Survivor Song Page 9

  Natalie grabs Ramola’s hand and slaps it over her forehead.

  “I can’t feel anything through my gloves.”

  “Take them off.”

  “You know I don’t go around feeling foreheads at the clinic. This is hardly—”

  “Just tell me. Do I feel warm?”

  Ramola sighs (Natalie returns her sigh) and shakes her head. She takes off both gloves and puts her right hand on Natalie’s forehead. And it does feel warm; it feels warmer the longer her hand lingers. When Ramola was sick as a child, her mum would consult the oral thermometer but would not diagnose a fever until after she pressed the back of her hand to her forehead and cheeks. Mum would then announce in an exaggerated English accent, “You’re a little boiler, you are.”

  Ramola says, “Perhaps you’re a tad warm.” She flips her hand over briefly. Looking up into Natalie’s face, it is difficult to not read infection in the redness and glassiness of her eyes, the red splotches on her skin. “Not outrageously so. My hands are cold from being in the gloves.” Ramola pulls away and rubs her hands together. They are not cold. “It would be perfectly normal to have an elevated temperature given the stress.”

  Natalie groans and goes back for her bag. She plucks out the thermometer and aims it at her head again.

  Over the intercom: “Paging Dr. Firestone to the cafeteria.”

  Natalie lowers the thermometer without looking at the temperature reading. She says, “Seriously? Dr. Firestone?”

  Strobing lights flash, followed by the automated, rhythmic wail of the fire alarm.

  Natalie says, “This isn’t good.”

  “No, it’s not ideal.” None of this is ideal. None of this is good. Ramola closes her eyes for a moment and rubs her hands together and they are as clammy as Natalie’s forehead. You’re a little boiler, you are. Ramola pulls the radio out of her pocket.

  Natalie is standing and turning from side to side, as though searching for an escape route. She rattles off a blur of questions. “Do we stay? Do they make us go stand outside? What about my C-section?”

  Ramola hasn’t worked in a large hospital since her residency, and their fire-alarm drills have become fuzzy bits of marginalia. She remembers that if evacuations are necessary, most staff help ambulatory patients to the exits, while only a skeleton crew remains with the patients who are not so easily moved. Ramola halfheartedly (and not very convincingly) explains that hospitals are “defend in place” buildings that have fire protections built into them. They likely won’t have to evacuate the building. They might be moved to another area within the wing, or to another floor, however. She knows her calm recitation belies the panic and despair she feels; all the best-laid plans of incident commanders and infectious disease specialists and chief medical officers—their rigorous emergency-response logistics and government protocols—cannot prevent disaster, cannot save everyone, and perhaps cannot save Natalie.

  Natalie slumps and sits on the edge of the bed. She wipes her eyes with the back of her right hand and then rubs her belly. She says, “Are they still getting that obstetrician to help me?”

  Ramola tunes the radio to channel 2, presses the button, and says, “Hello, Dr. Awolesi, or Central Control? Hello? This is Dr. Ramola Sherman in Room 217. Are we evacuating ambulatory patients? Please advise.”

  “That’s me. Ambulatory patient.” It’s a Natalie-style wisecrack but is cold and inflectionless.

  Dr. Awolesi answers almost immediately. “Dr. Sherman, only visitors and kitchen staff on the first floor are being evacuated currently. You are to remain in your room for now, but we may be moving you. The situation is—” The long pause becomes a break.

  Ramola drops the radio away from her mouth and says, “Fluid?” unable to resist completing the sentence.

  “Fucked,” Natalie says. “Ask her if they’re still going to do the C-section.”

  Ramola does as asked. Dr. Awolesi responds with, “I’m working on it. Hang tight.”

  The alarm stops. The lights continue to flash.

  Natalie grabs the empty blue plastic cup from the bed tray table, stands, and shuffles past Ramola. She says, “I’m going to drink more sink water. Or throw up. Or both.” She ducks inside the bathroom, does not shut the door, and turns on the sink.

  “Do you need any help?”

  “No, I can manage both.”

  Ramola paces and tunes the radio to the open channel. From the harried chatter she determines the fire in the cafeteria is not the main concern, but a second one at a nurses’ station on the third floor is. She tunes back to the second channel so as not to miss a message or instruction from Dr. Awolesi.

  Natalie walks out of the bathroom holding the cup of water, her face scrunched up. “Ugh, I need, like, some regular, non-sink water. This tastes so gross. Almost like old eggs. I can smell it. Disgusting.” She puts the cup on the table tray.

  Ramola intends to say something about getting her bottled water soon but does not. She goes to the bathroom sink, fills her own cup, and takes a sip.

  Natalie calls out, “It’s awful, right?”

  There is that overly chlorinated taste one associates with unfiltered tap water, but it’s not overbearing. There’s none of the sulfur odor or flavor Natalie described. Is Natalie expressing dysgeusia, a drastic change in sense of taste that many pregnant women experience? That usually only occurs during the first trimester. Is her taste aversion to the water instead a manifestation of the classic rabies symptom of hydrophobia?

  The staccato two-note fire alarm blares again. Ramola steps out of the bathroom, turns right, and almost knocks into Natalie. She has her bag slung over her right shoulder.

  Natalie says, “We can’t just sit here in this room.”

  “Yes, I know, but—”

  “Tell the doctor they need to try something, something new. Anything. Give me the booster early, like now.”

  “We can’t. The booster doesn’t work like that.”

  “How do you know that? How does anyone know that? It’s a new fucking virus, so they should be trying or testing new treatments. We’re just sitting here and I don’t have the time. I don’t. And I don’t want to die. Don’t let me die. It’s not fucking fair, not fucking right . . .” Natalie turns away.

  Ramola can’t tell her she isn’t going die. She can’t tell her everything will be okay. She doesn’t say anything. How could she possibly say anything? Ramola places a hand on Natalie’s back. The fire alarm squawks and the lights flash, their rhythms not synced but unyielding; it’s easy for one to imagine these broadcasted warnings continuing through the darkest of ages, ceasing only when there is no one around to heed them.

  Natalie turns around. “Okay. We need to do the C-section now. Right now. Get one of the surgeons, anyone, I don’t care. Give me an orderly with a penknife. Get an operating room, lock it fucking down, and get it done.”

  Dr. Awolesi says Ramola’s name repeatedly on the radio.

  “Yes, yes. I’m here.”

  “Open your door, please.”

  Ramola opens the door. Dr. Awolesi rushes inside and says, “Change of plans, Natalie. We’re transporting you to Ames Medical Clinic. Oh, I see you’re already packed and ready to go.”

  Natalie cocks her head and pulls at Ramola’s yellow sweatshirt, stretching it over her belly. It falls away when she lets go. “Why can’t we just do it here?”

  “Both of our surgeons have been injured. The obstetrician has not arrived, and I don’t know her ETA. Most importantly, I cannot guarantee the procedure could be performed safely here at this time. You’ll be sent via ambulance. The Ames Clinic is less than twenty minutes away and they’ll know you’re coming. But you need to leave before this building is quarantined, which could happen at any moment, and that would mean no one will be allowed to leave until that order is lifted.” Dr. Awolesi speaks loudly to be heard over the alarm. Unlike earlier conversations, she gesticulates while talking, but instead of aiding in communicating and projecting calm confidenc
e, her traitorous hands are held low, at her side, and palms-up, as though pleading. Her shoulders slump and shrug.

  Natalie looks past Dr. Awolesi to Ramola, watching for her response.

  Ramola hides her ungloved hands in her coat pockets, as though they might betray their thermometer ways. She says, “All right. We should move quickly then.” She walks past both women and retrieves her bag.

  Natalie says, “I—I’m not feeling well. Should I take my temperature—”

  Dr. Awolesi holds up stop hands (or are they surrender hands?) and says, “Stop. Natalie. I didn’t hear you say that . . . .” She pauses, looks down, defeated, and shakes her head.

  Ramola instantly extrapolates from this shocking statement, questions avalanching within her head. Is the doctor implying Ames wouldn’t take Natalie if she were infected? Would the clinic break protocol (and federal quarantine law) for her emergency case? Is the clinic willing to risk exposing their patient population (presumably healthy mothers and babies) to a potentially infected Natalie and her child? Where do they go if the clinic refuses Natalie, high temperature or no high temperature? Are things so dire here that this is their best or only option?

  Dr. Awolesi looks back up at Natalie and says, taking care to enunciate as though each word were a story: “You are well enough to get on that ambulance. Isn’t that right?”

  Natalie says, “Yeah. Okay, I’m fine.” She doesn’t break eye contact with the doctor. Her expression is blank and, for Ramola, worryingly indecipherable.

  “Good. We need to go now,” Dr. Awolesi says, and before Ramola asks any one of her questions, the doctor turns and walks out of the room, adding, “You can take your temperature on the ambulance if you feel you must.”

  A security guard is waiting in the doorway to escort them. He is a young white man, about six feet tall. His patchy, thinning black hair is buzz-cut short. A respirator mask dangles from around his neck and he touches it with a gloved hand as though it were a talisman. He wears a blue vest, security written in bold yellow across the midsection. He is armed with a Taser, holstered at his hip.

  Dr. Awolesi hurriedly introduces the guard as Stephen. He nods and flashes the variation on a smile where one’s lips disappear entirely. He motions for everyone to follow. Dr. Awolesi walks with him, stride for stride.

  The hallway is not empty. Medical staffers duck in and out of rooms, buzzing from patient to patient. There are no signs of the struggle with two infected patients Ramola briefly witnessed. She wonders what happened to them and where they were taken, and she can’t help but imagine the woman with the rolled-white eyes, the one who in her stressed memory now looks like Natalie, is waiting behind any one of the doors they might pass. The alarm reverberates, echoing from one end of the hallway to the other, made more piercing by the distance traveled.

  Refusing an offer to have her bag carried, Natalie trudges forward, following the doctor and guard. Ramola shuffles behind Natalie, sidestepping left and right in an attempt to see through and beyond the group; she is too short to see over them. Every other step, she throws a look over her shoulder, the hallway behind them expanding with each flash of light.

  At the nurses’ station a late-middle-aged man argues and pleads with a police officer and a nurse. His hunter-green flat cap held in hand, he’s a stooped and grayed Oliver Twist, weary from all the years of begging for more. From what Ramola can piece together, he is not a patient but a visitor who, in the newer chaos ushered in by the alarms, managed to sneak up to the second floor to either be in the room with a family member or to help his loved one evacuate the hospital. Both the officer and nurse shake their heads and say sorry as they attempt to herd him wherever it is the healthy are supposed to go and go alone.

  Once through the open area of the nurses’ station, their group quickly huddles around Natalie in the elevator vestibule and in front of the exit stairwell. She grimaces and slowly flexes her left hand as they ask her how she’s doing and if she can walk down one flight of stairs, as they should bypass using the elevator. Natalie says she is fine to walk and still stubbornly won’t allow anyone else to carry her bag.

  The guard, Stephen, opens the door to the stairs and the four of them step onto the cement landing. Contained and compressed within the cold metal-and-concrete stairwell, the alarm is again transformed, cruelly mimicking human vocalization, growing more weary and desperate with each ricocheting call. Smoke gathers around the recessed emergency lighting as though the wisps are moths. The smell is not the pleasant roast of wood at the campfire or fireplace but the cloying, sickening tang of melting plastic and other substances that shouldn’t be burned.

  Natalie says, “Jesus, aren’t there other stairs?” then covers her mouth.

  Stephen says, “We’re okay going down. The smoke is coming from the third floor.”

  Ramola is the last to step off the landing and onto the stairs. She can finally see over the others’ heads from her elevated vantage, but she can’t see around the turn to the landing between the first and second floor. From above, a percussive bang almost sends her tumbling into Natalie. Everyone stops. Ramola turns, looks behind and up; the third-floor landing and door are not visible. The alarm still cries. There’s a click and a whoosh before another exploding bang. The same sounds repeat, caught in a loop. Someone is opening and then slamming closed the third-floor door.

  Dr. Awolesi urges everyone to continue on. “Keep moving. Keep moving.”

  A woman shouts from above, “She had great power and was dreaded by all the world.” The door slams shut and then swings open without pause. “Surrounded by a high wall,” she says singsong, lilting at “high” and separating “wall” into two syllables. Her voice is the same tone and pitch as the alarm and it sounds like there are two of her. The woman continues shouting between the pistonlike opening and closing of the door. “Let it cost what it will cost.”

  Ramola eases down the stairs, a reluctant swimmer stepping into freezing water, one hand on the railing, neck craned, trying to locate the shouting woman, to see if she’s following. Ramola reaches too far out with her last step and stumbles onto the landing. The others have stopped walking.

  “In the desert she has to live in misery.”

  Natalie has her back pressed against the far wall. Dr. Awolesi shields her and speaks rapidly into her radio. Stephen has his Taser gun pointed at a teenage boy standing a few stairs below the platform. The boy wears a fitted gray hooded sweatshirt adorned with a sneaker-brand logo and black skinny jeans, both showing off his wiry frame. Gauze bandaging is visible, a secret peeking out from under the sweatshirt at the base of his neck.

  “The beautiful bird isn’t singing in the nest,” the woman says. She has stopped slamming the door and her heavy, descending footfalls vibrate throughout the stairwell’s exoskeleton.

  Stephen scoots to the edge of the landing, talking to the boy, telling him to turn around, to walk downstairs, telling him they can get him help if he goes downstairs.

  Wild-eyed and as twitchy as a short-circuiting electrical panel, the boy snaps and growls, atavistic in his new animalness. He does not turn around or walk down the stairs. He holds his ground. His legs are spring-loaded. His fists are rocks, his teeth bared in deimatic display, broadcasting the threat of our most primitive weapons.

  “The cat got it.” The woman jumps onto the platform between the second and third floor. She cries out as she thuds and crashes, landing on all fours judging by the sounds of her scrabbling hands and feet, but quickly gathers herself and continues progressing down the stairs.

  The boy leaps and wraps his arms around the guard’s legs. Stephen cries out and falls backward, onto his butt. There’s a pop and rapid ticking from the Taser gun. The boy and Stephen stiffen and then convulse in thrall to 1,200 volts. As the ticking slows and ceases, the boy slumps, slides off Stephen’s legs, and rolls into a fetal ball. Dr. Awolesi rushes to Stephen’s side. His eyes are closed and he is groaning. The boy unfurls and lies facedown on the platfor
m, crying.

  “It’ll scratch out your eyes too!” The woman rounds the corner onto the second-floor landing above them. Her feet are bare and dirty, and her hospital johnny hangs loosely around her shoulders and chest. Her forearms are streaked with blood. She points at Ramola, rooting her to the spot. The woman laughs; a terrible hitching, grinding gears within her chest, and her sputtering, sickly engine springs a leak and she hisses and spits, flailing one arm as though it is a trebuchet.

  Ramola backs away until Natalie grabs her arm and says, “Let’s go.”

  Stephen is sitting up and shaking out his left hand. Dr. Awolesi has his right arm draped across her shoulders, urging him to get on his feet. Natalie and Ramola scoot by and descend the flight of stairs to the first floor, pausing at the fire door.

  Ramola calls out to Dr. Awolesi, “Where are we going? Which way?”

  The guard and the doctor slowly make their way down the stairs. Their three-legged race is awkward and out of rhythm.

  The boy remains on the landing between floors, whimpering and belly-crawling in aimless circles. The woman crash-lands on her knees next to the boy and rains two-fisted punches down on his head and back. She spits in his face and pulls his hair, lifting his head off the platform. He squeals a younger child’s squeal, one of heartbreaking shock and despair at the physical realization of the pain and horror of the real world.

  Natalie yells, “Fucking where? Come on! We need to go!” but she doesn’t move to open the door herself.

  Dr. Awolesi is at the base of the stairs and says, “Take a right, follow the main hallway to the other side of the hospital. Central Street exit. We’re right behind you. Go.”

  Holding his head up, the woman leans in, spits in the boy’s face, and bites his ear. He screams and writhes, twisting out from underneath her. He briefly holds a hand over his ear before launching shoulder-first into her chest, bending her backward, her legs pinned under her, driving her into the stairs. The woman arches her back, thrusting out her torso, but then sags, slides, and pools at the bottom of the stairs. The boy blurs with his own attack. The uninhibited ferocity is breathtaking. He punches her head repeatedly, hopping into the air with each strike. He grabs and pulls and shakes her, and he alternates those terrible, full-body-weight strikes with bites of her arms and shoulders and face, latching onto the same area with two quick strikes before moving to the next and the next. There’s no apparent strategy or reason or order to the violence beyond the existence and the instance of the acts themselves.