Survivor Song(28)
Ramola instantly extrapolates from this shocking statement, questions avalanching within her head. Is the doctor implying Ames wouldn’t take Natalie if she were infected? Would the clinic break protocol (and federal quarantine law) for her emergency case? Is the clinic willing to risk exposing their patient population (presumably healthy mothers and babies) to a potentially infected Natalie and her child? Where do they go if the clinic refuses Natalie, high temperature or no high temperature? Are things so dire here that this is their best or only option?
Dr. Awolesi looks back up at Natalie and says, taking care to enunciate as though each word were a story: “You are well enough to get on that ambulance. Isn’t that right?”
Natalie says, “Yeah. Okay, I’m fine.” She doesn’t break eye contact with the doctor. Her expression is blank and, for Ramola, worryingly indecipherable.
“Good. We need to go now,” Dr. Awolesi says, and before Ramola asks any one of her questions, the doctor turns and walks out of the room, adding, “You can take your temperature on the ambulance if you feel you must.”
A security guard is waiting in the doorway to escort them. He is a young white man, about six feet tall. His patchy, thinning black hair is buzz-cut short. A respirator mask dangles from around his neck and he touches it with a gloved hand as though it were a talisman. He wears a blue vest, security written in bold yellow across the midsection. He is armed with a Taser, holstered at his hip.
Dr. Awolesi hurriedly introduces the guard as Stephen. He nods and flashes the variation on a smile where one’s lips disappear entirely. He motions for everyone to follow. Dr. Awolesi walks with him, stride for stride.
The hallway is not empty. Medical staffers duck in and out of rooms, buzzing from patient to patient. There are no signs of the struggle with two infected patients Ramola briefly witnessed. She wonders what happened to them and where they were taken, and she can’t help but imagine the woman with the rolled-white eyes, the one who in her stressed memory now looks like Natalie, is waiting behind any one of the doors they might pass. The alarm reverberates, echoing from one end of the hallway to the other, made more piercing by the distance traveled.
Refusing an offer to have her bag carried, Natalie trudges forward, following the doctor and guard. Ramola shuffles behind Natalie, sidestepping left and right in an attempt to see through and beyond the group; she is too short to see over them. Every other step, she throws a look over her shoulder, the hallway behind them expanding with each flash of light.
At the nurses’ station a late-middle-aged man argues and pleads with a police officer and a nurse. His hunter-green flat cap held in hand, he’s a stooped and grayed Oliver Twist, weary from all the years of begging for more. From what Ramola can piece together, he is not a patient but a visitor who, in the newer chaos ushered in by the alarms, managed to sneak up to the second floor to either be in the room with a family member or to help his loved one evacuate the hospital. Both the officer and nurse shake their heads and say sorry as they attempt to herd him wherever it is the healthy are supposed to go and go alone.
Once through the open area of the nurses’ station, their group quickly huddles around Natalie in the elevator vestibule and in front of the exit stairwell. She grimaces and slowly flexes her left hand as they ask her how she’s doing and if she can walk down one flight of stairs, as they should bypass using the elevator. Natalie says she is fine to walk and still stubbornly won’t allow anyone else to carry her bag.
The guard, Stephen, opens the door to the stairs and the four of them step onto the cement landing. Contained and compressed within the cold metal-and-concrete stairwell, the alarm is again transformed, cruelly mimicking human vocalization, growing more weary and desperate with each ricocheting call. Smoke gathers around the recessed emergency lighting as though the wisps are moths. The smell is not the pleasant roast of wood at the campfire or fireplace but the cloying, sickening tang of melting plastic and other substances that shouldn’t be burned.
Natalie says, “Jesus, aren’t there other stairs?” then covers her mouth.
Stephen says, “We’re okay going down. The smoke is coming from the third floor.”
Ramola is the last to step off the landing and onto the stairs. She can finally see over the others’ heads from her elevated vantage, but she can’t see around the turn to the landing between the first and second floor. From above, a percussive bang almost sends her tumbling into Natalie. Everyone stops. Ramola turns, looks behind and up; the third-floor landing and door are not visible. The alarm still cries. There’s a click and a whoosh before another exploding bang. The same sounds repeat, caught in a loop. Someone is opening and then slamming closed the third-floor door.
Dr. Awolesi urges everyone to continue on. “Keep moving. Keep moving.”
A woman shouts from above, “She had great power and was dreaded by all the world.” The door slams shut and then swings open without pause. “Surrounded by a high wall,” she says singsong, lilting at “high” and separating “wall” into two syllables. Her voice is the same tone and pitch as the alarm and it sounds like there are two of her. The woman continues shouting between the pistonlike opening and closing of the door. “Let it cost what it will cost.”
Ramola eases down the stairs, a reluctant swimmer stepping into freezing water, one hand on the railing, neck craned, trying to locate the shouting woman, to see if she’s following. Ramola reaches too far out with her last step and stumbles onto the landing. The others have stopped walking.