Chapter 5

It was only now that he was somewhat recovered, that Joel began to remember that he hated hospitals. The smells surrounding him began to make him feel sick. There was just something unnatural about the sterility of the place. He smiled as he realised the contradiction in his thoughts, one minute bemoaning the filth he is forced to live in, the next complaining that cleanliness is too unnatural.

Man he hated waiting. He felt so useless. He knew he was about ready to leave the hospital, was expecting them to come and sign him out a few minutes ago in fact, but then there’d been a cacophony of sirens and alerts, general mayhem had ensued as doctors and nurses had scrambled and suddenly his area of the hospital was devoid of all medical personnel. Presumably there was an emergency coming in and everyone had been needed in the crisis department of the hospital. Well, either that or there was some sort of threat and they were evacuating this area, ignoring the patients in their hurry to be safe. He pushed the paranoia aside though, it had certainly seemed as if they were running to, not from something. There wasn’t much he could do yet anyway, he could get up and hobble to the crisis centre, but what would be the point of that? He had no medical skills and would simply be in the way. He could leave the building in case there was a threat, but realistically if it was a bomb or something he probably wouldn’t have time to escape and in all likelihood any threat would have come from outcasts, so they would be targeting commuters, not injured outcasts. Any commuter staff had left the area, there weren’t any commuter patients here anyway; injured commuters didn’t stay in this hospital for any longer than was absolutely necessary, they may be treated in the crisis area, but as soon as they had been stabilised they were transported out to one of their own hospitals where they would receive the best care money could buy. Outcasts would no this, so there would be no point attacking this area if that had been their plan. They may have planned to push the commuters into a different area, but really it seemed to Joel that any scenario which had the commuters abandoning them to evacuate the area, seemed illogical. It seemed far more likely that there had been an incident. He would just have to wait and see, despite the urge to know, to see if it was his friends fighting for their lives.

Cassandra tuned out the noise around her as she worked on the man in front of her. So much blood, she was coated in this man’s blood. A screaming child clawed at the man’s body. Cassandra yelled and a porter dragged the child from the room. Cassandra desperately tried to shut the image of the distraught child out of her head. Focussing her mind on the task in front of her, Cassandra pressed on, ignoring the emotions battling for her attention, telling herself that this was not a person. She could not think of him as a person: a husband, a father. If she did she would make mistakes, she had to remain distanced. This was just another project which she had to finish. There was a pulse, it was weak, but it was there, she just had to make sure it didn’t stop. Cassandra ploughed all of her energy into her task. He was in a bad shape and she knew it, not many survived from the kind of injuries he’d sustained, but he had to, his wife lay on a slab in the other room, no one was even trying to save her, there was no point, one look at her and it was silently agreed that she was beyond help. Someone had to survive for that little girl in there or she’d have no-one.

It had been hours and still Cassandra was working on the man, she didn’t know his name, didn’t want to know it. If she found out his name she wanted it to be because he’d told her. She didn’t want to accept that he would never be able to, that he just wasn’t going to make it. She didn’t want to know his name just so that she could say goodbye. Every time she fixed one part of him another failed, he was battling, but his body was beginning to give up. She carried on working, he certainly wasn’t going to miss out on anything that might possibly have saved him.

Finally Cassandra stopped work. There was literally nothing more that she could do, it was now out of her hands, she just had to wait and see whether he would awaken and live, or give up and die. Cassandra looked around at the other staff, most of them had given up long ago, the room looked like a morgue, the people had just been too far gone. There was a heavy silence over the room, interrupted only by the irregular beeping of the monitor for her John Doe. Suddenly the beeping stopped. Cassandra stopped breathing at the same time, willing him to breath, to live. She began talking to him, begging him not to give up, telling him about his little girl in the next room.

Joel had tried to wait patiently, but he just really wasn’t that kind of guy, he needed to know what was going on. Pulling each of the sensors from his skin he ignored the wail of complaint that issued from the monitor. Slowly he levered himself up from the bed and began looking for his clothes. Typically, he couldn’t find them. This left him with two options. Number one, continue waiting, or number two wander around in the hospital pyjamas. Since by this point, walking naked through a large crowd of everyone he’d ever met would be preferable to waiting any longer, he chose to venture out in the clothes he was dressed in.

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