“Sounds like you’ve been lucky so far.”
“So far, yeah,” Jen nodded.
As they neared their destination, Jen veered the helicopter away from the I-10 Highway and angled south, until they came up on a large group of buildings — a baseball field, a football stadium, and the roof of a large, domed structure. A dozen parking lots, with only sprinkles of cars, filled the rest of the open space. It looked as if they were flying over a college town.
On the other side of the sports facilities was Mercy Hospital, a ten-story brown and black building that looked as if it were molded from clay. Gaby wasn’t sure if the architect purposefully designed it to represent a cross when viewed from the air, but that was what Mercy Hospital looked like to her as they glided toward its rooftop. Four separate towers joined at the center, forming a squatting cross. It also looked a bit like a giant Tetris piece, waiting to be inserted into a larger puzzle.
“Welcome to Mercy Hospital,” Jen said. “People check in, but they don’t check out. Unless they have a helicopter. Which, happily, I do.”
Two figures appeared out of a building along one of the towers and jogged over to the center of the rooftop. Jen hovered above them for a moment before starting the helicopter’s descent.
“How many times have you landed on this roof?” Will asked.
“Too many times to count,” Jen said. “Easy as pie.”
“Are all rooftop landings easy as pie?”
“Just like driving a tank. You wanna learn? I bet a smart soldier like you could probably pick it up in no time.”
“Maybe on the next trip.”
There was a slight bump and rocking motion as the helicopter touched down.
Jen flicked at switches along the dashboard. “You’re welcome to keep your weapons. Just do us all a favor and try not to point them at anyone, okay?”
“As long as no one points their weapons at us first,” Will said.
“Fair enough. Oh, and one more thing.”
“What’s that?”
Jen looked back at Gaby. “There are a lot of guys down there. Teenagers, early twenties, mostly. Don’t be offended if they stare. They’re only human.”
“Thanks for the warning,” Gaby said.
“Don’t sweat it. Girl power, and all that.”
Gaby grinned back at her, then unbuckled her seatbelt and climbed out. She was wearing combat boots, and loose but hard gravel crunched under the soles. The helicopter was winding down behind her, its engine the only sound for miles.
Jen waved the two guys over. They were both young, and their eyes went from Will to Gaby, where they stayed for much longer than necessary. She guessed they were in their early twenties, though neither one had shaved in a while, so it was hard to know for sure. One had a shotgun, while the other was cradling an AR-15 that looked brand new.
Jen snapped her fingers in front of them to get their attention. “Hey, boys, stop staring at our guest and grab the boxes from the helicopter.” Jen motioned to Will and Gaby. “Come on, I’ll take you to see Mike.”
They followed Jen to the access building on the north tower rooftop. The steel door was fortified on the other side with a second sheet of repurposed metal, possibly a tabletop with its legs sawed off.
“How often do they attack the door?” Will asked.
“They used to do it more often in the beginning,” Jen said, “but not so much these days.”
“But they’re still around. They know you’re here.”
“Oh, they know,” Jen said, and something about the way she said it made Gaby slightly nervous.
They stepped into the stairwell, their path illuminated by a single LED portable lamp hanging from a makeshift hook. Gaby leaned over the railing to get a look at the nine floors below them, but only saw a big slab of concrete instead.
“There’s only one rooftop access on the north tower,” Jen said. “And that’s only accessible from the tenth floor. The nine floors below that share a common stairwell, but you need to use a separate door to get up to the rooftop.”
“So you didn’t have to barricade the entire stairwell in order to keep using the rooftop,” Will said.
“Uh huh.”
Jen pushed open a second door, this one with no extra fortification. Two people standing guard on the other side glanced over as they emerged out of the stairwell. There was another door directly to their right, reinforced with thick slabs of wood.
“Guys, this is Will and Gaby,” Jen said. She indicated the redhead. “That’s Claire—” and pointed at the man, who was staring at Gaby “—and this slack-jawed idiot is Miles.”
Miles looked offended, but Claire chuckled and said, “Welcome to Mercy Hospital.”
“Benny and Tom are bringing some heavy stuff down,” Jen said. “You might want to leave the door open for them. And Miles, make yourself useful and give them a hand when they get down here.”
Claire nodded, while Miles looked sheepishly away.
Jen continued on, leading them through the hospital’s tenth floor.
Gaby noticed the smell right away. She recognized it from all those days and months living inside other people’s basements before she joined Will’s group. It was the suffocating smell of forty people living, sleeping, and surviving on a single barricaded floor with very little (if any) ventilation. After three months on the island breathing in the fresh air, the sudden attack of enclosed space came as a major shock to her system.
The dirty floor under her squeaked, and portable LED lamps strategically placed along the ceilings lit their path. There was barely any natural light, with the windows along the hallways boarded up with doors and furniture, which explained why some of the empty rooms they walked past no longer had doors.
Jen seemed to know where she was going, though Gaby thought they were just walking from one hallway to another. There was a mazelike quality to all the turns, but maybe that was just her mind trying to orient itself to the layout after having the wide open spaces of the island as her backyard for so long.
Every now and then, people came out of their rooms to watch them. Most didn’t bother to wave or say hi. They all had long and pale faces, weary eyes, and gaunt cheeks. They didn’t look sickly or malnourished, but she imagined the lack of light and physical activity had something to do with their unhealthy appearances.
She glimpsed more doors plastered over windows inside the rooms, and stray spills of sunlight here and there. Some of the windows had what looked like steel rebars soldered over them, like some kind of prison.
Must have run out of doors…
“How many rooms?” Will was asking Jen.
“Over 200,” Jen said.
“That’s a lot of access points.”
“We removed every door from the rooms that weren’t being used so we could cover the windows, and we even raided a construction site next door for supplies.”
“The rebars.”
“Yeah.”
“That must have taken a while.”
“It took forever. Luckily, we have people who had done construction before. They taught the rest, and we got them up eventually.”
“So the floor is safe.”
“We haven’t had an incident in months.”
“Don’t jinx it,” a voice said behind them.
They stopped and looked back at an attractive Asian woman in her late twenties coming out of a room behind them. Like everyone they had met so far, she wore cargo pants and a sweat-stained T-shirt.
“Welcome back,” the woman said to Jen. “I thought you were gone for good this time.”
“You wish,” Jen said. “Will and Gaby, this is Amy Park, our resident doctor. Amy, this is Will. He used to be a corporal.”