When all the formalities were taken care of they finally made their way to the car and started the journey and the formalities involved with her tests at Banner Medical.
It felt strange but familiar to be back out in the city again. Everything had that look of being bleached by the sun. Phoenix was predominantly a city of orange, yellow, and muted green. There were homeless people everywhere. Every stoplight. Every overpass. Every nook and cranny.
She looked out in front of the van and saw a DPS vehicle leading the way. She blinked and muttered, “Do we have an escort?”
Her mother looked over her shoulder, “Just to get us there quickly honey. Everything will be alright.”
They finally arrived at the hospital, towering and modern and surrounded by cars.
When they extricated her from the van a security guard took over pushing her wheelchair. He was a little rough pushing her up the ramp and through the doors. She managed a glare over her shoulder and muttered, “A little care boss?”
The man chuckled and smacked his gum. He smelled of old spice and sweat.
He wheeled her into an examination room where two nurses nonchalantly checked equipment and tapped away at tablets. The guard muttered, “Got another one for you,” and left her.
Her mother called out from the door, “We will be waiting for you out here Peanut!”
She cast a glance back at her mother and when she turned back a bored looking nurse was staring at her. She quickly started in on standard questions, checking things off on her tablet. Her counterpart started a quick physical examination including her eyes, pulse, and blood pressure along with bored sounding questions about her medical history.
When the two of them were done another nurse came in and unclamped her chair rolling her out the door and into a busy hospital hall. Someone was screaming in one of the examination rooms.
“I’m not supposed to be here!”
“I want to talk to a lawyer!”
Maria blinked and tried to get a look into the room but only saw a struggling figure being restrained by a security guard and a nurse.
The nurse broke her distraction by saying in a tired voice, “We are going to take you up to six and get a few scans and then they can take you back.”
Maria gave an unsure, “Sounds good,” as the nurse wheeled her into the elevator. She hit one of the buttons and turned her around in preparation to leave. She spied her nurse behind her pulling out her phone and thumbing out a text with one hand.
The elevator lights started to get brighter as they went higher. She looked over her shoulder and muttered, “What is that?”
The nurse asked, “What?”
The light was becoming blinding and the entire elevator started to shake. She closed her eyes tightly and gritted her teeth.
She heard the nurse say over her shoulder, “Fuck, we’ve got another one.”
All went black.
One of the darkened figures looked over their shoulder and said in a flat voice, “Doc? We have another participant being spun up in the DoR.”
The young scientist looked up from where he was flicking his hands through his VR menus and made his way down the bank of monitors. He tucked his hands into his lab-coat pockets and looked at the image displayed on the screen. There was a room full of metal framed bunk beds. Most of them were rusted frames with no bedding but one contained a bundled up female figure.
The dark figure in front of him said, “Build is ninety nine percent.”
He fished a lollipop from his pocket and unwrapped it before tucking it between his lips. His eyes shifted over the diagrams next to the video feed that had shifted and arched upward as the patient’s wakefulness neared.
He muttered, “What is her signal like?”
The dark figure said softly, “Sir, all of the components seem to be operating at maximum possible connectivity.”
“Sir!”
He looked up to the far end of the monitor bank where one of the dark figures had stood from their chair. He didn’t have to see their face. He felt their panic and said, “Throw your feed up in the center!”
The area was bathed in light as a video feed appeared floating in the center of the darkened area. The workers in front of the bank of monitors vanished and Doc was left standing alone, watching the scene unfold.
The feed was from the lobby of the Toronto Metro office. He narrowed his eyes as five figures in rain slickers made their way through the hallway of an office that was supposed to be abandoned. Emergency lights illuminated them over and over as they made their way to the main elevator. One of the figures, red haired and slender wearing a program polo shirt turned and looked up at the camera feed.
Doc cursed, “Damnit! Send an emergency message…”
They were cut off as heavy iron bars dropped from the ceiling of the observation room doors locking it down. The entire chamber was bathed in red emergency light as the screens behind him continued to play the current status of his patients.
He turned and made his way back over to the station he had just been supervising. He leaned over and started typing his hands moving so quickly they could barely be seen by the naked eye.
A figure, a being of pure shadow, appeared at his shoulder and inquired in a flat tone, “Is it wise to change landing coordinates at this late stage sir?”
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Doc's eyes moved across the screen through dense and fast moving code and he said, “There is only one way to cut off our invaders at the pass now. Let’s just hope that she doesn’t ignore us for justifiable reasons.”
The dark figure spoke softly, “Which one of them sir?”
He did not answer. He cycled through the new patient’s menus at a blinding pace changing variables as fast as he could manage. He brought up a holographic representation of the operations zone, zeroed out the patient's mission location and spun the globe manually. Spotting a large area of forest south of a mountain range he zeroed in on a summoning point and hit, ‘Confirm’.
Just as he sent off his code changes the screen flickered and went dark. After a few tense moments bathed in red light the screen flickered again and changed to pure white light. A smiling figure walked onto the screen.
It was him. A far too upbeat version of him down to the lollipop stick still hanging from his lips. The doppelganger's smile widened and he said, “No worries old boy. I’ll take over from here on out. Take a load off. You deserve it.”
The entire room went dark.
–
Maria groaned as she sat up in her bed sharply. Her head throbbed with pain and her tongue felt like sandpaper.
There was a feedback whine and a tinny and flat female voice intoned over an intercom, “Wel… Welcome… Fa… Fa… cil… Corruption… Stand-by.”
She looked around and blinked slowly. Where was she?
She was laying on a cot in a room full of them. Her ‘bed’ was little more than a moldering piece of canvas and above her there was another. There were eighteen of the bunk bed oriented cots in the small room with flaking gray paint. There was a single window but it was barred and the glass was so stained with dark brown build up that it was impossible to see through it.
Outside she could hear the dull roar of constant wind.
She noticed with a start that the blanket she had been laying under was ancient and filled with holes and black stains.The door to the room wasn’t only open, it was gone entirely. The orientation of the room was almost exactly like her room at the facility but obviously very different.
The light outside the window was muted as if overcast. It was warm, but nothing compared to the more brutal temperatures that were possible in the valley.
“What the fuck?”
She swung her feet out of the cot and tested her legs finding that she could easily stand. Her t-shirt and pajama bottoms were in a similar state to the blanket, but thankfully did not seem to be falling off. She stood tentatively and after a few moments made her way toward the door. Random trash was strewn across the floor along with occasional fallen pieces of concrete and rubble.
The hall stretched in both directions, as they had in the facility, but they were very different. All of the walls were the same flaking bland gray paint in her room. The floors were painted with yellow and red walking lines that were mostly worn away. There were occasional dark metal gratings in the floor every one hundred feet and to her right she could see a barred wall blocking progress in the direction where the cafeteria and courtyard had been located at the facility.
The walls appeared to be covered in graffiti and trash. Broken cots and other medical equipment lay strewn about. Some industrious person had dragged an oil barrel into the hall. It seemed to have been set on fire at least once.
She ducked back into the room and was relieved to find a pair of flip flops, covered in grime laying discarded under one of the cots. She slipped them on and made her way out into the hall.
She glanced into the rooms as she went. Most were in far worse shape than hers and there was no one inside them. She bellowed down the hall, “Is anyone here?”
Her voice echoed back to her with no response.
She made her way right toward the barred gate. She reached out and gave it a cautious pull finding it locked. Peering past it she saw more rooms on the left and right but no sign of anyone else. The place was so similar to the facility but looked more and more like a prison.
Something uneasy was working its way up her spine. She took a deep breath and turned back making her way past open and dark rooms toward administration and the doctor’s offices.
Her eye caught on the faded numbers above one of the doors, ‘111’. Nora’s room? She made her way to the door. The inside of the room was nearly empty save a rusted bed frame, blackened by fire. On the far wall someone appeared to have used their hand to paint with shoe polish or charcoal.
“I have no choice. I will come back.”
“Yeah, but where did you go?” she asked aloud.
She looked up sharply as the feedback whine filled the facility once again and a familiar female voice said smugly, “This facility is under new management. Proceed to orientation.”
Maria looked upward and called out, “Who the fuck are you? What is going on?!”
Getting no response she paused to grab a twisted piece of metal, from the fire blacked bed-frame. She wrenched it free with surprising ease and let it rest on her shoulder, speaking to herself, “Ok Mare, if no one is going to give you the lowdown on this shit, it’s up to you.” She steeled herself and left the room.
Each room was more of the same. Some rooms were like hers, with eerie bunk bed canvas cots still lined up and untouched. Others had clearly been ravaged by fire or other calamity. A few were completely collapsed with concrete and rubble.
When she paused at one door to check for signs of any other residents she caught herself before moving on. She saw a bundle under a pile of moldering canvas. Moving cautiously into the room she knelt down and lifted it. She nearly dropped it when she recognized what was underneath.
A person, a long dead person by her best guess, curled up in the fetal position. They looked like they were wearing patients' clothing in just as poor condition as her own. The dry Arizona conditions had left them a withered mummy. This was not the first time she had been close to a dead body. Quite a few of her digs in Central America had centered around large cave and rock shelter burials.
She was more terrified about what the implications of a random dead patient might be. It was impossible to tell gender although the body was on the smaller side. She started to re-cover the body when she noted black writing on the back of their decayed gray shirt.
“Sonoran 11469”.
She stood and pulled off her tattered shirt. On the back there was similar writing.
“Sonoran 114”.
Studying it, she sighed and pulled it back on carefully. She picked up her makeshift metal club and left the room and the long dead patient.
She opted to give rooms cursory glances from that point on. Where there was one body, there were sure to be more.
She did pause in the doorway to the patio where she had met Nora. It was still a patio but filled with rusted wire and bars between her and the outside. The world outside was a torrent of swirling dust and wind. She could barely make out the wall beyond which was much the same but the top was covered with the remnants of razor wire. She tightened her grip on her weapon and continued on.
She found another barred gate at the entrance to administration. Luckily for her the gate was long gone. She made her way through it and found herself back where she had been only an hour ago. Like the strange rooms and the altered halls, however, she found it different.
It was more like a waiting room than a lobby with rows of cracked and faded plastic seating. The doors to the outside at the far end of the room were open but where they had been filled with glass they now housed lines of bars. There were no signs or paintings on the wall. They were bare, which raised her suspicions.
She searched the front desk and found it devoid of a monitor, chair, or any basic office supplies. Someone had stripped it of anything useful. She knelt and found that the electrical sockets had even been removed. Under the desk she found a spot where a button, perhaps to remotely open the barred gate, had been placed but it was gone as well.
“Those are some serious looters.”
