Chapter Text
The window of the hospital room was a portal to hell. Flames roared from rooftop to rooftop, towering infernos fueled by the efervon-dried husks of techrot that Scaldra was supposed to be clearing. A controlled burn gone wrong.
It was almost June, he thought hysterically. Why did they try to do a burn in June?
Jana wailed, burrowing into Corin's arms as the wall of fire grew closer.
"It's ok," Corin said to himself. Jana couldn't hear him. But she could feel the vibrations in his chest and his hand on her back. "It's ok."
It's a blessing that she cannot hear the fire alarms going off. That her back is to the hallway, where he can see smoke pouring from the ceiling.
"It's gonna be over soon."
Scaldra planes screamed by, the windows of the lobby rattling. Not so distantly, something exploded.
Just a few months into the new year and the hospital was compromised. According to the last nurse who came through, the building was being evacuated. Priority, of course, going to the Scaldra occupied wings.
Nobody was coming to help them, she had said. And neither was she. The remaining members of the little community had packed what few belongings they still had, and whatever supplies they could carry, and prepared to leave.
Some were staying behind. They had no other choice, being bedbound. Most asked for a faster way out than waiting for the bombs or the monsters to take them.
He told Jana to wait in the hallway until he was done saying goodbye.
Corin forced himself forward, his abdomen screaming with every step. Almost to the doors. He paused, breathing unsteadily. In his periphery, he saw movement.
[Where we go?]
Jana was signing to him. Her scraggly hair was hidden under a parting gift: a sunflower-patterend handmade knit hat.
[2 blocks, Apartment, West,] He signed back. The floor rumbled.
Jana nodded. The young girl grabbed his hand, ignoring the blood freckling his skin, urging him to the door. He stumbled after her.
The rumbling was getting louder. It echoed through the building, seemingly from every direction. A jet screamed overhead, flying low.
Surely. Surely, they weren't already bombing the-?
His eardrums burst, and then-
Nobody had visited their part of the building in over a week.
All actual employees and some of the volunteers had been forced into the emergency ward by the Scaldra operators running the hospital. There had been some kind of... upset, with that strange group of resistance fighters, and there were so many injured that they needed all hands on deck.
Corin sat in one of the therapy chairs with the last remaining bottle of testosterone. Sabine was the one who would get them from the main pharmacy, which he could no longer walk to. She had disappeared that first night, brought kicking and struggling down to the main body of the hospital, and she hadn't come back.
Vitaly usually made sure they had hot food. But after he left to try and find someone who could do his dialysis, he also had not returned.
Carolyn sat in a nearby recliner with Jana. She was teaching the young girl how to finger knit with some yarn they had unraveled from an old lost and found sweater. They were both doing their best to act like they weren't watching him for signs of- well.
Corin hadn't eaten since that first night. His body was rejecting anything he forced down, and continuing to try felt wasteful. They were running low on preserved foods. Someone was going to have to try to brave the halls again.
He wasn't sure who would disappear next.
Besides him, but he wasn't really going anywhere, per se.
His hand twitched around the tiny bottle. He didn't have the strength to do his injection, and his muscles were so atrophied at this point that it wouldn't be safe to ask someone else to do it. But he wanted it to be nearby. He wanted it even if he couldn't take it anymore.
Jana noticed his movements and hopped out of Carolyn's lap She signed at him, [Water?]
He forced his neck to respond, shaking his head no. She frowned, eyes darting over his face, before she nervously moved forward to adjust his blankets. What a sweet kid.
The blankets didn't help much. His body had long lost the ability to thermoregulate, with almost no body fat and no energy to waste on something as stupid as staying warm. No, his body was eating itself, burning everything to stay alive, his extremities cold despite the layers. He floated in the haze of agony, his heartbeat loud in his ears.
He was so tired. He was so fucking tired...
His eyes closed once again, and he felt-
Jana's body fell. Her head was- it was gone, cleaved from her body from the force of the creature standing above her, smeared into nothing between the metal of its appendages and the floor. Its sinuous body writhed, blood vessels and wires pulsing, propelling its enormous forearms in wild arcs.
He kept firing. Two more bullets hit its chest. The abomination howled, smashing its fists into the wall like an ape, barely slowing down.
The next shot found a weak spot. A few more, the cracks impossibly loud in the tiny room, forced it to the ground.
Corin's ears were ringing. It was down.
it was down.
Jana was dead. That thing killed her.
There was techrot in the hospital.
Jana was dead.
The others - were they still screaming?- he can't fucking hear anything-
Jana was dead.
Her body was- the monster fell on-
Was anyone else-?
fuck, fuck,
He mouthed the barrel and-