The Hospital was on a foothill on the far northern edge of the mountain range. It was an inbetween kind of place. Technically it was still Talia but it was hard to tell when it would stop being Northern Talia and became the southern edge of the Black Woods.

The train approached our planned stopping point slowly, quietly. Albrecht Klam brought it to a halt with the minimum possible fuss. I hoped that no-one had heard anything, because if anyone should come to investigate, there was no way to hide the train.

Amris and I were the first to leave the train. We stepped down into an overgrown pasture. The grass was long, but dying back now as winter grew closer and the pasture was studded with saplings, shrubs and young trees. Everything about it fitted with this having been a carefully maintained lawn about twenty years ago.

I could imagine this as an outdoor extension of the hospital. Something like the wide balconies and paved gardens of tuberculosis hospitals back home. A place where the staff could wheel the convalescents out so they could take the air and the sun. The patients here would all have been children and teenagers so a wide lawn where they could picnic, play, or just lie in the sun made a lot of sense.

I sniffed the air, drawing the cold, clean air through my sinuses, flushing out the scents of the crowded train. Amris stood next to me, also sniffing the air. His sense of smell wasn’t as acute as mine but was still much better than a human, elf or dwarf.

Behind us Sarah, the Outlander Orc JUGGERNAUT, clambered up onto the top of the train. Her sense of smell was okay but her eyesight was excellent, particularly in low light. JUGGERNAUTS are close combat specialists, but she was also good with a bow. Her intention was to keep an eye on everyone and to make sure that there was a clear route back to the train.

“There’s people in the Hospital but not in this section,” I said.

“Agreed,” said Amris “They don’t smell homeless to me. Maybe the hospital isn’t completely abandoned?”

“I smell that carbolic soap stuff that all the nurses use,” I said. “And menthol, and maybe an antiseptic of some kind. I don’t smell many people. I especially don’t smell any beds in use. I think you’re right that they’re using it but I don’t think there’s any patients. I think it’s mostly a pharmacy.”

“Maybe in a small town they prefer to keep the children at home?” said Sarah, from the roof of the train.

I hoped that was true.

Amris and I went ahead to find an entry route into the hospital building.

We didn’t exactly creep through the pasture but we certainly weren’t advertising our presence. We reached the shade of a balcony and found a door into the main Hospital building. It looked like it was supposed to be boarded up but over the years the moisture had got into the wooden boards and expanded and softened them and at some point they’d just fallen off, leaving long, rusted nails sticking out of the door. The door was locked but I had a pry-bar and plenty of practice using it so the door wasn’t locked for long.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

With the door open I sniffed the musty air on the other side. It confirmed that no-one had been in this section of the building for a while. There were people somewhere close though, though. They were ahead of us, in the central block of the building, most likely on the ground floor. The smell also confirmed that there was no dangerous mould infestation, the other thing I’d been worried about with an abandoned building.

“This block should be safe for the scavengers,” I said.

“I’ll go back and tell them,” said Amris. “What about the kids? You know they’re going to want to play in the long grass.”

“As long as they stay on the grass between the hospital and the train. Hopefully there’s enough there to keep them busy.”

I pushed on, through the door. Inside, the building was in better condition than an abandoned building back home would have been. A fancy building, like this one had been, wasn’t complete without enchanted glass windows. Those don’t really break until the magic wears off and that takes a lot more than two decades. The enchanted glass also does a better job of screening out UV light than the windows back home so things were a lot less faded than they would have been. However it was just as dusty as a building back home would have been.

I wanted to fully search every part of the building but it actually wasn’t a good use of my time. The Scavenger team that I had trained was coming and they would search this first building completely. My specialist SEARCH ability only found generic valuables, things like jewellery and coins, so it wasn’t going to produce anything that we needed.

I did have a quick look round but all that did was confirm that this part of the hospital had been cleared out and then boarded up in an orderly fashion and there was unlikely to be anything useful in it. Amris caught up with me as I was forcing my way out of a door on the other side of the building.

Beyond that door was a formal courtyard garden. It was overgrown now but not nearly as badly as I’d expected. It looked like it had been well maintained until quite recently. There was only a year or so of growth on the low hedges, maybe a little more on the rose bushes.

Once there had been several connections between the building we’d just left and the rest of the hospital but most of them had been bricked up when the building was abandoned.

The one route that remained had started out as a decorative trellis walk. There had been roses trained up the framework. Then someone had decided that it was a good idea to grow something less decorative and more practical. I could see remains of pea plants and some kind of squash still clinging on to the old wooden frames.

Later still someone else had decided to reinforce the trellis and add more space for useful plants so they could produce even more food. That person had added something that looked a lot like chicken wire to the wooden frame and now there was a bizarre ramshackle corridor of wire and wood that started in the middle of the formal garden and led to the central hub of the hospital. At some point someone had decided to plant grape vines and those had taken over most of the wire. The vines had clearly been pruned this season so someone was still harvesting the grapes.

Judging by the state of the gate that blocked the near end of the wire corridor no-one had come out of the corridor in a while and they were harvesting the grapes from inside. Therefore the inside of the wire corridor represented the furthest extent of the current use of the hospital building. They’d given up on the formal garden but they were still taking care of the vines and whatever else might self seed and grow up the chicken wire.

The end of the corridor was closed off with a roughly made gate that was taller than me but not quite tall enough for Amris. The frame was warped and crooked and the gate was jammed awkwardly in place and held by cheap, rusty hinges and a slightly bent deadbolt. Neither the hinges nor the bolt had been fitted properly and the gate was mainly staying closed because the ramshackle framework of the corridor end wouldn’t let it swing open properly.

I used the oiler can from my scavenging kit on the hinges and the dead bolt but it still took a couple of kicks from Amris to get the gate to open.