There was no solemnity or catharsis, just a simple yell, a call for a physician to step in and formally declare Mr. O’Houlighan dead. That peculiar honor fell to Dr. Jonan Derric, who darted out of the room as soon as he’d done the deed.
Like everything else nowadays, corpse disposal had been streamlined. Now that Joe-Bob was officially dead, the network would take care of the rest. All it took was a quick swipe of Jess’ hand chip over the console built into his bed and then two transparent polymer sheets emerged and swept over the corpse, one from each side of the bed, like a darkpox bed, only permanent. Plastic tides melted and fused together where they met one another, forming an air-tight seal. With a brief hum, a pump went to work, sucking out all the air from the space between the mattress and the plastic barrier, creating a vacuum seal.
Jess glanced at Hachiko as the two women wheeled the bed out of the room. Once it was out the door, Nurse Nagoya darted back in and got to work disposing used IV bags and sanitizing the plastic covers on the monitors.
“We’ll save them, Hachiko,” Jess said. “Keep your spirits up. That’s what makes a good nurse into a great one.”
Nurse Nagoya looked back and nodded hesitantly.
Jess let Hachiko have the honor of preparing the room for its next patient. As the nurse who’d hog-tied the man, Jess felt it was proper that she be the one to dispose of the dipshit’s corpse. It was a straightforward task. She rolled the bed down the hall to the staff elevator just around the corner, which she summoned with a swipe of her hand chip across the scanner in the wall. The doors slid open, revealing luminous, swirling patterns covering the elevator’s chrome-lined walls. The ride down to the morgue on the third basement level was silky smooth. The bed didn’t rattle in the slightest.
But Nurse Kaylin couldn’t have expected what was awaiting her.
She stepped out into the bright underground hall, and then whistled in shock.
The dead were stuck in rush-hour traffic, clogging up the hallway. Vacuum sealed beds lay end to end against the wall, occupying about a third of the available space. Members of the staff stood among the beds like traffic cops, directing arriving nurses and physicians while others helped guide the beds into the morgues. Normally, the responsibility of putting a corpse into one of the morgue’s refrigerated cadaver drawers fell to whomever had brought the corpse there in the first place. But this pandemic was anything but normal, and so it didn’t surprise Jess in the least that management had charged some folks with body processing duty.
Jess waved to one of the bodymongers.
“Just leave it there,” he said, pointing to the line of beds.
With a nod, Jess laid Mr. O’Houlighan’s death bed to rest alongside the others.
They were already onto their second row of beds.
We’re getting our asses handed to us on a platter, served with a side of black truffles.
“Fuck,” Jess hissed.
A sinking feeling pinched the pit of her belly.
There was no war quite like healthcare.
Turning around, Nurse Kaylin noticed the elevator behind her was still idling at the current floor, so she swiped her hand over the scanner and stepped back in.
Goodbye Ba3 Morgue. Hello Ground Floor Hell.
She pressed the button and the elevator rose. The floor indicator light flicked from Ba3 to Ba2.
Then all the lights went out.
The elevator screeched to a halt. The noise was like metal rasping upon stone. Jess flinched, squeezing her eyes shut.
In between heartbeats, the elevator screeched for a second time. The floor shuddered beneath Jess’ feet as the elevator tilted downward. Jess braced her legs, and though spooked, she did not tremble. As a hobbyist rock-climber, she was no stranger to slanted, uneven surfaces. Though the ones she knew weren’t in pitch black darkness.
Jess fumbled for the switch to turn on the built-in light in her PPE visor when she blinked in confusion. She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, just to make sure she wasn’t imagining things.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
The elevator wasn’t pitch black—at least not anymore. It was lit by a narrow band of lambent amber. The source of the light was coming from somewhere behind Jess. Its rays echoed off the elevator’s chrome interior.
It was almost like torchlight.
Turning around, Nurse Kaylin saw the source. The elevator doors were ajar—slack-jawed, even.
Jess let out a breath.
She’d always wanted to push the shiny red emergency button. Now, she finally got to indulge herself. She lifted up the angular plastic cover and pressed the big red button. It felt damn good to press.
But absolutely nothing happened. No videophone conversation started up on the console screen embedded in the wall. No helpful voice spoke to her on an intercom. She didn’t even hear any trace of an alarm or siren. The electronics were all dead as a doornail.
Breath condensed on Jess’ PPE visor as she snorted in frustration, though the micro-fans built into it quickly evaporated the moisture.
Guess it’s all up to me.
Fortunately, Jess was used to that.
After a couple seconds’ scrutiny, she noticed that, though small, the gap between the elevator doors wasn’t so small that she couldn’t squeeze her bite-sized fingers through. Taking a deep breath, Jess mentally prepared herself for the possibility that what she was about to do was gonna be murder on her back.
“Here goes nothing,” she muttered.
Nurse Kaylin didn’t bother counting to three. She had places to be and people to save.
She groaned as she pushed, and to her amazement, the doors slid open without the least bit of resistance. She pushed again, spreading them a bit wider right before stepping out through the off-kilter doorway and into the dim light beyond.
“What the fuck…?” Jess whispered.
Nurse Kaylin stood in a room that shouldn’t have been there. She was in a grand hall, walled by blocks of stone. It must have been two stories tall and at least five times as long. Several massive tables filled the room, gnarled and woody, along with many benches beside them.
And the benches were anything but empty.
A great feast was underway. Details almost too numerous to catalog assaulted Jess’ senses.
What is this, some kind of medieval fair?
She didn’t know the words for half the things the diners were wearing. Tunics. Jerkins. Pointy shoes? More than a handful of the revelers wore suits of armor made from tiny, interlinked metal rings that had been woven into scruffy sheets. A massive fireplace blazed in the middle of one of the long walls. Sconces scattered along the walls held lit torches; a putrid, tallowy stench wafted down from simple chandeliers that hung from the ceiling’s wooden rafters. The chandeliers were made from spoked wagon-wheels topped by stinking candles that filled the room with a warm, ochre glow. It made a fearsome partner to the musty smell that clung to the air, and the scents of meat and beer and sweat and incense that filled the space beneath the endless rain that percussed the roof high above.
Multicolored banners hung from the walls, covered in archaic patterns and imagery that Jess recognized from heraldry of old. One pattern predominated: the Church’s emblem: an equilateral triangle, lonesome and golden. The gold was woven into a solid red background, red for the blood of the fallen; red for the warriors who gave their lives to defend the faith. The room was alive with a faint music—plaintive woodwinds; mediative, plucking strings—though the sound was almost lost to the thick, boisterous conversations that filled the air.
A flash of lightning and a roar of thunder drew Jess’ eyes to the narrow glass windows set into the walls opposite the fireplace. Their panes were gauzy; their mullions crooked; and through them, she saw a Night unlike any she’d ever known. Beneath the gibbous Moon, the only lights came from the torches scattered alongside half-timbered buildings. The structures jutted over the mud-rivered street in an overbite overhang.
A shriek cut through the noise, rivaling the recent thunder. Then everything went silent, save for the rain.
Jess turned toward the sound. The scream had come from a young man with messy, straw-colored hair and a bile-colored tunic. A wineskin fell from his hands and hit the rough wooden floor.
He pointed at Jess.
Several hundred eyes bore down on Nurse Kaylin all at once. Knights in ring armor rose from their benches. Crossbows clicked. Swords sang as they were unsheathed. Several well-armed men approached Jess, shouting at her in a mix of words, some of which Jess almost understood.
“Goost!”
“Comelyng!”
“Wicche!”
Jess held out her palms, trembling in fright. Suddenly, she felt like a little girl all over again, hiding from her father who was in one of his alcoholic rages. Jess stammered, trying to form words, but that only angered the men even further.
More thunder boomed in the distance.
One of the men pointed a sword at Jess. He bellowed fearsome words that Jess didn’t understand, but which still made her blood curdle.
Her legs tensed, and she ran with it, racing for a nearby archway, hoping it would be an exit. The men gave chase. Metal rustled behind her. Voices roared.
She tripped on a wet patch on the floor and fell forward with a scream. Her PPE’s plastic visor cracked as she hit the ground.
She blinked again. The texture of the floor beneath her suddenly changed. Rough wood and stone turned perfectly smooth. The familiar scent of antiseptic wafted through the crack in the visor, clearing out the stench in her nose.
Pushing herself off the floor, Jess staggered to her feet, only to find herself in the bright light of a hallway. Waste receptacles were lined up against the wall. The aggregated bins depicted Werumed-san giving helpful reminders to passersby to place their trash in the appropriate openings. Plant and animal matter went in the hole with the black lining; recyclable metals went in the hole with blue lining; recyclable plastics went in the hole with the green lining. A rainbow of responsible waste disposal.
Jess’ pulse throbbed in her temples as she stared at it in disbelief.
She was back in West Elpeck Medical.
Wary, and wondering if the stress might have finally been getting to her, Jess staggered off and then set off in a jog, not knowing what to think.
I wonder: what might Jess have done if she had noticed the dirt she left in her footprints, or the wineskin behind her, just around the corner, spilling its frothy contents onto the floor?