The Children's Hospital

6

Jemma’s best friend Vivian joined the crew, dressed in goggles and surgical overalls insulated with pillow stuffing and led by Jordan Sasscock, the PICU senior, that tried to break through the glass doors of the lobby with a bench. It was the sort of bench, built from heavy wrought iron and laminated wood, that would have been more at home in a park than in a lobby, but it nicely approximated a battering ram just when they needed one. While a big crowd watched from the railings of the atrium balconies, they lifted it all together and ran at the doors that weren’t doors any longer, but had become, while they were all distracted by the sudden lurch toward death taken by every last patient in their care, one flat panel of glass, as dark as slate and yet if you stood close and stared long enough into it, you saw your own face deep within, not exactly reflected. When Vivian looked she thought of a girl swimming up from the depths of a cold mountain lake.

She didn’t know what she expected to see, on the other side of the shattered glass. Maybe the city on fire, or all the buildings fallen down. Or maybe just a group of soggy policemen. “We’ve been knocking for hours,” they would say. Something had happened — that much she certainly believed. You could not feel that violent disjointment which had unsettled her off her feet, and unsettled the kids out of their tenuous grasp on health, and think otherwise. But a new ocean, and them in the hospital the only survivors? They were more likely experiencing some cruel experiment — black out the windows and blow in some aerosolized LSD and get Phyllis Diller to hide somewhere with a microphone and claim to be a sweet, creepy angel — than the end of the world.

“I wouldn’t do that, if I were you,” said the voice, seeming to come from everywhere in the lobby, loud but not stern.

“Fuck you!” said Maggie Formosa, one of Vivian’s classmates, and easily the worst person she knew. Jordan counted to three and they ran. She was thinking of her family as she ran, imagining, stupidly she knew, that they were all waiting on the other side of the glass, lined up with hundreds of others behind a police barrier that separated this strangely behaving hospital from the usual city.

“You will live!” the voice shouted at them, and something about the tone of the voice betrayed it to Vivian as at once utterly compassionate and utterly deceitful, and in the scant moments before they collided with the glass it managed to convince her not that they were going to live but that the world had well and truly ended, and that they had been thrust beyond an ultimate pale into a strange and horrible new world.

She alone of the six was prepared for the hard shock that assaulted their shoulders when they ran the bench into the unbreakable glass, but she fell back with all of them, and just like Maggie she nearly missed having her foot crushed by one of the legs of the bench. But while Maggie stomped her feet and shouted at the highest window, the black glass cap of the atrium, Vivian sat on the ground and drew her face to her knees and wept, just like anyone who believes all of a sudden in the proximity of angels, and the death of her family, and the end of the world.

“I am the preserving angel,” said the voice. “Did you think I would let you hurt yourself?”