Survivor Syndrome
Chapter 1
A half smile formed on Jay’s chapped lips as she peered down the corridor in front of her; though you couldn’t really call is a smile. It was more like a twitch of her facial muscles, maybe, or an acknowledgment of the scene in front of her. This was nothing to smile about. Her bearing witness to this scene was nothing to smile about.
It was the change that triggered this reaction. The way everything normal could be destroyed in a matter of seconds and only be restored to just a slice of what it was after weeks of hard work. This place could never be the same. Never. Not after what happened. But it could be put right.
Minus the deathly empty silence, it could have appeared like nothing was wrong. The faint smell of antiseptic and polish scrubbed onto the floor still hung in the stagnant air. Beds lined the corridor walls - crisp sheets, tightly folded, ready for use. At the end of the corridor, the nurse’s station was organized and spotless - patients’ folders ordered and piled neatly, a stethoscope on top of the mound of paper. A typical hospital corridor.
What wasn’t so typical was the lack of sound. The place should have been alive - the gentle snores of the sleeping, the piercing beeping of machines, the clicking of shoes down the corridor, even the sobbing family of the ill and injured. Now it was silent. Dead silent. Not just the corridor, the ward, or the hospital, but the outside world too. The sounds of traffic, people, and birdsong no longer filled the streets. There was nothing.
Rouge River was a ghost town.
Jay walked forward, breaking the stillness of the corridor. She moved almost silently, her worn and grubby Converse All-Stars padding along the linoleum floor as she walked. Really, there was no need for her silence. She knew she was alone.
There was just something about shattering the silence than unnerved her. It was everywhere - possessive, stifling, suffocating. Deadly. Like a glass tower, one wrongly placed foot could bring everything down. The silence was powerful and Jay was nothing to disturb it. Silence was death and silence was life.
She stepped behind the counter of the station. Half completed forms littered the desktop, but other than that, everything was in order, and possibly even neater than when the last nurse was there. With her knees tucked up to her chest, Jay swung around on the swivel chair and grabbed a pen from the tray. She flipped open the nearest folder, and placed all the papers it contained in chronological order before finally writing the date of decease as 10-25-06 and the cause of death as “Ravenwood” with the cheap, Fillmore County Hospital biro.
When she had completed all the folders, she sorted them with the others already piled around her. Originally, part of her had thought of this as stupid, but the more she thought about it, the more sense it made. She needed to show these people some dignity. They had been murdered at no fault of their own and left to decompose within the concrete walls. Jay had already moved the people from this corridor to the morgue. She thought filling in their date and cause of death was the least she could do for them. She wondered if they had family alive out there. At least someday, because of her actions, they would know what happened.
As silently as before, she got up and moved back down the corridor - the corridor that she herself had scrubbed on her hands and knees to remove the bloodstains left by those who died there. In proportion to the scale of the hospital, it was nothing, but she felt it was the least she could do. In some ways, it was because of the death of the others that she was still living. It was unfair, she thought, that they died and she survived. “Survived,” because her existence now couldn’t be classed as living.
For a fraction of a second, she caught a glance of her reflection in the glass of the closed doors as she made her way back down the corridor. Just over a month ago she probably would have stopped to fix her hair and gaze at her reflection. That was the teenage girl she used to be, the one that had died with millions of other Americans the day that the bombs went off. It was the biggest attack in the history of the world.
This new Jay was almost unrecognizable. Her hair, once jet black and straightened before she left home, now stuck out all over the place, greasy, with a couple of months dirty blond re-growth showing. Black lines under her eyes showed that she hadn’t slept in weeks and her skin was deathly pale from lack of sunlight and iron.
She had always wanted to be super skinny, but she had been stuck with her natural athletic build which was more muscular than slim. Now she was. Under her grey hoodie she could see all her ribs through her taunt skin and she had to hold her jeans up using the stretchy cord she found in the physiotherapy department. Her clothes were worn and bloodstained, not all of it her own, and her left shoulder was stitched and bandaged. Not to mention the assault rifle slung over her right shoulder, the knife strapped to her thigh, and handgun in the pocket of her hoodie. That was how much she had changed as a result of the world she lived in.
She continued her walk back to the ICU. Here the hospital was exactly the same as Ravenwood left it. Jay tried not to look at the faces as she stepped over the bodies and around the puddles of blood - some faded and dry, others glistening in the half light, orbs of a deep crimson. She walked on past, still in near silence.
She could have been lying amongst the dead on the linoleum floor. She knew she was lucky, but sometimes it felt as if she was the one who drew the short straw.
It was the change that triggered this reaction. The way everything normal could be destroyed in a matter of seconds and only be restored to just a slice of what it was after weeks of hard work. This place could never be the same. Never. Not after what happened. But it could be put right.
Minus the deathly empty silence, it could have appeared like nothing was wrong. The faint smell of antiseptic and polish scrubbed onto the floor still hung in the stagnant air. Beds lined the corridor walls - crisp sheets, tightly folded, ready for use. At the end of the corridor, the nurse’s station was organized and spotless - patients’ folders ordered and piled neatly, a stethoscope on top of the mound of paper. A typical hospital corridor.
What wasn’t so typical was the lack of sound. The place should have been alive - the gentle snores of the sleeping, the piercing beeping of machines, the clicking of shoes down the corridor, even the sobbing family of the ill and injured. Now it was silent. Dead silent. Not just the corridor, the ward, or the hospital, but the outside world too. The sounds of traffic, people, and birdsong no longer filled the streets. There was nothing.
Rouge River was a ghost town.
Jay walked forward, breaking the stillness of the corridor. She moved almost silently, her worn and grubby Converse All-Stars padding along the linoleum floor as she walked. Really, there was no need for her silence. She knew she was alone.
There was just something about shattering the silence than unnerved her. It was everywhere - possessive, stifling, suffocating. Deadly. Like a glass tower, one wrongly placed foot could bring everything down. The silence was powerful and Jay was nothing to disturb it. Silence was death and silence was life.
She stepped behind the counter of the station. Half completed forms littered the desktop, but other than that, everything was in order, and possibly even neater than when the last nurse was there. With her knees tucked up to her chest, Jay swung around on the swivel chair and grabbed a pen from the tray. She flipped open the nearest folder, and placed all the papers it contained in chronological order before finally writing the date of decease as 10-25-06 and the cause of death as “Ravenwood” with the cheap, Fillmore County Hospital biro.
When she had completed all the folders, she sorted them with the others already piled around her. Originally, part of her had thought of this as stupid, but the more she thought about it, the more sense it made. She needed to show these people some dignity. They had been murdered at no fault of their own and left to decompose within the concrete walls. Jay had already moved the people from this corridor to the morgue. She thought filling in their date and cause of death was the least she could do for them. She wondered if they had family alive out there. At least someday, because of her actions, they would know what happened.
As silently as before, she got up and moved back down the corridor - the corridor that she herself had scrubbed on her hands and knees to remove the bloodstains left by those who died there. In proportion to the scale of the hospital, it was nothing, but she felt it was the least she could do. In some ways, it was because of the death of the others that she was still living. It was unfair, she thought, that they died and she survived. “Survived,” because her existence now couldn’t be classed as living.
For a fraction of a second, she caught a glance of her reflection in the glass of the closed doors as she made her way back down the corridor. Just over a month ago she probably would have stopped to fix her hair and gaze at her reflection. That was the teenage girl she used to be, the one that had died with millions of other Americans the day that the bombs went off. It was the biggest attack in the history of the world.
This new Jay was almost unrecognizable. Her hair, once jet black and straightened before she left home, now stuck out all over the place, greasy, with a couple of months dirty blond re-growth showing. Black lines under her eyes showed that she hadn’t slept in weeks and her skin was deathly pale from lack of sunlight and iron.
She had always wanted to be super skinny, but she had been stuck with her natural athletic build which was more muscular than slim. Now she was. Under her grey hoodie she could see all her ribs through her taunt skin and she had to hold her jeans up using the stretchy cord she found in the physiotherapy department. Her clothes were worn and bloodstained, not all of it her own, and her left shoulder was stitched and bandaged. Not to mention the assault rifle slung over her right shoulder, the knife strapped to her thigh, and handgun in the pocket of her hoodie. That was how much she had changed as a result of the world she lived in.
She continued her walk back to the ICU. Here the hospital was exactly the same as Ravenwood left it. Jay tried not to look at the faces as she stepped over the bodies and around the puddles of blood - some faded and dry, others glistening in the half light, orbs of a deep crimson. She walked on past, still in near silence.
She could have been lying amongst the dead on the linoleum floor. She knew she was lucky, but sometimes it felt as if she was the one who drew the short straw.