Silent Hill fic: Outbreak - Chapter 6: Cassandra

[mistressofmuses]

In chapter 6: Cassandra brings her daughter, Emily, to the hospital, with a suspected case of chickenpox.

Saturday, September 10, 2016

Emily did not feel well.

That was why her mother, Cassandra, was sitting in the Alchemilla Hospital ER. She knew it was chickenpox. Everyone knew it was just chickenpox. Complications were rare, and they were usually caused by secondary infection; Cassandra knew that. She’d called the doctor when the first spots started to show up, and that’s what they’d told her.

“Just keep her home. Use topical anti-itch creams, and over-the-counter pain relievers other than aspirin. Keep her from scratching the blisters. Seek treatment if there are any complications, though it’s unlikely.”

Well, a 103-degree fever that wouldn’t go down seemed like a pretty serious fucking complication. And the blisters, too… they’d started as little red spots, sure. But they’d deepened in color, first purple in the center, and now to that deep, black bruise color of a blood blister.

Cassandra had suffered through the chickenpox when she was a kid. It had been a long time ago, but not so long that she was left with no memory of it. She remembered the miserable itching that her mom had given her oatmeal baths for, and she still had a few scars to attest to the spots where she’d scratched too hard. They had hurt, yes, but not the way Emily’s hurt. Her little girl had screamed when Cassandra so much as so much as touched the spots. Getting her dressed had felt like she was torturing the poor girl, and Emily wasn’t normally so oversensitive.

They’d been rushed into the ER waiting room, and had even been given an ice pack for Emily to hold to her neck to cool her down, along with some ibuprofen, hoping to bring down that fever. But there had to be twenty or thirty other people in the waiting room, most of them with the same complaints. Kids with blisters that looked like below-the-skin wounds, and fevers that wouldn’t go down, some beginning to cough or bleed from their noses. Some adults with the same symptoms.

Cassandra sniffled. She was starting to feel like she was coming down with something. At least it couldn’t be the chickenpox, since she’d already had them. It was probably just a cold or something else going around.

Cassandra bit her lip and checked on Emily for the hundredth time. Her daughter was listless, obviously miserable and hurting. Cassandra took a deep breath and told herself, also for the hundredth time, that it was just chickenpox. A strain with more complications than most, maybe, but it was a normal disease. They could treat it.

The nurse from the check-in counter brought another pair of parents and a child into the crammed waiting room. Cassandra recognized the little girl, one of Emily’s classmates. Maddison, she thought her name was? She had the same dark blisters, and even from across the loud room, Cassandra could hear it when she coughed; the kind of deep, rattling cough that made her think of pneumonia.

The nurse escort ushered the family to a cluster of seats near Cassandra, the person on the other side moving over to give them space together. Cassandra flashed a quick, tight smile their way. This was the last place any parent wanted to be.

The father turned away with a deep, bone-rattling cough of his own, before turning back and answering her smile with something more like a grimace. “Your kid has it too? They have class together, don’t they?”

“I think so,” Cassandra answered. “This is Emily. I’m Cassandra Carter. I’d shake your hand, but…”

He nodded, before another cough forced him to turn away, almost doubling over in his seat.

The woman on the other side of the child introduced herself. “Melissa. And this is my husband, Paul. Our little girl here is Maddison.”

“I’m sorry to be introduced here,” Cassandra said, with another tired smile.

“Us too,” Melissa sighed.

They lapsed into silence for a few moments, and a nurse came over to ask questions of Melissa and Paul. That seemed to be the way they had to do it; just get everyone checked in, then come around in the waiting room to get further information. There were just too many people to bring them through triage as normal.

The story Paul told the nurse was remarkably similar to Cassandra’s. The spots had come on a couple days before for Maddison, and she’d had the sniffles before that. The breathing problems had just started that day. For Paul, he’d thought he had an extremely nasty cold, along with the cough, and had been having nosebleeds. For him the spots were new, but spreading rapidly.

The nurse said something about “a bad strain of chickenpox going around.”

What Paul said next caught Cassandra’s attention.

“I don’t think it’s chickenpox. Maddison got the shot just a year or so ago.”

The nurse offered a slight, professional smile. “The vaccine is very good, but sometimes the immunity isn’t 100%. Usually it keeps any cases from being too severe, but unfortunately there’s always still a small risk.”

He shook his head. “And I had the chickenpox as a kid.

The nurse’s smile grew tighter, more forced. She swallowed visibly. “I’ve… I’ve heard that a few times tonight,” she murmured quietly. Then a bit louder: “Chickenpox is still the most likely diagnosis. Sometimes immunity just isn’t complete, even after having once before, though it is unusual to have another symptomatic infection. We may just be dealing with a particularly nasty strain. We’ll get you in to see a doctor as soon as we can, and we’ll run some tests to confirm. I’m sorry for the wait, but we thank you for your patience.” She hurried off with her clipboard.

Cassandra felt a chill down her back. It’s just chickenpox, she reminded herself, but the thought didn’t provide any comfort this time.

Sunday, September 11, 2016

It was almost four hours later, nearly 2:00 in the morning, when they were finally called back into one of the ER rooms behind the wide double doors. Emily’s fever had gone down, but only to 102.

Despite the constant anxiety and worry—or maybe partially because of it—Cassandra was barely awake. Emily was still lethargic and barely responsive, but she hadn’t slept any. Cassandra had tried to get her to sleep a little in the waiting room, but she just sat there, barely a step above catatonic.

A nurse came in and spoke to them briefly, confirming the information in the chart and getting Emily’s vitals. She gave Emily an IV, explaining to Cassandra that dehydration was one of the common complications from a prolonged high fever. She gave her more fever reducers, and replaced the ice pack. Cassandra watched as she drew blood, and took both a cheek swab and a nasal swab.

Cassandra was surprised when the nurse asked Cassandra to provide the same. “We want to explore any exposure risks,” the nurse explained. Cassandra consented, still barely feeling conscious enough to properly respond. When the nurse left, she switched off both of the lights in their room, which at least helped kick some of the headache building along the inside of Cassandra’s skull.

After that, they were left alone to wait. People rushed by in the hallways, mostly nurses in their blue scrubs. Cassandra watched, trying not to resent whomever they were rushing to see. She knew it probably meant they were in worse shape than Emily was.

Somehow nurses wearing scrubs always looked strange to her. For some reason she still always pictured nurses wearing white dresses with red crosses on matching little hats. The kind of attire that seemed to no longer exist outside of naughty nurse fantasies. Scrubs just weren’t nearly as sexy. She almost laughed, recognizing the random thoughts her brain was spitting out as a symptom of her exhaustion.

The thin hysteria faded, leaving her in a complete stupor. She couldn’t even make herself fall asleep, though she tried. She held Emily’s hand in one of hers, and pillowed her head on her other arm, hoping to get some rest, but with no luck. The minutes blended together and everything grew somewhat hazy. The impersonal fluorescent lights in the hallway outside even seemed to dim, and the voices faded into a soft and indistinct background hum, before fading out entirely.

Cassandra was suddenly struck with the very odd certainty that if she had the energy to get up and leave the room, she’d find the whole hospital deserted, like the nurses and doctors had all gone home, and forgotten about them waiting in their dimly lit room.

It was ridiculous to even consider; with the number of nurses she’d seen rushing back and forth, and the number of patients back here and still out in the waiting room. Despite her lethargy, she was seized with a sudden, fierce need to prove that it had happened; that she and Emily were the only ones left in the entirety of Alchemilla.

She pictured herself getting up out of the hard plastic easy-clean chair and crossing through the curtains to the doorway and looking out. Cassandra had experienced lucid dreams before, and she vaguely wondered if that’s what this was becoming, as she felt herself walking into the hallway, despite not feeling entirely in control of the motion.

The few open ER rooms facing inward toward the center were all empty. The nurses’ center in the middle was deserted too, the computers all shut down. Power failure? she wondered, though it seemed unlikely. Even in her pseudo-dream she knew that any hospital would be equipped with backup power sources. And the overhead lights were still on, if strangely dim. There was no motion anywhere.

Cassandra glanced behind her, and saw Emily was still in her little hospital bed, maybe sleeping. Hesitating only a moment, Cassandra stepped forward, knowing she had to find out what was happening. If the power was out, Emily would be in danger, and if they had somehow simply been forgotten, Cassandra needed to find someone she could chew out for it. It was certainly beyond unacceptable to forget a patient! To leave them there, when one was a sick child!

The double door off the emergency room and back into the waiting room was firmly shut. Maybe it required a buzz through or something, to keep anyone from just barging in. A hallway ran to the right of those doors, leading farther into the hospital. She assumed that was intended for patients and staff, moving in and out of the department where no one in the waiting area would see them. She took a few steps in that direction, casting one more look toward her daughter’s room. Emily hadn’t stirred.

A few more steps into the hallway, and the light was even dimmer. It had an odd quality to it, too. It reminded her of the sort of light that came in the window during the winter at night; diffuse, reflected light, rather than anything direct.

Her steps were cautious as she walked on. She wasn’t sure why she felt so hesitant; she’d prefer that she felt authoritative in some way, if she was going to have to confront someone. Her hip banged into a gurney that had been left against the wall.

“Ow!” It was more of a reflex to have said it; it hadn’t actually hurt all that badly. She rubbed at her hip, and then frowned at the gurney.

It looked very unlike the other ones she’d seen in the hospital, like the one Emily was on. Those had all appeared to be relatively high-tech things, adjustable in about twenty different ways. This looked practically antique by comparison, flat and barely padded, covered with stained, torn vinyl. Placing a hand on it as she stepped around it, her frown deepened. Her hand came away grey. The whole gurney was covered in a layer of dust.

Cassandra wiped her hand on the leg of her jeans, staring at it in confusion. That wasn’t right at all. There shouldn’t have been anything here covered in dust. It was a hospital, for goodness’ sake! Even if you ignored the fact that there was no way this hallway was so disused, it wasn’t clean.

The more she thought about it, the worse it seemed. She hadn’t been paying much attention when they came into the ER from the waiting room, but everything she could see had been crowded with people. She was fairly sure there had been people in this hallway, what she could see of it as they were brought past. Like they’d set up extra beds here. So how could it be deserted like this?

Thoughts of old Twilight Zone episodes flickered through her mind, of people crossing into different dimensions or traveling back in time. Ridiculous to even think of something like that.

She thought she heard something up ahead, maybe the rustle of clothing, like someone was standing around the corner.

“Hello?” she called. “Excuse me!”

Her voice bounced back at her from the stillness, making her feel somehow even more alone. There was no other answer to her call. She let out an irritated huff of breath and started forward again.

Reaching the corner of the hallway, there was a small window to the outside of the hospital. More of that thin, hazy light was filtering through, and Cassandra paused again. There shouldn’t be any light, except maybe the yellow of the streetlights outside the windows; they’d just been brought back into the ER around 2 am. She was willing to believe she’d dozed for an hour or so, but not enough for the sun to have come up. Though a trace of doubt crept in; had she somehow slept so long that they would have been left there when the nurses and doctors went home? Just as quickly she dismissed that. If anything, there should be more people around during the day.

Squinting through the window didn’t help solve the mystery. All she could see was a grey fog outside. Fogs rolled off the lake often enough, though it seemed odd for it to be this thick here, and it still did nothing to explain the light.

Then to her left down the hall, she heard the rustling noise again. Turning, she thought she saw something down against the wall. Something maybe a little lumpy, and an odd off-white and brown color. It looked like a pile of dirty rags, until it moved.

Cassandra jumped, giving a startled little yelp. “Hello?” she asked again.

The rags pulled upright, revealing that it was actually a person.

“Excuse me, are you another patient?” Cassandra asked, taking one more slow step closer, before stopping. There was something repulsive about the figure, which looked dirty and sick.

This is a hospital, she reminded herself. Of course someone here is sick. You shouldn’t judge.

The figure gave a lurch away from her into deeper shadow, before turning around and stumbling a few feet closer into the weak light from the window.

Cassandra screamed. Her first thought was that it was a nurse—the figure was wearing the kind of old-style nurse uniform that she’d been thinking about earlier—but it was certainly not the kind of nurse that should be in the hospital. Best-case scenario, this was someone extremely ill; they looked like they were wearing a surgical mask caked with blood. Worst-case scenario… they barely seemed human. The proportions and movement were just wrong.

Cassandra took an involuntary step backward, and the figure stumbled ahead a few more paces, lurching into a half-shamble half-run.

Cassandra turned and fled, any lingering thoughts about how she shouldn’t be judging this person and should instead see if they needed help completely gone. Her only thought was for escaping that thing and getting back to her daughter. She heard the footsteps behind her, though she was faster, and she broke from the hallway back to the nurse’s station and individual ER rooms. A few paces in, she heard a clatter, like the creature had run into the same gurney Cassandra had hipchecked herself on.

It’s a dream, it’s a dream… she thought to herself, just now remembering how she’d thought this was some kind of lucid dream.

As she reached the central nurses’ center, her feet came down with a heavy splash, which was almost unexpected enough to trip her up, except that her panic propelled her on with barely a stumble. Water? The entire center seemed to be flooded with a few inches of icy water.

Not something she could worry about. She splashed her way back into the room where Emily was still lying in her hospital bed…

Cassandra didn’t think that she’d slept, but the next thing she was fully aware of was a woman shaking her by the shoulder, and a flurry of motion elsewhere in the room.

Cassandra sat up from where she’d been leaning forward on Emily’s hospital bed, and saw with alarm a bloodstain spread over part of the sheets. She couldn’t separate this from the dream at first. The panic registered before the words of the nurse who was now holding a wad of paper towels in one gloved hand toward Cassandra’s face.

Only when she felt a fresh rush of warm blood on her upper lip, and the rough towels touching her face, did it register that the blood was hers, that she was having a nosebleed.

Seconds later, she noticed the two additional nurses now crowded into the room; one copying down information from the machines reading Emily’s pulse rate and other vitals, and the other—with a cheerful pattern of kittens playing with balls of yarn on her scrubs, marking her as a pediatric nurse—nudging Emily.

The nurse who’d given her the paper towels, the same one who’d come in for the swabs and blood samples earlier, was still speaking. When Cassandra looked at her blankly, she sighed and started over. “We’re recommending intake for all symptomatic adults and children, even if they have only come in accompanying another patient.”

“Symptomatic?” Cassandra slurred around the wad of paper clutched to her face.

The nurse looked pointedly at her arm, and Cassandra glanced down. Spots of what she’d dismissed as flecks of blood from her nosebleed stood out against her pale skin, too large and regularly round to be blood spatter.

“Additionally, we are recommending preemptive ICU care for all pediatric patients.”

That penetrated her mental fog far more than anything else had. “What?” she barely avoided shouting. “For chickenpox?”

The nurse smiled, though it seemed more placating than genuine. “As a precaution only. A few children with similar symptoms have rapidly declined, and we feel it is in Emily’s best interests to try and prevent any further complications.”

Cassandra looked toward Emily’s bed, where the nurse in the incongruously cheery scrubs had succeeded in rousing Emily into half-consciousness. She and the other nurse were explaining in calm tones that they were going to move her to a different room to help her feel better. Emily barely moved her head in agreement, still barely reacting to anything around her.

The nurse in front of Cassandra moved in front of her to block her view and said, “Once we’ve completed your intake, we will certainly discuss Emily and our treatment proposals, all right? Please let us move her now.”

Cassandra nodded numbly as the nurses wheeled her daughter out of the room.

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