The sound of raspy breath echoed in the otherwise silent room. It was dark. Slowly, the man lying on the floor began to stir. His mouth was open as he breathed his labored breath through chapped lips. The tubes in his nose were supposed to flood his lunges with oxygen, but the oxygen had run out, and now the tubes simply constricted his breathing. The man reached his arm toward his face and pulled at the tubes. Once the tubes were removed he felt the dried blood on his face and searched for the source of the blood with his fingers. There was a gash running across his forehead, one corner had scabbed over, but the rest was swollen and sent an electric twinge of pain down his spine when he pressed it. He definitely had an infection, but he couldn’t worry about that now more. He tried to remember everything he could.
His name was Sean, he had been admitted to the hospital after a bout of pneumonia that came on after the spear fishing expedition. He nearly had drowned in the ocean as he tried to pull his diving buddy out of the rip-tide that seized his friend’s shark bitten body. Sean had been lucky and he knew it. It was great white season in Pacifica but he went out anyway, the spear fishing was great this time of year, and he was willing to take the risks. His diving buddy Jacob was bigger than Sean. His muscular body in his black wetsuit must have looked like a much better meal to the 16 foot great white that came out of nowhere. Sean saw his buddy get hit by the shark, but he was 30 feet away and couldn’t do anything about it. After a single bite, the shark had realized his mistake; the large black swimmer didn’t taste like a seal, so the shark abandoned his prey and swam off. Sean swam as fast as he could toward the mangled body of his friend, but by then they both were caught in a rip current that began sucking them out to sea.
Jacob had passed out either from the blood loss or from the pain: his nearly severed left leg attached to his body by a thin piece of muscle and the remaining neoprene from the wetsuit. Sean grabbed Jacob around his torso and began kicking with all his might, swimming laterally to escape the rip tide. Compared to Jacob’s 6’2’’ frame, Sean looked like a large child. At 5’8’’ weighing in at 150lbs, Sean didn’t seem like much of an athlete. He had been out-muscled by kids his age for his entire childhood, and adulthood hadn’t really changed things. But, what Sean lacked in physical strength he more than made up for in will-power and determination. After fighting with the tide for nearly an hour, Sean managed to drag his friend to shore, only to collapse exhausted on the sand. A group of Chinese fishermen from Pacifica found them on the beach and called the ambulance. By the time the ambulance arrived, Jacob had already died from blood loss, and Sean was hypothermic. In his constant quest to save money and pay off his student loans, Sean had opted out of renting a thicker wetsuit, and had gone out with his shorty suit that he had bought for skin diving in San Diego. He remembered being admitted to the hospital, he remembered the doctors talking about pneumonia and fluid in his lungs, he remembered the visitors who stopped by, but he couldn’t remember much else. The next thing he remembered was waking up in darkness.
Sean willed himself to sit up and as he did, he focused his attention on the rest of his body in search of other pains that would indicate injury. He moved his toes, then his feet and legs: no pain so far. He felt his torso, chest, and arms: all good. Besides the pain coming from the gash in his forehead and an acute thirst, he felt fine. Water, he needed water. Sean felt along the floor in the dark and found the base of a table. Reaching up, he found the surface of the table. He stood up holding onto the table for support. His head began to spin and he thought he would pass out, but he steadied himself against the table until the feeling passed. He wasn’t just thirsty; he was hungry; very hungry. How long had he been out? He didn’t know. He began feeling his way around the room. He gathered from the tubes he had pulled from his nose that he was still in a hospital. He felt his arms and found the IV line still inserted into his vein. Somehow he had missed it when he was checking his body for injury. He found the IV tube and followed it up to the bag.
It was empty. He pulled the IV line from his arm and felt the warm blood begin to ooze from the hole left by the line. It didn’t bleed much, he was very dehydrated. He continued feeling around his room. Sean found the wall behind the bed and decided to circumnavigate the room to create a mental image since it was pitch black. Since the bed was blocking his movement to the left, he moved to his right with his hands sliding against the wall. He bumped into a trash bin and moved passed it, coming to the first corner. As he turned inward to his right, he came across the sink. His heart leapt, he was so thirsty. He reached for the faucet, couldn’t find it, but remembered that hospitals have those foot pedals that turn the water on. Searching with his right foot, he found a pedal and pushed it. He nearly jumped back as the pipes made a loud creaking and sputtering sound. The water must have been turned off for a while. After a few moments, he heard the water come splashing into the sink, and reached down his head to drink from the faucet. The water had a rusty flavor, but it was wet, and it quenched his thirst. He drank until he couldn’t drink anymore.
“What the hell is going on here?” Sean wondered to himself. He didn’t normally curse, but first his buddy had died, then he nearly died just trying to pull his buddy ashore, then this. “Where is everybody, and why are all the lights out?” Something about the quiet seemed ominous, Sean had been in hospitals many times before, but he had never been in one so quiet. He continued feeling his way around the room. Moving on from the sink, he felt a cupboard, and past the cupboard a door. He was tempted to open it, but he decided to see if he couldn’t find a window that might let some light into the room. He moved past the door and rounded another corner inside the room. About half way down the next wall he found the window: its shades had been shut. He found the string to open the shades, but was surprised by the darkness that remained once the shades were drawn open. He felt the window that was in front of him. It was covered with something that felt like cardboard. As he found the edges of the cardboard with his searching fingers, he began peeling back the tape, until he could pull the first piece of cardboard away from the window. A small beam of light shone in from the small piece of cardboard that he had removed, and he squinted as his eyes adjusted to the light. A sense of foreboding overcame him, as he turned around to investigate the rest of the room.
From where he stood by the window, he could see dark splotches on the otherwise white walls. “What is that?” Sean thought to himself. Then, as if his nose hadn’t been working before, he smelled it: blood. That iron smell so unmistakable to someone who grew up with a father who practiced taxidermy as a hobby. He looked down at his body again, just to make sure that the blood wasn’t his. With the light shining into the room he could see that he had lost weight. He could count his ribs, and his stomach had flattened out. But, there were no scars on his body that would suggest a source of the blood. As his gaze glanced around the room, his eyes landed on a mirror that covered the cupboard. There were words written on it, but he couldn’t make them out until he took a step toward them. “Don’t get bit.” The words were written in blood, clearly by someone’s finger, but Sean couldn’t figure it out. Why was there so much blood everywhere?
Panic rose in his mind, but he breathed deep to stay calm. On the bright side, he noticed in the mirror that his head wound wasn’t as severe as he had imagined. It definitely would leave a scar, but it didn’t appear to be too bad. Sean also realized that he was pretty much naked. His hospital gown was torn and his feet were bare. He opened the cupboard to find his belongings: his wetsuit, mask, snorkel, fins, spear gun, dive knife sheath with dive knife missing, a pair of spandex shorts and a shirt that he normally wore under his wetsuit, and a pair of booties. “Where is my knife?” Sean wondered. He had paid a lot of money for that knife. After being attacked by a reef shark a few years back Sean had invested in a high quality dive knife with a six inch titanium blade, with a sheath that strapped to his ankle. He hadn’t been attacked by a shark since that time, but he didn’t want to risk it. He always went out spear fishing with his knife.
He quickly pulled off the remains of his hospital gown and squeezed into the shorts and shirt. “Better than nothing,” Sean thought. He considered going barefoot, but decided to wear the diving booties because they had a bit of traction and Sean also realized that the ground was partially covered by debris. It looked like a dog had tried to chew on sheetrock but had thought better of it. Sean started to close the cupboard, but then decided to take his spear gun. None of his surroundings were making any sense to him. His eyes searched the rest of the room. From where he stood he could see everywhere in the room except to the immediate left of the bed. He stepped back toward the window and began to peel off more of the tape and cardboard. As more light came into the room, Sean could see what he had been missing. Just to the left of the bed, there was a hole in the wall about the size of a doggie door, the edges looked like it had been chewed through, and halfway into the room through the hole in the wall lay a corpse with Sean’s dive knife embedded all the way to the hilt in it’s head.
“Oh my God” Sean cried out. The noise of his own voice cutting through the silence startled him even more than the corpse. Sean stepped closer to the body and held his nose as the smell of rotting flesh made him dry-heave. It appeared that this person, whoever he or she was, had tried to crawl into the room through the hole, and that someone had stabbed him in the head before he could get through. Sean was horrified by the thought of being trapped between the walls of a hospital only to get stabbed through the back of the head once he was close to escape. “Did I do this?” Sean asked himself. He concluded that it couldn’t have been him, but still he wondered. Sean grasped the handle of the knife and pulled it from the skull. It made a sucking sound as the blade slid out, and it brought some tissue with it. Sean wiped the blade on the bed, went back to the cupboard to gather the sheath, and then strapped the knife to his ankle. Someone had killed this poor guy, and he wanted a way to protect himself in case the person came after him.
Sean went back to the window and pulled the rest of the cardboard from it. He was on the fourth or fifth story, and he was back in San Francisco, the hospital in Pacifica must have transferred him there. As Sean stared out the window he could see the streets of the city. There was no movement, everything was still. Cars were stopped in the middle of the street, and some of the building appeared to be burned out. Sean looked passed the building to the Bay Bridge and let out a gasp as he saw the tangled mess of wire and concrete that had once been the bridge connecting San Francisco to Treasure Island. It was destroyed, completely destroyed. “Were we attacked?” Sean tried to imagine a scenario that would match with what he saw before his eyes, but he failed to come up with anything. He was so caught off guard by the sight that for a few minutes he failed to notice the movement on the street directly below the hospital.
People were milling about, walking between the stopped cars. Their pace seemed unnaturally jerky yet melodic, in tune with each other, but strangely inhuman. When Sean noticed them he tried to open his window, to yell to them for help, but the window wouldn’t open. Sean yelled at the top of his lungs and waved his arms, “Hey, I’m up here!” The windows were dual pane and didn’t let any sound pass through, but his waving arms seemed to get their attention. One by one, the people stared up at Sean and began walking toward the hospital. Sean kept waving his arms, but as the people drew near, a wave of terror crept over Sean. The faces of the people approaching the hospital barely looked human. Their eyes were sunken in, their hair was patchy and looked like it was falling out, and their mouths hung open. Some appeared to have open wounds, others were missing limbs, while others looked like nothing more than skeletons with a tight layer of skin. Sean stepped away from the window and sat on the floor where he had woken just minutes before. A prayer escaped his lips “Oh God, what has happened?” He sat silently on the floor for a few moments thinking of what to do, and that is when he heard the gurgling moan come from the other side of his door.