Chapter II

The second chapter of the three-part story (this is also my eighth CWP for English 11).

The air in the stairwell became stagnant as the last echo of Diane Morrison’s Taurus PT92 disappeared. Diane stood there, her eyes wet, her gun smoking, her mind racing. She lowered her head like a gunslinger lowers his pistol after a duel. Closing here eyes, she tried to hold herself together. It had felt so facile to shoot Mark. Her finger had squeezed the trigger with no hesitation, and even though she knew (or believed) that he was dead, she felt that she had to do it. And even thought she knew (or believed) he was dead; the repercussions of emptying a round into her neighbor’s head left a deep scar in her mind. Diane didn’t know it, but that scar was building a callus for many successive scars to come.

 

An empty moan slowly forced its way down from the floor above Diane. The sound brought Diane’s head up, her gun swung deftly to her left, towards the stairs leading up towards the source of the moan. Backing up slowly, Diane pivoted her body towards the stairs leading down to the floor below. She pulled the gun away from her premonitory target and fled down the stairwell. Every time she got to a new floor her acuity sharpened, her mind waiting for something to move.

 

Diane reached the first floor and ran out of the apartment complex, leaving behind two dead neighbors, a home, and one shell, still covered in the heat of its mother, losing its warmth every second, becoming cold. Diane felt callously about her actions, but with every step she took, her primitive instinct kicked in. She ran, her breath billowing from her mouth, her feet gradually slowing down in their cycle of movement. She ran through a park where kids played while their mothers watched absently. The hands of the children spurred on the spreading of the bacteria, their hands entering their mouths and then leaving just to wipe it on slides where other children would touch with no more thought than one would give to taking a drag of a cigarette, finally ending up on the children’s faces, in their cuts, and in the bloodstreams.

 

Eyes glanced towards Diane as she ran with her gun in her hand through the park and along the sidewalk. She didn’t know where she was going and was starting to believe that she had gone crazy. Everything seemed normal, making the situation she just escaped from seem so inept. There was not a single disturbance in the regularity of everything around her. Yet still she ran, and at the end of her breath, she dropped to her knees, not far from the doors of a hospital.

 

These doors that often represented life and rejuvenation opened up and a sixty or so year old doctor walked out. He had a white lab coat on, but no stethoscope around his neck.

“What a disappointment,” thought Diane, “he could have looked like one of those doctors on TV.” She found this funny and cunning. Laughing to herself, she tried to not dwell on the thought of how she seemed to be solidifying her theory of a psychotic breakdown. While she busied herself laughing inside her head (from stress she argued with herself) the doctor walked up to her, concern in his pallid eyes.

In typical propensity the doctor asked if Diane was okay. His words seemed distant and psychedelic to Diane. She looked up just to make sure he was actually there.

 

“I… need rest…” Diane tumbled over, falling onto her side. She dropped her gun on the pavement. The doctor looked down at the firearm and then back at Diane’s heavy eyes. The image of him running away was distorted and the sounds of his fading footsteps were moving from ear to ear with a dizzying effect. The steam left the small shell all alone in an apartment complex with two bloody men.

 

A white ceiling smiled down at Diane, welcoming her back to consciousness. She propped herself up on her elbows, digging into the uncomfortable hospital bed mattress she lay on, her hair matted over her face in sweat. Dressed in a light blue hospital gown, Diane brushed her hair out of her face while her eyes reconfigured themselves to their new surroundings. The small room she was in was empty and quiet. The door leading out to the main corridor of the hospital was closed and she figured it must’ve been made to block foreign sounds from penetrating the patient’s room, but still found it odd that there was no sound at all.

 

Diane sat up and swung her legs off the bed, her bare feet dangling above the floor. She pushed herself down, the skin of her feet pressed tightly against the cold floor and refused to let go when she tried to walk. She grabbed her clothes from the table next to her and put them on. Tying the laces on her shoes, she looked up at the door again. It all seemed so odd. Diane walked over to the door, grasping the metal handle, and slowly pulled it down. She opened the door and stared into the bloody corridor.

 

A semi-circular counter sat in front of her, covered in bloody paper. The corpse of a heavy-set woman lay collapsed on the counter, her arms outstretched in agony. Doctors, nurses, and patients littered the floor, their faces screwed up in twisted expressions of pain. Even a little boy, around the age of eight, sat in a corner; his head slumped down on his chest, blood dripping from the front of his neck, wetting the collar of his shirt.

 

The doctor who Diane had seen before she fell unconscious was sprawled along the ground in a bloody mess, his corpse emanating the fetid stench of slaughter. It looked as if an incompetent mortician had been asked to perform an autopsy on him. Diane bent over, grasped her knees, and emptied her last meal onto the already soiled floor.

 

Diane cursed her endowment of acute imagination as she tried to push the thought of how the doctor had ended up like he did from her mind. Slowly she stood back up, recovering from the horrors in front of her. As she walked across the corridor, towards the counter, her shoes stuck in the blood on the floor, pulling up small beads into the air as she pulled her shoes up. She rounded the counter and stopped in her tracks.

 

A man in a white lab coat doused in red lay at the feet of the woman who was spread across the top of the counter. His mouth was open, his teeth dotted with blood. His head had a large gash in it. The heel of the woman’s left foot lay just a few inches from the gash and was covered in sticky evidence. Diane shook her head and looked away, dry heaving a little, but with nothing to expel, she moved on.

 

Walking down the corridor, following the occasional EXIT sign suspended from the ceiling, Diane held her breath, afraid to breathe in anymore of the smell around her. She walked past a patient’s room to her left. The door was open and a sickening sound of something eating meat dribbled into the corridor. A silhouette behind the glass window of the room was hunched over, holding something up to its mouth, gnawing at it like a corn cob. In what must have been an action induced by shock, or maybe just sick curiosity, Diane peeked her head through the doorway of the room and looked in disgust at a girl in her early twenties eating the arm of a nurse. What made it worse was the proficiency that the girl did it with, cleaning every little bit of flesh from the bone.

 

The girl whipped her head around and her eyes met with Diane’s. They both looked at each other, Diane in horror, the girl in a sick kind of lust. Without any forewarning, the girl dropped the nurse’s arm and leapt at Diane. In a consummate reaction, Diane picked up a small wooden stool that stood next to her and lunged at the girl with it. The thin legs of the stool cracked as the girl crashed into them, her bloody hands ripping them apart, tearing at them, furious at their interference.

 

Diane pulled the stool back from the girl, her muscles building up tension as they held the stool back behind her. With a snap her muscles let go and Diane jabbed forward with the stool, the splintered prongs spurting from the base of the stool leading the attack. The girl’s body jolted as the broken legs of the stool pierced her neck and chest. Diane pulled the stool out a few inches, and then threw all of her weight into it, ramming the stool deeper into the girl.

 

The body of the girl dropped to the ground, eyes hollow, raw wounds spurting blood, layering the floor in a fresh sheet. Diane just turned around and walked away. The shell was completely cold now, devoid of any heat that had ever caressed it. It lay there on the ground, staring at its brother burrowed deep within its mother’s victim.

 

Diane stepped outside of the hospital. The smell of death wafted out from behind her, pilfering the air around her of any sweetness of life it once had. Diane’s eyes scanned the city. The street cradled corpses and cars, neighbored dead buildings and sat under fires.