Monday, 12 January 2009 - 5:48 pm

Signs of life

After that last post, I went scouting and found a lot of things I didn’t want to.  I also found a few things that might be of use.

There are a lot of bodies in the building.  Whatever happened here, a lot of their patients didn’t make it, and there was no-one to… dispose of them.  I hate that term – people should not be disposed of – but that seems to be what these bodies were waiting for.  Lined up, piled up in some cases, in others just left on their beds covered in soiled sheets. 

And now they’re decomposing, rotting away.  Some of them are not as big as they should be, I think: they look like they’ve been disturbed.  I didn’t want to look too closely and I really don’t want to know what’s been chewing on them. 

If they were outside, the rain would take them, but I wouldn’t wish that on the dead.  At least this way they leave a stain.

The hospital’s supply rooms have been ransacked, just like the houses and stores between here and the tunnel.  The cafeterias have been emptied, and the drug caches thoroughly pillaged.  I’m not surprised by either, though I had hoped that the latter wouldn’t be true.  I have to go back later and look through what’s left, see if there’s anything we might be able to use.

The more mundane supplies have been largely overlooked.  Like some of less pharmaceutical medical supplies around, too.  Bandages, dressings, that sort of thing.

Best of all, there’s a vending machine in a back stairwell that seems to have been overlooked.  We’re going to go back and see if we can crack it open, like a Kinder egg.

 

I think there are people here. I didn’t see them, but I heard them.  Shuffles in the distance, voices murmuring back and forth.  They’re on the top floor, towards the corner where the smoke was coming from; perhaps the fire was a sign of life rather than the opposite, for once.

I don’t dare hope.  I don’t want to hope.  But once we’ve had a chance to regroup, a few of us are going up to see who they are.  If they’ll help us.

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