The Graceview Patient By Caitlin Starling - 34

I was vaguely aware of being wheeled through the hallway. The pain was far away. The terror, too. Nobody was holding my hand, and people talked over me. I couldn’t understand the words.

Around me, the walls pulsed with breath. My breath, slow and steady, medicated down now. There was gauze on my chest, somebody’s hand on top of it until the bleeding stopped. Then nothing. The wheels of the gurney, squeak squeak glide . A mask over my nose and mouth. Paper, not plastic. Nothing to help me breathe.

I waited for everybody to disappear, the way they had in my nightmare, when the port was first placed. But there were too many. The impression of bodies walking past, hurrying past, straggling past. So many bodies. So many reservoirs for infection, hosts and hostages.

Just sleep , I told myself. I imagined cradling my own body in my arms. I’d lost weight; I’d be just a bag of skin, a jumble of bones, all bound up in sinews too attenuated to allow me to move. If I slept, it would be over. Nothing left but to wait, and wait, and wait.

And go mad.

More than I already was, anyway.

Graceview was so expansive in its institutional copy-paste aesthetic. Beneath the linoleum, it was an old, old building. Bones I couldn’t see, but felt. Thunk thunk thunk , the wheels of the gurney clicking over them. And in between the bones, so many dead. Flu and tuberculosis and sepsis and trauma and so many other things, so many bodies that had given out, so many microbes feasting and replicating and spreading.

And my own little passenger, in my lungs and blood and skin, growing, growing.

The bed stopped moving.

“Get up,” Isobel’s voice said in my ear.

I opened my eyes.

I wasn’t alone. I was in a room, but not my room. There were other beds, other patients. Nurses, circulating. More people than I had seen since I’d taken my last stroll through the main floor of the hospital, caught in glimpses through gaps in the curtains hung around my bed. The sight was momentarily stunning, disorienting in a way entirely separate from the drugs buzzing in my skull.

Louise wasn’t there. The security officer was, but he was talking softly on his phone. My bed was closest to the door. Some kind of waiting room, before they took me into the OR? There was still gauze taped to my chest. No replacement port, not yet. They’d managed to get a fresh IV into my arm.

For all the bodies, there were no eyes on me. The curtains were a pitiful attempt at privacy, but they were enough. The cannula in my arm wasn’t hooked to anything, just taped down to my skin. I wasn’t restrained.

I got up. I left the gurney, and the room, and nobody noticed. There was no shouting, no running feet. The door I went through wasn’t locked and opened not onto a main hallway, but a service corridor of some kind. There were signs and fluorescent lights, but there were no nurses’ stations, and no doors to patient rooms.

Isobel wasn’t there.

I faltered, finding myself alone. There was no voice in my ear, no shadow at the end of the hall beckoning me forward. But there was a path, of sorts. The linoleum beneath my feet, cracked and oozing plasma. I followed the line, head still foggy from whatever they’d given me, whatever hadn’t been enough to keep me asleep.

Whatever Isobel had cut through to get to me?

She’d done it, whatever it was. Just like she’d promised, she’d gotten me out. Now I had to move. Get somewhere safe. Outside the hospital, if I could manage it, but I was in my gown, no socks, no slippers. No wallet. Phone long gone. I’d have to get creative.

Overhead, that same voice, that old litany: “Priority page. Code green. East building. Second floor. IMCU. Room two-zero-seven.”

When I reached the stairs, I went down. They were solid, no trace of infection or injury. Signs indicated I was starting from the fourth floor. My legs burned as I descended, my knees weak, ankles threatening to roll or simply give out. I clung to the handrail. With every step, I expected one of the doors into the stairwell to open, but none of them did.

I reached the ground floor and kept going. I couldn’t go out from there, not as I was. I’d stand out. It was too close to morning, or maybe too far into it; I had no idea how long I’d been unconscious. At any rate, there’d be too many people, and I was too conspicuous.

But the custodian had told me that nobody ever went down. And those rooms we’d passed that night, they’d been offices. Maybe inhabited today, yes, but maybe not. Maybe there’d be somebody’s clothing I could take. Was it a weekend? I couldn’t remember.

It must have been.

The offices were mostly empty, the windows in the doors closest to me dark. But I could hear voices from farther down. Not much space or time to work in. The first couple doors I tried were locked, but not the third. Inside was an office, paperwork left on the desk, computer quiescent and dark. There was no window, the only light coming in from the hallway. I slipped inside, peering into the shadows. There: a plush sweater hanging from a hook. It was a start. I pulled it on, somebody else’s perfume crashing over me.

Before I could find a way to stop it, I was coughing. One of the old fits, the deep ones, and it hurt so much worse with the ragged wound on my chest. I leaned against the wall, then slid down to one knee. Both. I braced myself on the worn, scratchy carpet, coughing into my mask, eyes watering. The world tilted. Slid.

My shoulder hit the ground. I curled up and twitched, unsure of what I was doing, of what I was trying to do. I needed to be somewhere safe. Somewhere protected, where I could rest. I was so tired. I was so fucking tired, and the adrenaline was burning off. My hands clutched at my ribs, and I could feel every one of them, jumping beneath my palms. My fingertips were still numb. The joints below burned as if on fire.

When the coughing subsided, I wasn’t sure if I could move. I felt liquid, swollen, and yet so light that I was halfway to dust. My heart beat fast and soft, like it was far away. Or—

No. Those were footsteps.

The noise that escaped me was an animal whine. I rolled myself onto my back, then reached out, scrabbling with unfeeling fingers for the door. The footsteps grew louder, closer. I had no idea what the person who made them could see, but I pushed, slow and steady as I could manage.

The door shut quietly.

I was left in darkness. Not the darkness of my hospital room, where there was always some illumination from outside my window, some light from the medical equipment, the glow of a night-light in the bathroom. This was total and complete, and with it was a silence I hadn’t known in weeks. No click of a pump. No murmur of voices in the hall. Nobody would come for me, to take my blood pressure and samples of my body, to measure and evaluate and observe. Nobody knew I was here, if I’d been fast enough to get the door closed.

I could die here, and they wouldn’t find me until Monday.

Maybe that’s what I’d wanted all along. Maybe that was why I’d hallucinated Isobel. The last little push I needed to go out on my own terms, for all of this to be over. Too cowardly to put the scalpel in my neck, perhaps. But that didn’t track, did it, with what I’d managed to do instead. And I wasn’t so close to death, wasn’t so sick, that a day or two alone would finish me off. Right?

The footsteps grew louder. They went right past the door I shivered behind and moved on.

My lungs were mercifully silent.

Slowly, tentatively, I uncurled. My shins stung, and when I ran my palms over them, I felt torn-up flesh. Not bleeding, just a skinned knee. I was fragile.

Isobel had told me to go somewhere safe. I still had no idea what that looked like. Shakily, I tried to think through what I’d need. Food. Water. Shelter. Some way to keep myself away from other people, so I wouldn’t get sick.

So they wouldn’t get sick.

If Isobel was infected, that meant other people could catch it, too. Other people who weren’t me, who weren’t Veronica, who weren’t artificially burned to the ground. I couldn’t inflict it on anybody else, the seizures, the bleeding, the chaos. The roar. And Isobel was so much sicker than I had been, so much faster. Why?

What was different?

The only difference I could see was the obvious one: my immune system had been artificially decimated, hers hadn’t. But that was backward. I should have been more at risk than she was. Unless, maybe, she had something else beating down her defenses? Something beyond the burnout, the long nights, the lack of proper meals and breakfasts of energy drinks?

Maybe. Maybe. So many maybes. My brain buzzed with them. My stomach churned. I kept everything in.

Could I go to another hospital, ask for help there? Show up in an ER, feign ignorance of my medical history? But they’d see where the port had been. They’d ask questions. Would they believe me, if I told them what had happened?

Was it worth the risk?

Another hospital wouldn’t have Dr. Santos. Wouldn’t have whatever approval he’d needed to run the SWAIL trial. No Dr. Santos, no Adam, no bags of mystery fluid. It had to be better than this.

But …

I’d be leaving Isobel.

I couldn’t do that. Not just for her sake, but for mine. She’d been my rock. The one tether to myself, the one real thing I’d had. Even after I’d put her in a hospital bed, she’d tried to save me. Tried to warn me.

She understood the trial, had seen this thing kill Veronica. If it had been her here, instead of me, she would have known what to do. I was sure of it.

I couldn’t do this on my own, and I couldn’t abandon her. Which left me one terrible option:

I had to go back and get her out, too.