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The Maddening Silence
by Vera Searles
The nurse walked along the hospital corridor, stepping over and around dead bodies, looking into each room to check if anyone still had a breath of life. Patients were sprawled on the floor or across their beds, the quick agony of the Enkaba Virus showing on their faces. In the corners, roaches, spiders, and ants were piled up where they had skittered and fallen in sudden death. The virus had attacked everything and left no survivors, in here, or out there.Susan looked out the window. On the road, cars were standing everywhere, and in the parking field below, dead drivers were slumped over their wheels, or were hanging out onto the cement from their open doors. Some people had made it to the emergency room entrance, where their corpses sagged together like rag dolls. Her own car was out there too, but she’d never get through that roadblock of autos on the road. Besides, where would she go? Home? Her parents and her younger sister were all dead. To be out there alone frightened her. She could survive in here, where there were plenty of medications and drugs, lots of blankets, bedding, linens, and food, for a long while. Maybe someone somewhere else would survive, as she had. In her heart she doubted it, for there had been only one dose of the experimental vaccine - - and she had taken it herself.
Out of habit, the nurse went back to her station. She lifted the phone, as she had almost every hour since it happened. Still dead, of course. She tried the computer. Nothing. In the space of three days, all communication was gone, erased from the world. All the electric in the hospital was out - - the wires had been blown down when the viral windstorm hit, and the generators had worked for a few hours, but were now out of fuel. At night, only the moon shining in the hospital windows gave any light.
Susan had gathered up all the flashlights from all the nurses’ stations and maintenance closets, and found a good supply of matches. In the huge kitchen freezers, the packaged meals were thawed out and spoiled, but from the pantry, she salvaged other food supplies - - apples, oranges, boxes of cereal, canned goods. She found a couple of manual can openers, and was learning to eat everything as it was, unheated, uncooked. And there were quite a few cases of canned liquid food supplements.
Sitting down at her desk, she picked up the empty vial of viral vaccine. As head nurse, she had signed for it when it came by messenger, but she pretended it never arrived. In the privacy of a toilet stall she had injected herself with the dose that was earmarked for the major surgeon of the hospital, who had agreed to take it if the virus headed this way. He never knew that Susan kept it for herself, and he died that night, when the viral wind swept across the nation.
The Enkaba Virus started in Malaysia, spread quickly to the entire Asian continent, zoomed through Europe and Africa, then across the ocean to the Americas, the airborne spores gathering speed until it had circled the globe like a whirlwind. It killed by entering the lungs and multiplying so rapidly there was no room left for air. People choked, gasped, suffocated. Susan had watched in horror, unable to help. Within three days, the whole world was dead, but the nurse was going to live.
She stared at the empty vial, remembering the sudden gusts that had howled their eerie tempest that night, permeating and filtering in through the doors, vents and cracks in the two-story building. Millions of short-lived organisms crowded the breath from everyone else's lungs. Experimental or not, the vaccine worked, and made her immune.
The nurse knew she must ration herself. Tomorrow she’d gather more foodstuffs, break more of the vending machines with the hammer she found in the maintenance closet, and begin a thorough search for any edibles that were stashed in the patients’ belongings.
Susan peeled a wrapper from a candy bar. Even the smell of chocolate didn’t blunt the stench of dead bodies. She had begun to drag them downstairs, one by one, and set fire to them in the parking field. Her eyes stung and watered every day from the smoke.
Her station had once been a hub of activity, with phones ringing, lights on, food trays being delivered, TV noises, doctors and visitors passing back and forth. Now it was like a morgue. Susan longed for a sound - - any sound. The silence was maddening.
"I’ll have to push more bodies down soon," she heard her own voice say. It was nice to hear something, anything, after no radio, no phones, no doctors issuing orders. How odd it felt not to see the lights blink on over the patients’ doorways. How odd not to have Alice, Trudy, Dot, and Becky to talk to. The four other nurses had died in various places in the hallway, where they dropped when the viral wind hit the building. An hour before, Susan had given herself the shot. An hour later, she was staring at her friends as they toppled over almost simultaneously, their faces grimaced in the futile struggle for breath.
She shuddered. "Stop it," she commanded herself. "In order to keep your sanity, you have to stay busy. Set a goal. Drag one body down every hour."
"Okay," she answered herself. "After I eat this candy bar, I’ll burn more corpses. I will survive, because somewhere, out of the billions of people on this planet, surely someone else has survived, and will contact me. We’ll find each other."
* * *
A month later, the nurse ate the last orange. It was shrunken, but she ate slowly, letting what remained of the juice trickle down her throat. When she finished, she went to the open window and tossed out the peeling and the pits. There was no more running water, so she mopped herself daily with moist-wipes. She thought about using some of the water left in the toilet tanks, but she decided to conserve it for flushing when absolutely necessary.
In one corner, she had stacked up every magazine and piece of reading material she could find from both floors She read a little bit each day, in between doing aerobic exercises and singing loudly to herself. She had a terrible voice, but it made her breathe deeply and worked out her lungs. "I’m waiting for you," she sang out the open window. "I don’t know your name, or what you look like, but I know you’re out there. I can’t be the only one who survived. Can you hear me singing? I wish you would sing back to me."
Often Susan found herself giggling at the silliness of it all. Singing and tossing trash out the window. Picking up the phone and saying, "Metropolitan Hospital, second floor charge nurse speaking. Oh yes, Dr. Madison, I’d love to go out with you this evening. I hope you take me home and make love to me after the movies. I forgot - - there are no more movies. There are no more cars. They’re all in the parking field, where I put big pots from the kitchen to catch rainwater, but it hasn’t rained. I wish it would. The burned corpses need to be washed." She giggled again. "I cut my hair for their funeral. Was it last week? Who’s there?" Susan stared at the phone in her hand. "Stop it, stop it!" she cried, flinging the phone to the floor. "Stop talking to no one. Stop being idle. Do something. Keep busy, or you’ll go crazy!"
The nurse went foraging, even though she’d been through every pajama pocket, night table, purse, wallet or piece of clothing in the hospital. She found no more edibles, but took whatever clothes she found - - robes, sweaters, men’s trousers. She wore outfits continuously until she could smell her own perspiration, then tossed them out the window and put on something else. With summer coming, and no air conditioning, it would be hot, but Susan would go naked. There was no one to see her. How she wished there were. She wished there were just one living being somewhere out there, making his way toward her. It had to be a him, of course. They would be Adam and Eve, and start the human race all over again.
At night, she slept on a gurney near her station. Her nightmares were filled with huge, long-tailed creatures walking up out of the depths of the oceans, their below-water grottoes having been ripped apart by the viral wind. When she woke, she couldn’t remember who or where she was.
Sometimes she was afraid of starving, or that she was going insane. But mostly, she was afraid of dying alone.
* * *
One night after several more months had rolled past and the moon was again full, the nurse watched the strange shadows moving on the wall. It must be Becky and Dot, dropping in to say hello. A thirsty patient flew about near the ceiling, rattling the empty vending machines, screaming for a Coke. Lights blinked on over all the dead patients’ beds, and Susan ran to give them their medications.
She sat on the floor in the moonlight, naked, playing with the phone cord. Her hair smelled foul and her skin was itchy and flaking.
On the wall, one shadow loomed larger and she spoke to it. "Hello, what’s your name? Oh that’s right, you’re dead. The corpses have to wait in the parking field until we have room for you."
The shadowy head tilted to one side, as though waiting.
"Oh all right," Susan said through cracked lips. "Go to the admitting office and see if they have a room for you. Maybe in the morgue." She giggled. "But there’s no food, you know. It’s gone. I ate it all up. Nothing’s left. Only me. See? Skinny me with all these patients to take care of, and the computer’s down again. I’m so tired and thirsty. Can you get me some water? Please? Is that you, Mama? I want some water. Please."
She curled into a fetal position, trying to suck moisture from her thumb. The shadowy head bent closer. "Who are you?" she asked. It didn’t answer. The silence was maddening.
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© Searles, 2005
Vera Searles has published over three hundred short stories. Her work appeared recently in APEX ONLINE, DANA LITERARY JOURNAL, and NOCTURNAL OOZE.