After a minute or so, the street dead-ended. “Dere is no highway up ahead, as you say.”
“Drive over that fence. It’s on the other side.”
He gave me an odd look.
“We’re not going to get a ticket, Aadesh. Just do it.”
He muttered something unintelligible. I’m not sure the issue was going over the berm. The problem was what was I getting him into next, and why wasn’t I telling him.
There were legitimate reasons why I chose the location I had. I suppose at least one of the reasons should be obvious, but not all of them were self-serving. The hospital was multi-storied. It was in close vicinity to the base. Hopefully, far enough away to be safe, but close enough to see what the hell was going on. I was pretty sure there was an observatory on top you could access, which seemed to me to be a very safe place to launch a drone. Not to mention, I had been to the hospital.
Aadesh, as you might expect, wasn’t happy with the choice. When he saw where I was taking him, he cursed loudly and told me I was an idiot, then stopped in the middle of a subdivision. I then went about explaining to him my reasoning. That helped a little, but he was still unconvinced. I even made sure to point out the observatory at the top of the building, as we could see it from the subdivision, but all that did was make things worse.
“I can fly de fucker from nearly any locadion. I do nod need such an accommodadion. You are wery much making up excuses do ged more drugs.”
Then I told him we about the electronic doors leading to the ER. We could barricade all the other doors besides those, and we would be safe. No one could easily get in if we didn’t want them to. Plus, the spiraled staircase that accessed all the floors would make a perfect funnel point and Killzone if it came to it, and it would probably come to it. **This needs to be changed slightly… they are on the ground floor in the third book. Maybe have Jack talk about the stairs as a fallback and killzone. There were ladders off the building from the top…
“It’s perfect, dude. Or as perfect as anything can get.”
“Whadever, Jack. I am being fine wid id.”
“Are you?”
“Does id madder?”
“Yeah. I mean, why wouldn’t it?”
“I know whad you are wanding. Dad is all.”
“Yeah, okay… What do you want me to fucking say? I’m a drug addict?”
“I am nod needing dad confirmation.”
I probably screamed. “I AM!”
Aadesh pounded the steering wheel. “Den do you believe dis is de besd of ideas, given your issue?”
My eyes were growing heavy. “It isn’t just about that,” I pleaded.
We sat there for a long time before Aadesh slammed the shifter roughly into drive. We sputtered our way through the subdivision, crossed a highway, and was in the parking lot at the hospital within just a few minutes. Without saying a word, and taking the time, even though gunshots rang out much closer now, to make sure it was safe, Aadesh grabbed his gear, including the shopping bags from Walmart, and waited for me to get out of the truck.
“Afder you,” he said, smugly.
I sighed, grabbed my things, and headed into the hospital.
In many ways, the hospital resembled Walmart. There were signs of things having gone very badly: trails of blood smeared the floors throughout the three levels, but again, no bodies. It was clear that the Sniffers had been at both places, and they had gone on a rampage. The good news, if you could even call it that, was, the Sniffers seemed to have been mostly concentrated at the military base. So, if the fort hung on, I hoped we would stay reasonably safe at the hospital. Damn, we were close, though.
Just like I had hoped, we were able to lock the entrances into the surgery ward. It took us a little time, but we found the switches that operated the electronic doors. As soon as that was squared away, Aadesh began working on the drone. During that time, I did my usual thing and passed the time mostly fucked up. We had enough food from our trip to Walmart that we didn’t have to go on any supply runs. All considering, aside from the constant reminder, the near-endless gunfire represented, that time at the hospital was not terrible.
One of the few conversations Aadesh and I had during that time dealt with the drone. He explained that he had to take the camera apart to place a filter inside. He also said that he had found some other useful stuff in the maintenance room, a few doors down from where we were staying, including a bank of IR LEDs, which I had no clue what was, and was in no state to ask too many questions, but he said it might increase the ability to see in the dark.
When he was finished, it looked like it had a tumor hanging from the bottom, the camera had several turns of what looked like electric tape holding it together. I doubted it would ever get off the ground. I was wrong. We had to wait a day or so for the wind to die down before taking it on its maiden journey, but the damn thing worked. And it worked better than I ever expected.
Aadesh and I took the drone to the roof. We wouldn’t have to be out there during the actual flight, which surprised me. In fact, Aadesh piloted the drone from the warm confines of the ER. He did, however, take the first flight with the drone he hadn’t done all the work on to make sure the electrical noise from the various pieces of equipment wouldn’t interfere with the controls. Once he deemed it safe for flight, he switched out drones.
It was quickly decided that the bank of extra IR LEDs wasn’t needed because of the amount of lighting around the base. That was good because running the LEDs, Aadesh estimated, would use several minutes of flight time. Without the modifications, the drone could stay in the air for roughly thirty minutes. The first time out, Aadesh plotted a preset course for the drone to fly, mainly because he was too nervous about flying it himself.
Aadesh pressed a button. I began to worry something was wrong, as there was no image coming through on the laptop. He flicked a switch on the controller, and a picture of the hospital and the surrounding area began to materialize into a bright green hue. Aadesh grunted something as he tabbed through the user interface on the laptop. He mumbled something about a Fstop. Within a couple seconds, the image began to darken slightly to the point where there was enough contrast in the feed that a discernable, albeit grainy, image of a large H for hospital appeared on the screen.
“I hope dis works,” Aadesh said, not taking his eyes off the laptop. With one push of a button, the drone began to move. After maybe a minute of flight time, it settled over a sizeable hanger-type building. The surrounding area slowly resolved, Aadesh, again, expertly changed the camera settings. He also increased the elevation of the drone so we could see more ground real estate beneath it. The runway, and the blinking lights associated with it, slowly came into view, along with several other buildings.
“Are you seeing whad I am seeing?”
Aadesh had warned me that I was to be sober during the first flight. I mostly accommodated his wishes. I was coherent. Still fucked up, but coherent. “Shit. How could I not see it?”
Hundreds if not thousands of bodies littered the two large runways. There were what appeared to be large craters pocking the ground. I assumed that the area had been shelled by mortar or by some other means. It was hard to put words to what I was seeing, but warzone seemed apt.
What looked like a roughly straight line of flashing Christmas lights facing the opposite side of the drone’s location and extended the entire length of the runways, ended up being gun emplacements. Looking closer, or as close as possible, given the altitude of the drone, there seemed to have been a fence erected around the perimeter of the base. Dotting that perimeter were the gun emplacements. They were hard to see, but I counted ten in all, that we could see, anyway.