The VFMS Spark | Page 34

The Hospital

By Amber S.

Slowly, the last drips of water sputtered out of the sink until it stammered to a stop, the sink became stagnant, just like all of the others in the abandoned hospital. Winona sighed, taking the red Solo cup out from under the spigot and looked into it, disappointed that it was only half-full. She turned away from the sink and walked out of the bathroom with the windows shattered in and plywood stacked against the walls.

“Ninety-nine bottles of pop on the wall,” she muttered, dangling the cup from one hand and dragging the oversized scythe on the ground with the other. “Ninety-nine bottles of pop.”

“Take one down, pass it around, you’ve got ninety-eight bottles of pop on the wall.”

Footsteps sounded down the hallway as Winona passed by the empty rooms with vacant beds and closed shutters. A second set joined her from behind as a younger girl holding an old tablet walked up.

“Hey, Fifteen,” Winona said, continuing to move forward. The girl looked up from her tablet and gave Winona one of those 115-brand bittersweet smiles that she smiled so well. Fifteen was one of the orphan children that Winona had found inside of the hospital, her bones clacking together and her lungs hardly breathing. She was one of the orphans Winona had saved.

“I don’t have a name,” Fifteen had said when Winona found her, “just this.”

She had held up her shrunken wrist with a band on it that read Room 115.Since then, she hadn’t been known as anything else.

“Whatcha singin’, Nona?” Fifteen asked, sliding the tablet back down to her side. Her smile wasn’t that shade of melancholy anymore, but instead a genial grin.

“Some song from a long time ago,” Winona replied, stopping in front of a closed door, one of the sole working monitors beeping from inside. “from before the Program.”

“You always know the most obscure stuff, Nona,” smiled Fifteen.

“Is that a new word?” Winona asked, and Fifteen nodded. She was always a prodigious reader, learning from old sci-fi novels and plays from the twenty-first century. Winona always found those kind of books funny, because some of them were so inaccurate what had actually happened, but some of them were too true.

The New World Program was started to send humans away from Earth, to send them away from the bombings, the wars and famine and disease, from the human zombies that the disease infected. People that forgot who they were, people who were ridiculed with derisive comments about their mental state, their loss of memory. Winona remembered the days where she was a zombie too, where she couldn’t remember who she was, or her parents, or her life before the Program.

Cir was the host of the Program, a lab-baby that was too skinny to be a worker and too odd-looking to be a model. Their eyes were too big for their skull and their body was like a real life Barbie- without the feminine curves or the perfect smile. Just smooth and artificial in all of the wrong places.

But Winona never cared about how they looked- only that they had saved her from the dumps of ashes and radioactive sludge and nursed her back into her health and memory. But the NWP had carried on as planned, and now Winona was the one doing the saving, as Cir was gone. It was her retribution to them, her way of carrying on what Cir had done for her all those years ago.

“Ssssh,” Fifteen whispered as Winona creaked the hospital door open, leaning her scythe up against the wall outside. “Don’t want to disturb Chel.”

“Pardon me,” Winona whispered back, opening the door slower. Rachel laid on the bed inside of the room, eyes closed and lips dried, his breathing slow, as if he was dying. They had found him out in the abandoned wasteland of a city outside of the hospital. As he laid on the ground dying, the desertification of the world closed in around him, leeching the life away from his body. The effects of the world took their toll on all of them, forcing them to inhabit the bits of earth that still had even a little bit of water.

When some of Winona’s saved children had found Rachel, they brought him back to the hospital, and Winona slowly nursed him back to health with the supplies they had. She wanted to save him, save the boy that seemed to have fallen from nowhere into her care.

“Why’s his name Rachel if he’s a guy?” Fifteen asked one day as they sat in Rachel’s room, light filtering in between the cracks in the plywood.

“Gunter knew him,” Winona replied, referring to another one of the NWP members, “and said it was because that was his mother’s name. He never really got another one, just like you.”

“Oh,” Fifteen said, looking back down at her tablet. “Let’s call him Chel then. It’s more of a boy name.”

“We’ll ask him about it when he wakes up,” Winona sighed.

They hadn’t asked him yet, since he hadn’t woken up. As Winona opened up the door, she saw that he was awake, but just… not alive, like the rest of them. He was a zombie. But she never told Fifteen that, since she didn’t want her to know that another one of them was hurt.

Fifteen sat in a plastic chair across the room and opened the tablet back up, starting to read again. Winona pressed the red cup to Rachel’s lips and tried to make him drink it, but his dry lips were apprehensive to the feel.

“Come on, boy,” Winona muttered, taking her left hand and slowly opening his lips. “If you don’t drink now, I don’t know when you’ll get water again.”

She managed to get all of the drink down his throat, an eminent improvement over the last time she had tried to get anything into his stomach. He was too sick to chew, so she had to pump fluids into his stomach that she found in the hospital’s basement.

“Do you want to stay here with Rachel, Fifteen?” Winona asked, setting the cup down at the edge of the bed, for there weren’t any tables in the room. Fifteen nodded, engrossed in her novel, and Winona walked out of the room, taking her scythe and setting it over her left shoulder as she walked.

“Ninety-eight bottles of pop on the wall, ninety-eight bottles of pop.”