Lippe Simone - Blank

The best hope was offered by Dr. Spivic who claims that the possibility of a vaccine may have presented itself as a side-effect of his work with the clinically insane. If such a vaccine can be developed then predicting the location and breadth of the next incident will be key.

Key. Ray really needed to find that key now. And then he needed to learn to scuba dive, assuming that he didn’t already know how. The nice men with the calm voices wouldn’t be coming for a while, if they were coming at all and not at that very moment trying to figure out how to open an ambulance from the inside.

For all he knew the hospital might be at the epicenter of a radiation burst that’s wiped the minds and memories of people for miles. But if that was the case then why was Ray merely amnesiac while so far everyone he’d encountered displayed all the symptoms of Dr. Spivic’s cortex killing solar spasms? Why was he left knowing that locked doors need keys and that dates and phone numbers are different things? Was he underwater when the sun lashed out? Was he somewhere else altogether and brought to this place and locked in as a sort of exile while thinking society worked out how to study them or cure them or give them meaningful employment licking stamps? Or worse, was this a degenerative condition and was Ray only a few popped fuses away from joining the Dodgers fans in rooting for their favorite color on the test pattern?

Whether or not he was meant to be sharing a mental ward with a loose society of adult early learners Ray determined that he wasn’t going to. He was going to find Nurse Nancy or whoever the key nurse was or a fire escape or jump out of a window if necessary, but he wasn’t staying. Ray armed himself with a banana and headed back toward the ill-green corridor.

And so Ray was eating a banana when he passed the observation room full of starving junkies, who had all turned a jolly blue under the emergency lighting. They had entirely abandoned their artificial fruit harvest and were concentrating their efforts on the magic invisible wall, unaware that the door on the other side of the room probably wasn’t locked and in any case would be easier to penetrate. When they saw Ray or, more specifically, when they saw Ray successfully consuming fruit, they froze for a moment, mesmerized and hungry, before redoubling their assault on the glass with cushions and a broken lamp.

“You know,” Ray said to the captive audience, “I’m normally a hard fruit man. Apples and pears and the like. But this banana, I tell you. This has got to be the finest banana I have ever tasted in my life.” He enjoyed a bite of the banana and made an elaborate show of savoring it before walking on down the hall.

The radiologist had lost interest in the X-ray machine which had ceased to buzz in its efforts to blind the old man in the lead apron. He seemed very vaguely interested in Ray or at least in the notion that there was another place in the world and he began to approach the door. The emergency response officers were similarly inspired and Ray dropped the banana skin to allow them to make of it what they would.

The Dodgers fans, deprived of TV, had reorganized themselves in concentric circles on the floor around the snacks with the three largest men, probably orderlies and nearly as big as Leonard, monopolizing them in the center. They looked worryingly like a primitive society already ordered by dominance and access to food. But they were calm and quiet and preoccupied with their snacks and Ray was hunting nurses.

The gentle wilderness scene was interrupted by a brisk crack, high-pitched and urgent, like a shotgun trying to sing soprano. Ray didn’t initially know which way to look when an awful instinct drew his attention in the direction of the observation room in time to see an ugly orange lounge chair settling in a shower of tiny glass cubes. It was immediately and inevitably followed by a scrambling stream of skinny, bleeding, greasy-haired escapologists who lost no time in organizing themselves into Ray’s worst enemy.

Whatever humanity the haggard mob may have been developing was certainly lost by the time they poured like a wave over the first of the emergency responders who had picked up the banana peel and was calmly considering its potential applications. He probably would have surrendered the peel willingly but the junkies were in a rage. They tore the peel to all but unserviceable shreds fighting over it before swarming the emergency responders and the radiologist like piranha, tearing at their throats and eyes with rotted teeth and broken fingers.

Ray ran the other way.

The junkies were hampered somewhat by broken glass and broken limbs and Ray had a good lead by the time he made it back to the ill-green corridor. Nancy and the other nurses and visitors were still there but they’d formed their own little society now, far more benign than the Dodgers fans or junkies. Sitting on the floor beneath an emergency light sharing pills from Nancy’s little cups, they seemed quite content and docile and certainly unsuitable allies in a battle against starving addicts who can break bullet-proof glass.

At the end of the hall was another hall, doubtless leading back to reception and Ray considered very briefly the strategy of running the junkies around in circles until they got tired or starved to death. But in the corner where the halls joined a different and far more appealing option presented itself in the form of a small red light above a door: “FIRE EXIT”. The door not just to safety but liberty. Ray sprinted toward it with a few of the fitter junkies only steps behind him.

Had the fire exit been locked Ray would have been disappointed but unsurprised. But it wasn’t locked and Ray pushed through and ran directly into a wire gate. The gate blocked the stairs leading down and it, of course, was locked. A strange and probably illegal measure which Ray would have appreciated enormously had he been on the other side. As it was the only options were to bar the door and live out his life in a stairwell or go up.

Ray looked for something to block the door. There was nothing on the landing but the gate, a big red “4” on the wall, and a fire extinguisher. While it wouldn’t serve to block much of anything for very long the fire extinguisher was of the heavy industrial sort and it might make a passable bludgeon. Ray hoisted the extinguisher to his shoulder just as the first blank-faced target presented itself.

The first swing exceeded all expectations and the decisive crack told Ray that he’d just killed a man. The junky’s head pursued a perfectly horizontal path into the wall and his body followed it like a plume of listless smoke behind a cannonball.

Unfortunately the first swing was also the last and Ray was unable to reposition the fire extinguisher before the landing was overwhelmed. The stairs leading upward were unlit by emergency lighting but there was sufficient natural light coming from an ominous source at the top for Ray to not miss a crucial step while the junkies found stairs a new and intimidating experience.

And then he was on the roof. Even before he was through the door Ray was conscious of intense heat beyond it and he wondered if the roof was on fire. The roof was not, technically, on fire but the atmosphere was hazy and hot and the sun had apparently come in for a closer view of the action. The top of the building was perhaps the size of the parking lot of the only bowling alley in a small midwestern town and like a parking lot it was covered in tar. Thick, oily tar that had turned into a determined glue in the sun. Ray couldn’t run, even if there had been anywhere to go.

The roof was barren but for some pulleys and cables on tracks within thin aluminum housings and a low-profile HVAC unit the approximate size and shape and defensive properties of an elevated dance floor. Only five or six junkies had made it this far but it was enough. Ray couldn’t run and he couldn’t breathe in the heat and he knew that he was in no position to fight. So he struggled across the flypaper surface and the junkies struggled after him in an absurd slow-motion chase, pulling a foot free and clomping it down again with each step, like a toddler in his first deep snowfall.