Runaway World

Awakening

     He was lying on a soft bed and he felt healthy.

     The headache was gone. The shivering was gone. He was able to breathe easily. The strength had returned to his body. He was hungry.

     He tried to raise a hand, but couldn't. He looked and saw a padded cuff around his wrist, attached by a leather strap to the side of the bed he was lying on. His other hand was also restrained, as were his feet. Who'd done this to him? The New Philadelphians? They must have found him, treated his illness and then tied him to the bed. He was a prisoner, then. Well, he'd deal with that situation later. Right now, he was just glad to be alive.

     Where were the others? Were they being treated too? He raised his head to look around and saw more beds. Two lines of them along the long sides of a hospital ward, most of them occupied. He saw Valentina in the bed beside him, dressed in a thin hospital gown and also restrained. On his other side was Joe Badger. Both were still asleep, as was everyone else in the room as far as he could tell.

     The room was lit by fluorescent tubes in the ceiling, but only around half of them were working. One near the other end of the room was blinking on and off while making a buzzing sound. Some of the polystyrene tiles lining the ceiling were missing revealing electrical wiring and dusty cobwebs. Maybe this room isn't used very often, he told himself. Eleven sick people all turning up at once might have overwhelmed the hospital's normal capacity.

     "Hello!" he called out. "Hello! Is anyone there?"

     A man came into view. He was wearing a military uniform and carrying some kind of automatic machine gun. He looked at Andrew, then turned his head to call to someone out of sight. "Doc, one of 'em's woken up."

     Another man emerged from a side office. This man was wearing a while lab coat and had a stethoscope around his neck. "Welcome back, Mister Birch," he said as he approached. "You had us worried for a while."

     "Where are my wife and children?" Andrew asked. He raised his head as high as he could, trying to see who was in the beds further away. "Are they okay?"

     "All eleven of you are still alive," the doctor replied. "A couple of the children are still poorly but we're hoping they'll make a full recovery."

     Andrew felt relief wash over him. "Thank you," he said. "The disease we had is very infectious. I hope you took precautions to avoid catching it."

     "We did," the doctor replied. "We received your warning messages. Unfortunately, the man who received it was a civilian and had no authority to respond. He passed it on to his military superior, who passed it on to his until it finally got all the way up to the President. He was the one who send a team up to the upper levels to investigate. I have to say, it's fortunate you were all unconscious or they'd probably have shot you."

     "I'm suitably grateful," Andrew replied. "You can release me from these restraints now. I'm quite rational. I'm not going to go crazy and attack you."

     "We're not afraid of psychosis," the doctor replied. He looked embarrassed and apologetic. "That's not the reason you're restrained."

     "Then what is the reason?" asked Andrew, suddenly alarmed.

     "While you were all still unconscious, one of you was, apparently, still conscious. Only pretending to be asleep. We don't know which one of you it was. At the time, it wasn't thought necessary to guard you. You were all near death, or so we thought. You weren't in any condition to do anything."

     "What happened?" demanded Andrew.

     "One of you tried to murder another of you. The young woman who was sharing a room with two teenage boys."