Survivor Song(16)
People abandon their vehicles in the middle of the street. Others lean and pound on their ineffectual horns and shout through cracked-open windows. They plead and they are confused and angry and afraid. Desperation and realization lurk within their collective voices. They don’t understand why or how this is happening; why it is that their personal emergency is not more important than anyone else’s; why no one is out here helping them.
Worried slinging the overnight bags over her shoulder might’ve knocked loose her medical ID badge, Ramola double-and triple-checks it is still affixed to her chest and is plainly visible. Finding it in place, she wonders if someone might snatch it from her, thinking they could somehow use it to gain entrance into the hospital.
There are sirens in the distance, approaching from somewhere behind the standstill traffic. Cars hop over curbs and beach themselves on the congested sidewalk. Clusters of people break like cascading waves around the sputtering mechanical carcasses. Everyone moves in pairs or packs, molecules bonded together by held hands, by arms entwined or draped around shoulders. The rhythms of their individual gaits are not in tune and they inefficiently half walk/half jog forward toward a hope they cannot see.
Ramola holds on to Natalie’s wrist as they trudge forward. There is enough space for them to walk side by side. Ramola jogs two steps for every four walked to keep pace with Natalie, who walks faster and with longer strides despite her increased girth and accompanying waddle. They follow Broadway and cross Guild Street, weaving between stopped cars and passing an elderly couple. The hunched gentleman walks erratically and is draped in a blue-and-white fleece blanket. His wife taps his shoulder and repeats his name as though it were an unanswerable question.
Instead of continuing along Broadway, which traces the boundary of the medical campus and leads eventually to the emergency-room entrance, Ramola darts in front of Natalie and leads her through a quick mart and gas station adjacent to the hospital’s physical plant and then into the outpatient parking lot. Here they encounter steel crowd barriers plastered with arrow signs pointing left and handwritten signs that read: Rabies exposure patients via emergency entrance only. A small group of police and other security personnel stand by the barriers and wave Ramola and Natalie away from the outpatient entrance, which is directly across the lot.
Having the single entrance is an attempt to control the traffic of infected patients and reduce the risk of their spreading the infection to the other hospital populations. Ramola knows better but she is desperate to avoid the crowd, so she shows one of the officers her medical badge and asks to be let into the hospital here. She fumbles through explaining she is reporting for duty, is a part of the second tertiary support, in addition to her tending to Natalie’s emergency medical needs, a thirty-eight-weeks-pregnant woman who shouldn’t be made to stand and be tossed about by the gathering mob. The man shakes his head the entire time she talks, eventually cutting her off. He points to the left, to a group of blue Zumro tents more than one hundred paces away, erected in front of the emergency-room entrance. He says if either of them has been exposed they must go through triage and screening. As she protests further the man ignores her, and he loudly repeats the instructions and points at the tents for the oncoming stream of people behind them.
Natalie says, “Fuck this, come on, Rams,” and walks toward the tents.
Ramola is left openmouthed for a moment, holding her badge out toward the indifferent officer. She says, “Wanker,” and then sprints to catch up to Natalie.
They approach the edges of a ring of humanity, ten to twenty rows deep, expanding out from the tents. There are four of them, ten feet in height, each the approximate width of a two-car garage and at least thirty feet long. They are stacked, side by side. Ramola cannot see through the crowd or over the tents to the emergency entrance’s sliding glass doors. This morning Ramola gave a cursory read to the hospital’s seventy-four-page Emergency Response Plan thinking she would read and reread it more thoroughly later in the evening. The tents are where they’ve set up triage and where everyone will be screened prior to entering the hospital. Medical personnel and service ambassadors in white coats, gloves, hair caps, N95 respirators, and green scrubs (decidedly not Hazmat gear) carry clipboards and flit from person to person like hummingbirds, serving as pre-screeners. They could be informing patients waiting to be seen for issues not related to the viral outbreak that they are to use a different entrance or perhaps they are being turned away; it’s likely that non-epidemic-related services have been suspended.
The crowd grows and presses forward heedlessly. Arguments rage over who is first in the formless line. Everyone is shouting. Bullhorns and police radios crackle with static bursts and unintelligible commands. Off-campus, sirens cry and cars stuck on Broadway and Washington continue to blat their horns. As unnervingly apocalyptic as the desolate, empty lanes of I-95 were earlier, this scene confirms Ramola’s worst fears.
“Is everyone here sick?” Natalie asks.
“I don’t know.” Is it possible this number of locals have already been infected? As Ramola scans the crowd she does not see anyone presenting the most obvious and worst symptoms of rabies.
“What are we—”
Ramola grabs Natalie’s right hand. “We’re going in.”
Natalie’s eyes are wide, the skin around her eyes is swollen and so deeply red as to be almost purple. She looks beat-up. She looks sick. Natalie says, “Don’t lose me.”