Chapter 6 Emergency Lights

Chapter 6

Flickering Lights

As the lights died the sound of the explosion ripped through the room like a thunder clap. Nancy could feel the needle in her arm, and hoped that Star wouldn’t jerk and damage the vein. When they both flinched at the noise she felt a trickle of moisture on the inside of her elbow.

“Star, focus on not destroying my vein please,” Nancy said. The words came out louder than she had expected, the silence that followed the explosion was almost absolute. The emergency lights flickered on and they found themselves bathed in a dirty yellow glow. Nancy knew that the light would brighten in a minute, but she always hated the yellow that proceeded it. It always seemed to her as though the world were waiting to see if it would continue for another moment before the lights committed to giving a damn.

“I’ve got it,” Star said. She adjusted the needle in the faint light cast by the emergency lights. “Now hold still and I’ll fill these.”

“I don’t think,” Nancy began but already the first vial was being filled. Within a moment Star had swapped to the second vial. “You’re really good at this. I’m coming to you for my blood draws from now on.”

Star began to laugh. “I worked in a plasma center during college to help pay for school. I’ve done more sticks than most nurses will do in their entire lives.”

“So, what do you think happened?” Nancy asked. “I can’t think of the last time that the lights went out here. Maybe it was back in ‘03 when the power was out for like two days.”

“God, I hope it doesn’t last that long,” Star said. She placed the gauze on the needle. “A little pressure here please.”

Nancy did so and waited for the needle to be removed. Within a moment it was disposed of in the sharps container and Star was wrapping her arm with some adhesive elastic.

“Okay, now lets find out what happened?” Star said. The two of them stood and walked over to the door, Star holding the vials in one hand while Nancy opened the door. Outside the hallway was dotted with emergency lights placed every twenty five feet. They could hear voices in the hallway, down the hall a child cried while his mother made shushing noises. In another room a man was shouting hysterically, Nancy found herself wishing that she had her cart with her. There were also the loud voices of nurses and Doctors trying to calm the various patients in the rooms.

“The nurses station is down here. I need to get these in an incubator, though I’m wondering if that still has power.” Star said, leading the way.

Nancy followed, she was curious why the backup generator hadn’t kicked on yet. Usually it would flip on within the first minute of an outage. She knew that anyone on life support would be covered on battery backup, but that only lasted ninety minutes at most. If the power was out for more then thirty they would begin arranging to move the most severe cases to other hospitals.

Star froze in the hallway, Nancy almost running into the back of her. Her left hand was held out as though she was signaling a stop from a bicycle. “You know Star, if you’re going to break you should say something instead of giving signs.”

“Shhh, quiet,” Star said. “You didn’t hear that? It sounded like glass breaking.”

Nancy did her best to ignore the voices and various cries from around the room. She began to make out the humming sound the emergency lighting made when a crunch sounded. “What was that?”

“I don’t know,” Star said. “That’s not a normal sound in the middle of the night. But the only glass is the ambulance doors which will be on lock down right now.”

The glass crunched again, this time a sound like gravel hitting the floor sounded from the area ahead of them.

“I think we should duck in here for a minute,” Nancy said. She motioned to the supply closet they’d just passed, she keyed in the code, and listened as the lock clicked open.

“Why would I want…?” Star began. She didn’t finish, instead she jumped backwards and scrambled inside as the glass shattered. A metal pipe clattered to the ground, followed by the click of doors.

Nancy knew that every staff member in the area was probably trying to find out what happened. A feeling in her gut made her think that several of staff might die like the cat, with a bad case of curiosity. She wished that she had her cart, there were solutions in her cart, the only problem she could fix here is a sudden gauze shortage.

Star almost tripped over herself as she came into the closet. Nancy closed the door before walking towards the back of the closet.

“What are you doing?” Star asked.

“Shhh, watch and learn,” Nancy whispered back. This was one of the secrets that most people didn’t know about, but she had used it a few times in the past on her ward. As she reached the back of the closet she picked up a broom and lifted the acoustic tile before sliding it out of the way. She then used the broom to hook the end of a board which was sticking out and began to pull it down. A ladder slowly unrolled until it was hung two feet from the floor.

“When did they install those?” Star whispered.

“They did a lot of the networking stuff for the computers at night about ten years back,” Nancy began. “These are so they can get to the hubs. You can also hear everything happening below you.”

She motioned to Star and held the ladder away from the wall just a bit. Star nodded and took the ladder. She dropped the two vials into the apron pockets of her scrub top and began to climb.

Nancy went to the door and cracked it again, listening to what was transpiring. Several voices shouted at one another, some demanding that people leave right away, others yelling that they were here for their friends. Throughout the argument there was one person who seemed to be laughing, a high pitched giggle which warbled in and out with each breath. She shuddered and closed the door as quietly as she could.

She shook her head and turned back towards the ladder. Star was disappearing over the lip and onto the crawl space. She walked over to the begin her climb, only to hear the screaming begin from the Nurse’s station. The first was a scream of rage which was followed by an ear splitting shriek from someone, she couldn’t say for certain if it was one of the Doctors or Nurses. The shrieks, shouts, screams, and angry cursing became a cacophony as she began to climb.

Cresting the top of the wall into the crawl space she could finally hear more of what was happening. The echos muted and filtered from the background noise by the the acoustic tile of the drop ceiling. She could make out the patients panicking, the screams of the dying, and that same high warbling laughter framing the whole argument.

One look at Star’s face told her that she’d heard too much already. The only color on her face was the light blue eye-shadow she used, the rest of the blood had drained. Within a moment she could hear why. The room which they’d crawled above happened to be the one with the mother comforting the little girl. Now the little girl was screaming while the mother was repeating prayers as quickly as her voice would allow.

“The door was open when the shouting started,” Star whispered. She inhaled deeply, blinking back tears, and then began again. “The little girl saw the start of the fight. The mother slammed the door. They might be attacked next.”

Below she could hear the little girl crying, “Make the bad man stop mommy, why do they want to hurt the doctors?”

The mother didn’t stop in her litany though, she continued saying her prayers, repeating them in the hopes that some merciful angel would take note of her cries.

Laughter erupted from the other side nurses station, the high warbler among them. There was a moment of silence from the invaders, and then he heard a door nearby open.

Star began trying to grip the acoustic tile next to them, trying to open a way into the room. Nancy slapped her hand, and glared at the woman.

“Why did you do that?” Star asked.

“Listen to that laugh,” Nancy said. She paused to punctuate the point as the laughter grew in volume. “They’re crazy, there are a few of them, I’m thinking these are…”

She didn’t bother finishing the sentence as she heard the mother below them shriek suddenly. There was a thud, then another, before a voice called out. “Someone has barricaded themselves in.”

The speech sounded slurred, the voice a little slow on the delivery. Nancy immediately began to think of him as the thug of the group without ever having seen him. She began to pull up the the ladder, winding it slowly with the winch. Star poked her trying to get her attention.

“Can’t we maybe save the daughter?” Star asked. Tears were now running down her face, the mascara she normally wore ran down either side of her face.

Nancy looked at her, feeling tears welling up inside her own eyes. “Do you want to die tonight Star?”

She could see conflict erupt into Star’s face. Her eyes said we needed to save the girl, but her jaw set firm, determined, perhaps now she would understand what was at stake. A shriek from below them seemed to punctuate the point, this one more of surprise than of hurt, it was followed immediately by a louder thud. This time the woman didn’t continue praying, she began to scream and her daughter began to cry.

“Don’t worry little girl,” the Thug said. “I promise you, you won’t hurt anymore in a minute.” With that there was a sickening crack that could be heard clearly through the tile. Nancy could see Star shuddering and knew that she was feeling the same way. The woman who had been praying began crying. Nancy could hear another voice after, one she attributed to warbling laugh below her.

“She’s in a better place lady, a place with sunshine and rainbows, you though,” warbling laugh said. Each of his pauses were punctuated with a giggle. “I think you’re something special. We may get rewarded if we take you.”

The woman’s sobs continued as she was dragged from the room, her voice trailing off in the distance.

“The boss said that we were supposed to go get our friends,” Thug said. “This isn’t getting our friends, you don’t want to make him angry.”

Thug’s voice trailed out of the room and into the Nurse’s Station. That was where the crying stopped, nothing else began though, no shrieks, not screams.

Star looked up to her, her eyes red with tears now, “How can you listen to this without doing something?”

Nancy inhaled deeply and could feel her nerves on edge. That had been hard. One of the reasons she liked her ward was that they didn’t deal with children, didn’t have deal with grieving mothers. Now she felt like each breath she took was going to make her break down. Knowing that below her a girl had died and there was nothing she could do about it made her feel weak again, a feeling that she despised.

“If we had tried, we would have been hanging through the ceiling when they came through the door,” Nancy whispered back. “When I asked you if you wanted to die I was serious. They sounded unhinged and violent. I deal with that every night.”

Star sat quietly, staring off into the crawl space, as though there was something in the corner that might help her forget. A part of Nancy hoped that she found something that made you forget all the bad memories, made you forget all the blood. If she did she find it she might even bring back enough for the both of them.

She turned back to the task at hand as someone tried the supply closet door handle. She turned the crank quicker, knowing those locks were to keep people honest not to prevent an actual break-in. The door handle clicked again before the first boot struck the door. She reached out to grab the tile as the second kick sounded, followed by the splintering of the wood of the door frame.

The third kick hit as she was sliding the tile into place. The door swung wide into the room, before bouncing off the doorstop and partially closing again. Nancy lowered the tile and found herself hoping that no one saw anything. There was a chance that he hadn’t been looking up, hadn’t been looking directly at the back of the aisle just inside the door.

She realized that she was holding her breath. With a moments hesitation she started to breath, soft and slow, hoping that Star didn’t choose now to come back to her senses.

“Hello,” a new voice called into the room. “Is anyone there?”

The new voice was a man’s voice which seemed to have a lisp. A part or her wondered if it was a real speech impediment or if he really liked to say the letter S. She decided in that moment to ask him if he caught them. It might make her death come a little swifter, it might prolong her death, it might even make him bust out laughing.

“There is someone here, someone who was bleeding recently,” the man said. Nancy decided after that remark to call him Bloodhound as she stared at the bandage on her arm. In the storage closet she could hear pronounced steps, heavy and deliberate. “Are you back here?”

There was a crunch of cardboard and then a moment of silence. “Is anyone in there? No? Well what about here?”

This time there was the sound sheet rock being hit followed by a shriek from the man below. “Who put a stud there! I think I broke my hand.”

Nancy found herself stifling a laugh. To punch a wall and hit a stud right on was a tough thing to do. She found herself lucky that she had never been stupid enough to try.

The footsteps quickened and headed out the door. She knew that they couldn’t wait and needed to move.

“Star,” Nancy whispered as loud as she could. Star shook her head, the dazed look on her face disappearing. “We need to follow the reinforced path and get to the stairway.”

“How are we going to get to the stairs?” Star asked. “I’m not going down there with those guys. I don’t want to die.”

“Star, listen to me, have you seen those metal doors on the landings?” she asked. Star nodded and Nancy continued. “Those were installed at the same time to provide access as well. It was some kind of Safety thing that Administrator Daniels had fought for.”

For once she was happy that he was the boss. He had said it was to help avoid hostage situations. Her only hope was that they hadn’t gone into the stairs yet.

“Why can’t we wait here for the police?” Star asked. “They’re going to come eventually, that is what they do.”

“They can smell my blood Star, that means that given time they’ll find us here,” Nancy whispered. “Besides, these might not be the only ones in the hospital.

Shrieking began from one of the rooms farther away and Nancy found herself shuddering. Star began to move at the sound of the cry, as though a new spurt of adrenaline was all that she had needed to get her body moving. Nancy followed, knowing that this was only the beginning of a long night.