DEAD IN BED By Bailey Simms: The Complete Second Book

PART 14, SECTION 6

Ian helped me rinse my mouth and change my clothes. I was in too much pain to walk to the bed, so Ian carried me.

"I don't get it," Ian said. "What is this?" I could tell that he was terrified that I might be expiring in some way that we'd never foreseen. But he kept saying, "Shhh. . . It's okay, Ash. It's gonna be okay."

The pain wasn't going away.

All night my guts and my spinal column ground against one another with fresh jolts of pain. By dawn, my nausea hadn't abated either. My limbs were feeling progressively limp and weak.

"I'm really worried you've ruptured something," Ian said finally. "We can't just stay here, doing nothing. We have to get you to a hospital."

"There are no freaking hospitals!"

Another jag of pain reverberated from my gut to my toes to the top of my head and back again.

"There's no hospital staff," Ian mumbled as he lifted me from the bed. "But there are hospitals."

He carried me out to the car in the early morning light. He buckled me into the passenger seat, and the next thing I knew, he was at the wheel and the tires were screeching away toward the highway.

The nearest hospital was only minutes away, an old Spanish-style building with red tile roofs. Ian pulled into an empty driveway marked Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center EMERGENCY.

Under the awning of the emergency entrance, beneath a dusty ambulance and a lone palm tree, wheelchairs had been left haphazardly.

In one of the wheelchairs sat a bent corpse.

The body was mostly skeletal remains enshrouded in a sheath of desiccated skin. The mouth had fallen agape. A weathered colostomy bag lay exposed beneath a tattered hospital gown.

The few TGVy-positives who hadn't been physically capable of clustering at the graveyards were mostly the old and infirm. The hospital was certain to have more corpses inside. Months had passed since the pathogen had gone airborne, which meant that, by now, most of the corpses had rotted or dried out. Still, the faint, lingering scent of decay hung all around the hospital.

Ignoring the corpse, Ian brushed off two of the wheel chairs. He helped me into one of them.

Yet another stab of pain pierced my abdomen. The gaping corpse across the sidewalk wasn't doing anything to help my state of misery.

I cried out again and clutched my stomach.

Ian opened the car's back and lifted out the small portable generator he insisted on keeping for emergencies. This he lay in the other wheelchair. He pushed me through the emergency room doorway, dragging the generator behind him.

Inside, the hospital was dark.

A stronger scent of decomposing flesh hung stale in the air. I covered my mouth and promised myself that, whatever happened, I wouldn't throw up again.

Despite the completely dark corridors, Ian knew his way around a hospital. He moved with a purpose along one long hallway, occasionally feeling the wall to get his bearings, then he made a sharp left turn down another corridor.

"It's okay, Ash," he said, panting. "We're going to fix this. Just be strong for me and hang in there."

Suddenly, he stopped pushing the wheelchair in the middle of a hallway, and I lurched forward in the seat.

The hospital was as dark as it was silent. Ian looked left and right, then he seemed to settle on a decision. 

He pushed open a door.

Bright light, streaming in through the hospital room's window, flooded into the hallway. I squinted and shielded my eyes.

Along with the light, an intense odor of decay burst from the room. 

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