Chris Adrian - The Children's Hospital

Jemma’s best friend Vivian joined the crew, dressed in goggles and surgical overalls insulated with pillow stuffing and led by Jordan Sasscock, the PICU senior, that tried to break through the glass doors of the lobby with a bench. It was the sort of bench, built from heavy wrought iron and laminated wood, that would have been more at home in a park than in a lobby, but it nicely approximated a battering ram just when they needed one. While a big crowd watched from the railings of the atrium balconies, they lifted it all together and ran at the doors that weren’t doors any longer, but had become, while they were all distracted by the sudden lurch toward death taken by every last patient in their care, one flat panel of glass, as dark as slate and yet if you stood close and stared long enough into it, you saw your own face deep within, not exactly reflected. When Vivian looked she thought of a girl swimming up from the depths of a cold mountain lake.

She didn’t know what she expected to see, on the other side of the shattered glass. Maybe the city on fire, or all the buildings fallen down. Or maybe just a group of soggy policemen. “We’ve been knocking for hours,” they would say. Something had happened — that much she certainly believed. You could not feel that violent disjointment which had unsettled her off her feet, and unsettled the kids out of their tenuous grasp on health, and think otherwise. But a new ocean, and them in the hospital the only survivors? They were more likely experiencing some cruel experiment — black out the windows and blow in some aerosolized LSD and get Phyllis Diller to hide somewhere with a microphone and claim to be a sweet, creepy angel — than the end of the world.

“I wouldn’t do that, if I were you,” said the voice, seeming to come from everywhere in the lobby, loud but not stern.

“Fuck you!” said Maggie Formosa, one of Vivian’s classmates, and easily the worst person she knew. Jordan counted to three and they ran. She was thinking of her family as she ran, imagining, stupidly she knew, that they were all waiting on the other side of the glass, lined up with hundreds of others behind a police barrier that separated this strangely behaving hospital from the usual city.

“You will live!” the voice shouted at them, and something about the tone of the voice betrayed it to Vivian as at once utterly compassionate and utterly deceitful, and in the scant moments before they collided with the glass it managed to convince her not that they were going to live but that the world had well and truly ended, and that they had been thrust beyond an ultimate pale into a strange and horrible new world.

She alone of the six was prepared for the hard shock that assaulted their shoulders when they ran the bench into the unbreakable glass, but she fell back with all of them, and just like Maggie she nearly missed having her foot crushed by one of the legs of the bench. But while Maggie stomped her feet and shouted at the highest window, the black glass cap of the atrium, Vivian sat on the ground and drew her face to her knees and wept, just like anyone who believes all of a sudden in the proximity of angels, and the death of her family, and the end of the world.

“I am the preserving angel,” said the voice. “Did you think I would let you hurt yourself?”

“It all started,” the man told Jemma, “with the voice from my fireplace.” They were climbing the stairs, on their way to the roof, to look out on the state of creation. It was one day since the hospital had been cast adrift, and she was trying very hard not to consider things. It had become immediately apparent to her that the disaster — if that was a great enough word for it, if there was a great enough word for it — had spawned two types of people: those who considered things, and those who did not. There were only a few of the latter; she and this man seemed to be two of them. When she tried to think of the dead she only saw her own four, their faces flashing in succession, or the four of them standing quietly in a bright room, or the four of them adrift on the new great ocean, hand in hand in hand in hand, arms and legs spread so they made a wide rosette, spinning just under the surface of the water with their eyes open and bubbles caught beneath their chins.

When she’d finally made it back to the call room, after listening over and over, always disbelievingly, to the hidden lady — where the hell was she? everyone kept asking — who told them over and over that they had been preserved from a world-wide deluge, after she’d given up trying to peer through the windows, after she’d had a clutching reunion with Vivian, and after she’d tired of the organizing chaos all over the hospital, she’d found Rob there, laid out crookedly on his belly in the little bed, weeping into his arms. Jemma stretched herself over him, reaching past his head to take his hands. “Something awful has happened,” he told her again. “It’s not a trick or a drill. It’s something more horrible than anything that’s ever even happened before.”

“I know,” she said, because she had suffered enough disasters to know a real one from a fake one. But she could think of no words that might comfort him. It would have been enough, she thought, to weep with him, but she could not even do that. She felt very little except pain at his pain. What if it were true, that the world, as the grating voice insisted, was drowned and the only survivors were those who were trapped within the round walls of this hospital. She thought something in her should balk at believing it, but nothing did. She was so used to getting horrible news, she never doubted anything bad: your brother is dead; your father has died; your mother was in that burning house; Martin has had an accident; of course, of course, of course, of course. Only good news ever seemed unreal to her, anymore, and the fact of all those ended lives — a comical voice numbered them in her head, billy-uns and billy-uns and billy-uns — only put in her a familiar stony feeling, that left her calm and alert, so she thought as she listened to Rob’s titanic weeping that she could discern the four distinct sobbing tones. She could name the muscles that shifted her to and fro as she rode on his back. She could track the progress of his tears down his face despite the dim light, and mark the tiny increments by which the tear stain grew on the festive sheet. She knew this state of being, her funeral mode — now time would slow down and stop and she would feel, would know, that this was the essence and purpose of her whole life, to be somebody leftover, when all the good people, the neat people, the cool people, the people who were actually people and not crawly depressive lizards, were dead, and to feel nothing about it, except the same old stony feeling and the not gnawing but nibbling suspicion that she had missed out, again. She put her face in his neck and said them again, empty words: “I know.”

“I thought it was the devil talking, at first,” the man told her. “Who else would speak out of the ashes? It was a cold night, but I had no fire going, so the voice came out of the blackness. It said, Listen to me, creature. I am an angel of the Lord. He has decreed a work for you.”

Jemma had not asked him to explain anything; he had just started talking as soon as they’d met. He was coming up the stairs to the first floor just as she was entering the stairwell. They stood and regarded each other for a moment. She saw a haggard-looking man in a green suit and terribly ugly shoes, little slippers of woven leather afflicted with beaded tassels on either front.