The Graceview Patient By Caitlin Starling - 35

Here is what you (I) need to remember: The mind abhors chaos. It cannot abide randomness. It needs a narrative, one event after another, reason and cause and effect. When life is at its most incomprehensible, the mind clings to narrative the tightest.

But the mind is not infallible. It is not rational. It obsesses over what it perceives as sense and order, but when viewed from outside, from after, from far away, that order may only be a momentary trick of perspective.

In that office, I saw the monster.

And I set out to kill it.

I stood. My port was no longer inside me, but the wound was only closed with little butterfly adhesives, and they’d given way when I collapsed. Fresh blood soaked my gown, softening the crusted clot of the initial trauma. In the darkness, it was impossible to see if any had gotten on the sweater. But it didn’t matter; when I opened the door, the floor was slick with it, too. A streaked trail, visible in the growing dawn, leading down the hall, in the direction of the fading footsteps. Distantly, I heard the creak of a cart, its wheels squealing for a portion of every revolution.

The air smelled faintly of rot, more strongly of antiseptic. The odor grew as I made my way down the hall.

It was getting worse. The break in the skin that I’d seen in the hallway a few floors up I’d written off to the influence of the drugs still in my system. But the pain was coming back now, and a certain flavor of clearheadedness that was at odds with what my senses were telling me. I saw nobody, and nobody stopped me. It seemed impossible. Hallucinating or not? Dreaming or not?

It didn’t matter.

I was on a narrow road, in a slot canyon, with no options but to stop or go forward. Give up, or follow until the end. I hit the west tower end of the office block, back where I’d started. The elevator bank loured, tempting in my infirmity, but impossible. I needed solitude. Secrecy.

So I’d go up instead, and hope I didn’t find anybody following my trail.

The climb was worse than the descent. My muscles were atrophied, my skin too delicate to handle the metal caps on the edge of each tread. I couldn’t do anything but shuffle, and shuffling pushed the metal into my flesh like a cheese grater. I left scraps of myself behind.

(Who would be sent after me, to clean it up? Would they be safe?)

(I refused to think about it then. It’s all I think about now.)

I passed the landing that I thought led back to where I’d escaped from. The fourth floor. Three more to go. The PA system was audible in there, and I heard them calling for me. “Priority page. Code green…”

One more floor up, and the bones I had rolled over in the hallway in my half-conscious state were visible here in place of supportive struts. At the sixth-floor landing, jumbled beneath the stairs, was a tangle of lungs, twisted on their bronchi, layered in together. They rose and fell independently, around nodules of scar tissue and pus.

Or maybe those were my own. I was wheezing by then, breath coming in violent little bursts. My skull threatened to split apart, and I wanted to stop. If I could just curl up in a dark corner for a minute, two, then I’d regain a few drops of strength—

No. No, Isobel needed me. I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t get this far only to fail. If I’d stayed sedated for the new port to be put in, if I hadn’t had the chance to slip away, I would have accepted that. I was so tired, so ready to stop trying. But I hadn’t stayed sedated. I’d been able to get away, and not just out of the room I’d been in, but down into the bowels of Graceview, and now, here, ascending.

If I’d gotten this far, I had to get that last bit farther. Just in case this was real. Just in case I was right.

I reached the seventh floor. Carefully, I pushed the door open. Or maybe not carefully, but weakly. It moved slowly, either way, and I squinted against the bright light of the hallway beyond. Fluorescent lights at full blast, working light.

And beneath the hum of those lights was the roar.

I could hear the rhythm of it. Tiny independent strains of noise, syncopated, layered on itself, feeding back and back and back—the workings of the pathogen inside me as it grew and spread and extended throughout Graceview.

My own heartbeat settled into time with it. Again the exhaustion swept through me, the longing to rest. I wanted to go to that rhythm, to the wall, press my forehead against the slick surface and sink into it.

The light shone in and pierced my eyes. It cut through, enough that I blinked, squinted, searched. No bodies in the hall beyond. Suppurating flesh walls glistened, not the impression of something alive but the detail of it. Red streaked through it, radiating from the door at the far end. A sign punctured it to my right, a name with an arrow. SEVEN WEST . I was getting closer.

No bodies in the hall, decaying or otherwise. I realized with a sick, strange lurch that there was nobody there. No nurses. No techs. No patients, no visitors. I faltered. Was this real? Could this be real? Could a hospital be so empty?

The roar grew louder. Encouragement or fear? Could the infection hate? Could it scrabble for its own survival? Or was survival different from replication, reproduction? Was fighting something it could do, or did it only endure and spread?

Through the organic pulsing, I caught sight of the mundane details beneath. Open patient rooms, empty of equipment. A ladder, lying on its side, flesh growing along it like a trellis. A gap where the nurses’ station would have been, the socket of a missing tooth.

The hall was under construction, being taken apart, being rebuilt.

Sudden movement. I froze, huddled by a ridge of scar tissue that arched up the wall, along the ceiling, its ropy furrows providing the barest hint of cover. Down by the exit, I saw a figure peel itself from the flesh. It did not move like a person, but it might have been shaped like one. The lights were so bright that I should have been able to make it out, but it seemed made of incidental shadows, there and gone again as it turned and faded into the door.

The lights just ahead of the door flickered. Dimmed. I looked up in time to see new pink skin growing over the fixture, thickening until I couldn’t see anything beneath it. It made a wash of deep shadows by the door, and I approached it unsteadily. Everything in me hurt, hurt to the point where I could barely comprehend it anymore. It was like floating just slightly outside my body, piloting it without feeling. All feeling was erased, subsumed, in the agony.

It was a set of double doors, the kind that could be opened to admit a gurney and a throng of staff if needed. They were heavy, and possibly locked, not the ones I’d been buzzed in and out of before, but very similar. Did they lead to the same place?

Just a little more. Just a little farther. And then—

And then all the way back out.

I wept. My tears burned, and my sinuses raged, and my lungs threatened to burst. I wasn’t built for weeping anymore. That took a strength I had already lost. But really, had I ever been strong enough to do this? When I had walked in the doors of Graceview, would I have been able to walk back out, if I had known? I would have had only my own weight to bear, and I wasn’t sure I could have done it. How was I supposed to save Isobel, too?

There was a reason she had told me to leave. That she hadn’t asked for anything for herself.

But Isobel wasn’t like me. She was strong, and she knew the hospital better than I did. If I could just get her out of her room, into these back hallways, she could tell me where to go. I wouldn’t be alone anymore.

I could do this. I just needed her help.

Tears slowing, I bent my head to the door. The roar was waiting. It slithered back into my ears, my bones. And this time, I listened. I listened for Veronica’s voice, or Isobel’s, telling me to go. Telling me it was time, it was safe. They’d helped before. I just needed them to help again.

Please , I thought. Please, I need you.

But nobody appeared to me.

Please, I can’t do this.

My hands didn’t just tremble; they wavered and jerked, uncontrollable. I could force them only to make the broadest gestures. My head swam, lost in the roar, and my vision pulsed with it. In, out, in, out. I felt close to collapse.

There was just this door between me and the ward. A staffed ward, a ward filled with nurses who would recognize me. I could still turn back. I could still leave. I could—

No. I couldn’t do any of that. I needed Isobel, or there was no going forward at all.

And then, overhead: “Priority page. Code blue. Adult. West tower. Seventh floor. Room seven-seven-eight.”

Not my room. Not Isobel’s room. But behind that door, I could hear voices, movement. All headed to room 778, away from this door, away from Isobel.

Beside the door was a key card reader. The light glowed green. No lock. As “priority page” repeated overhead, as the sounds from behind the door quieted, I leaned against the door, using all my withered weight.

It eased open. Slowly, slowly. I held my breath, or what was left of it.

Nobody sat at the nurses’ station. No Shannon, no Louise, no assistants or runners or even Adam. The ward wasn’t deserted; I could hear voices again, voices separate from the roar for just a moment before they, too, were swallowed up. A shrill alarm. Shouting. Somebody dying, or doing their best to. The walls pulsed with it, stretching, reaching.

I had time. Just enough of it, paid in some nameless patient’s death. Had I caused that, too? Or was it just heart failure? A stroke? Something entirely normal, half-expected, mortal?

I didn’t have time to think about it. I grabbed hold of a wheelchair close to the door and used it as a walker, stumbling across the hall, until I got to room 772.

The roar rose to a crescendo. I could barely think, but I didn’t have to.

Same red bar, same unlocked door. Of course they couldn’t change that, even with me on the loose: they had to be able to get to Isobel if she, too, started circling the drain.

I abandoned the wheelchair when it became clear I couldn’t get the door open enough to maneuver it through. Its wheels were rotting anyway, sagging in deformed circles, trying to merge with the flesh of the floor.

It didn’t belong inside, but I’d need it on my way out.

Inside the antechamber, I half expected Mark, the security officer, standing watch. Or some tech, sitting in the antechamber, ready at hand in case of an emergency.

There was nobody.

The vestibule was less rotted than the rest of Graceview, but it was still infected. The floors and walls were the linoleum and drywall they should have been, but patches of peach-pink slime aggregated in the corners. And the room was warm, too warm, febrile and aching.

But quiet. So quiet. I could hear the click click click of Isobel’s pump and the faintest sound of her breathing, and nothing else. The roar was gone. Even the code blue alert was swallowed by emptiness.

I pushed open the door to the main room.

Isobel lay in the hospital bed, shining with sweat and still tied down in soft restraints. Her eyes were closed. Her breathing was even. Her limbs were limp. I thought of the wheelchair, and how I’d have to bring it in here to have any chance of getting her up and out of bed. The pump, and the likelihood that she needed whatever was being pushed into her veins.

Her room was identical to mine. I knew these floors, these walls, that bed. I knew that pump. Only the view was different, a picture of the east tower and the garden below instead of the mountains. I could feel myself slipping sideways. I hung on to the knob of the door, sagging with the weight of how sick I was, had been, would be—and how much more there still was to do.

And then I saw Isobel, sitting at the window in clean scrubs. She stared at me. And then she said:

“I told you to leave.”