Boiler Room
Saving everyone, I kept thinking to myself, sure would be a lot easier if Jerry, Rosa, and the god-dog were actually here to help and not just voices in my head.
Where were they, anyway?
I kept digging at my unconscious mind, kept trying to bring another memory into focus, to find another clue, but the well had gone dry.
Focus! Brain is melting, hospital is hotter than a pizza oven, gotta keep moving, just keep swimming, just keep swimming. Damn, how much blood did I lose? Also, when was the last time I took my medicine?
The grim reality was becoming clear. If I’d been here for three days without my meds, that would land me right inside the golden-hour of withdrawal symptoms. And mine were the kind of prescriptions that don’t take too kindly to cold-turkey. There was an emergency supply in the van, but three days baking in the hot Arizona sun during a heat wave like this was probably enough to melt the seats. No telling what it could do to medicine.
One thing at a time.
The air was thick, almost suffocating, and I was forced to take the stairs. My room, it turned out, was located somewhere on the second floor. I just needed to go three flights down to reach the basement. Why the basement, you might ask, and not the ground floor? Simple: According to the fire escape plans posted at each landing, the boiler room was in the basement, and somebody needed to turn off the heat.
When I reached the final landing, I had to stop and catch my breath. Doing cardio in this kind of temperature was like climbing Mount Everest without an oxygen tank (or so I would assume). I was pushing the limits of my body while other factors pushed the limits of my mind. It was not a great place to be making life-or-death decisions, but there wasn’t anybody else here to make them for me. Not even Skeeter wanted to come along for the ride. I was completely and utterly alone.
The laughter bouncing off the metal walls started softly and intensified rapidly. Once again, I was wrong. I wasn’t completely and utterly alone. There was something else down here.
The door in front of me, the one labeled “Boiler Room,” was cracked open. I couldn’t remember if it was already open when I got here. It had to have been. Right? The laugh from the other side came as a distorted, high pitched, staccato… It sounded like Goofy after huffing a bunch of helium.
Fuuuck.
If Gaston were here, I could conjure up one of the friendlier deities inside his doggy-brain and have it watch my six. I wondered, not for the first time, what was going to happen to all those trapped entities when the day finally came… the day when our beloved pet crosses the great big rainbow-bridge in the sky…
No time to think. No time to second-guess. Just go. Time is running out.
I pushed through the door, hoping to see a giant metal machine with a clearly labeled on/off switch on a nearby pedestal. Instead, I found a labyrinth of dimly-lit hallways, dozens of pipes lining the walls this way and that, pressure gauges and spinning wheels all over the place. This is what I imagined the inside of a Soviet-era submarine to look like, down to the dripping ceiling and spontaneous HISS of steam that burst forth from random joints every few seconds like a built-in automatic jump-scare. If I thought the upstairs was hot, it was practically frigid compared to here.
I followed the pipes, trying to get a sense of the geography. It didn’t take long to discover that most of the walls were just cement pillars, support structures for the building above. The room wasn’t so much a maze as a grid of perpendicular rows. Easy enough to navigate. But plenty of places to hide. Somewhere down here was the boiler. And so, too, was the source of that inhuman laughter.
I found the metal heart of the machine affixed to a wall. It looked like a refrigerator, only twice as big and speckled with rust. A tiny glass pane near the bottom glowed blue, the flame inside whooshing loud like a waterfall, loud enough to feel the vibrations from the metal, through the air, against my body. The heat from this machine was different. It was pure. Undiluted. This was a heat so powerful it bypassed skin and went straight to bone. It seemed to be taunting me, as if it wanted to say, You really think you can hurt me, bitch? I am FIRE. I am ETERNAL. I will purge you, as I do to all life in the end.
I traced the veins of the machine until I found labels.
GAS INPUT. Okay, makes sense.
LINE OUT. Well, that could mean anything.
AUX IO. No clue.
EMERGENCY SHUTOFF. Hey, that’s probably it!
I turned the knob by that last label counter-clockwise as far as it could go, then waited for something to happen. In a matter of seconds, the blue flame began to sputter, the sound of combustion turned into a death rattle, and every single pressure gauge started to climb. Wait, that last one seems like a bad thing. I tried undoing what I’d done, turning the emergency shutoff valve in the opposite direction, but the flame didn’t turn back on. The needles kept tilting right, going into the red, then maxing out. Pipes started rattling. The occasional POP and HISS of steam became more frequent and more forceful.
Shit, shit, shit, I missed something!
I went back to the boiler, searched the tubes and pipes on the walls, then I saw the control panel. There had to be some kind of brain to it. Everything was controlled by computers these days. Was there time for me to figure out the operating system? Could I hack it on the fly?
No. I’m not that smart.
But I could definitely unplug it! Which is exactly what I did. I grabbed the cable leading to the power outlet and yanked it free.
I hadn’t even noticed the sound of the motor running until it finally stopped. With a dying squeal, it faded into nothing. I checked the valves, one after another, and breathed a sigh of relief. The pressure was back to the white zone, which I could only assume was a good thing.
That could have ended a lot worse. I might have accidentally blown up another building. Instead, I bought everyone inside a little bit more time…
Why do I feel like I’m forgetting something?
The laugh started again. In the newly silenced room, it came through much more menacing than before: a big, loud, shrill guffaw.
It was right behind me.
I turned to see the thing blocking the exit.
Skeeter was right. Sometimes, it’s really obvious that the thing you’re looking at is a demon.
“AhUck, AhUck, aHYUCK!” it laughed.
I’ve made the mistake of thinking that demons were “easy” problems. And it’s true, in our travels, we’ve encountered a few things that fell under the umbrella category of “demon.” Despite everything we’ve seen, I still can’t say for sure what demons are, or where they come from, or if there even is a hell to send them back to. But we discovered that most of these entities could be expelled pretty easily with the right incantation, ceremony, or blunt-force trauma. Even after taking a physical form, there’s usually some kind of easily-exploited weakness. Rosa’s ordained priestesshood from an accredited online institution gave her certain banishing powers that barely made sense to me. A smartphone app that played the top thirty exorcisms in Latin proved effective more than once. And when all else failed, Gaston’s void wasn’t all that picky about what supranatural beings it would swallow… But none of that was much help right now.
I could tell right away that this wasn’t like any monster or entity we’d ever faced before. The creature, demon, possessee, or whatever the frick it was, looked like a man, but his body was as distorted as his voice. He stood close to seven feet tall and had thin, gangly limbs–all but his right arm, which was swollen with enormous muscles and thick veins. Wild tufts of greasy black hair stuck out from the top of his head, narrowly missing the valves on the ceiling pipes, and fell this way and that across his round face. His eyes were bloodshot and bulging. His smile was wide and full of broken teeth. He wore brown trousers, black boots, and a tattered vest that showed off his sweaty torso and washboard abs. His skin had the texture of a cat-hoarder’s leather sofa–dirty and covered in a patchwork of burns and scars. In his hand (the one at the end of the Popeye arm), he held a metal tool that resembled a wrench, only it was half as long as I was tall and probably weighed thirty pounds.
As he stepped forward, his movements were eerily slow, as if he was stuck in a time vortex where things moved at three-quarters speed. But even at this rate, he would be across the room, within wrench-swinging range, in a matter of seconds.
Oh! Shit! Shit shit shit!
As he laughed at me, his head bobbed from side to side. “Ahyuck! Ahyuck!”
“Wait!” I said, trying to stay calm long enough to form a coherent plan. “Don’t come any closer. I don’t want to hurt you!”
To my surprise, he stopped walking. With his jacked arm, he pushed the wrench forward like a spear, pointing it at the boiler behind me. “YOOOUUU MAKE… FIRE STOP?”
At least, I think it was a question. His voice was hard to listen to. It was like a trumpet blasting off-key and directly into my ear.
I considered, for a brief second, lying to him. For some reason, that was my first instinct. But it’s not like that would do me any good. He could plainly see what I’d done. And I really didn’t want to make him angry, so I told the truth, “Yeah. I turned it off. It’s hot as balls upstairs.”
He still got angry.
The fact that he’d been moving and speaking in uncanny slow motion made what happened next all the more terrifying. In an instant, his smile blinked into a grimace. His eyes bulged even further. His muscle arm yanked the wrench backwards, and he began screaming like a banshee–a wild, high-pitched, inhuman wail. And then, he charged.
I ducked (or, more accurately, I fell out of the way of) his wrench as he swung it at my head. It CLANGed loudly against a row of pipes as I crab-crawled like I’d never crab-crawled before. And if you’ve ever wondered how hard it is to crab-crawl with a prosthetic limb, let me tell you from experience that it ain’t easy, but adrenaline and survival instinct are ingredients that can make you do the damned-near impossible. I crab-crawled for my life until I’d made it around the nearest column. That’s when I spotted the weapon hanging from the wall just a few paces away. I couldn’t believe it. The perfect weapon, right there for the taking.
It was a fire-extinguisher.
Another old, useless memory clicked into place. I’d once used a fire-extinguisher very similar to this one to bash in an old lady’s skull. That particular fight ended in what I would generously call a draw… Again, that’s a whole other story. Old memories kept flooding my mind, but for some reason I couldn’t put together the last seventy-two hours. GOD, IT’S TOO HOT TO THINK!
“WHAAA!” the thing screamed, spinning around the corner. I jumped for the fire extinguisher, ripped the pin, and aimed it at the creature just as it began another charge.
A blast of foam ejected from the cone-shaped nozzle, the bulk of it slamming directly into the wrench-wielding monster’s bare chest. Its cries turned deeper and (somehow) louder as it spun around and reversed course. The weapon clanged onto the floor as the demon fell onto all fours and galloped out of sight like a gazelle fleeing a predator. The scream bounced around the room, devolving into a desperate whimper before finally ending in silence. There was no way to know where he was hiding. He could be anywhere, perched and waiting to counterattack, but I couldn’t stay still.
I went back to the control panel. Whatever force had started this was smart enough to turn off the air and turn on the heat. They’d probably just keep sending minions down here until one of them got lucky enough to kill me, and then they’d start the whole process over again. I had to make sure that didn’t happen. I lifted the fire extinguisher. Still plenty of juice left in the tank. Still heavy enough to get the job done.
Smash. Smash. Smash.
That ought to do it, I hoped. Even if they plugged it back in, the control panel was shattered into pieces. The brain of the machine was dead.
Everything outside is dead, too.
Another fragmented memory.
We were stuck in the van. The sun was rising. Jerry broke the news that our engine was dead. Rosa looked outside, at the wasteland. I don’t think she meant to say it out loud, but she let it slip anyway. “Everything outside is dead, too.”
Then, we were in the back of the ice cream truck. She was talking to the two women about it. All the dead animals trapped out there. Our world had never seen a heat wave like this before. Nature had but one answer to it.
Extinction.
“Not everything is meant to survive,” the older woman said with a subtle grin. “Shelters will take in strays. Plants will grow back. The smarter animals burrow underground. But you shouldn’t worry so much about their safety.”
I felt the shift in the air before Rosa even asked, “Why not?”
“Because…” I spotted the needle in the younger woman’s hand right before the older one grabbed hold of me and said, “you should be a lot more worried about yourselves.”
I didn’t go looking for Big-Arm (which, I decided, was going to be his name from now on). If he wanted to hide somewhere and lick his wounds, that was fine by me. I still needed to get to a phone and find my friends. That memory didn’t make much sense, but it told me enough. It told me that Rosa was probably in just as much trouble as I was.
I managed to race from the stairwell to an empty patient’s room without being noticed, which was nothing short of a miracle considering how many people were on the ground floor. Everybody seemed to be in a hurry. A lot of people were shouting. I noticed several men running a notch above a jogger’s pace toward the stairs while I slipped inside the first room with an open door. I closed it behind me and turned the lock just as the sound of footsteps came to a stop right outside. I held my breath and listened.
Someone was there, breathing loudly. I almost jumped when the radio on their belt crackled to life. Amazingly, it was Skeeter’s voice that came through.
“Jack!” it said. “I stole a walkie-talkie just like you! I don’t know if you can hear me, but something crazy’s going on. It just hit 120 degrees outside! Did you know, that’s the highest setting on a hot water heater? Anything over 120 is considered scalding, and that’s the temperature of the air outside right now!”
The doorknob rattled. The person on the other side knocked loudly, then muttered something about getting keys. I listened as the footsteps resumed, moving down the hall and away from this room. Then, I let myself breath again and ran for the window.
Outside, everything was dead. The light from the sun was blinding. I could already feel the solar radiation against my skin, like God was a sadistic kid sitting somewhere up in outer space with a magnifying glass and I was an unlucky ant beneath the focused ray… Wait, that simile doesn’t actually work, does it? Because this heat actually IS the sun… And when you think about it, God really IS focusing it on me from outer space… Shit, how long has it been since I drank anything? It’s so damned hot! I knew I was running out of time. There wasn’t any opportunity to second-guess my plan. I raised the fire extinguisher and smashed out the window.
The alarm siren blared.
OH SHIT! They have an emergency alarm hooked up to the windows?! What kind of hospital is this, anyway?
It was an industrial, unnatural sound, loud enough to fill the sky. It reminded me of the man in the boiler room’s laughter, only more mechanical, and much, much, louder. The noise stopped and repeated a few times in a pattern–a pattern that I recognized. Then, a robotic voice took its place, his proclamation loud enough to stretch for miles across all of Broken Toe.
“ATTENTION. THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE HAS ISSUED A SEVERE WEATHER ALERT. TAKE SHELTER IMMEDIATELY. ATTENTION. THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE HAS ISSUED A SEVERE WEATHER ALERT. TAKE SHELTER IMMEDIATELY.”
Oh. Not an alarm. Or, at least, not that kind of alarm.
From the sound of it, the speakers had to be somewhere on top of the hospital. It made sense. This was probably a centrally-located spot with reliable power and backup generators to keep any broadcasts running, no matter how bad things got. It was curious that the demons would let the warning sirens continue if their main goal was getting rid of all the humans. Unless they wanted us inside for some reason. No, I’m definitely overthinking it.
As the voice commanded for the third time that I ‘seek shelter immediately,’ I crawled through the window and into the hellish nightmarescape that was the outside.
If I thought the boiler room was uncomfortable, it was practically cozy compared to this. Skeeter said 120, but numbers don’t do reality justice. With every breath, I pulled in more heat, but I kept moving. I knew if I didn’t find shade or shelter soon, I was screwed, but an even bigger motivator to keep going was the very real concern that if I didn’t, the bottoms of my shoes would likely melt against the pavement.
The brim of my hat shielded my eyes from above, but the sunlight was everywhere, reflecting off the asphalt like a giant tanning mirror. I had to squint hard just to see where I was, although that didn’t actually tell me very much. I saw an empty road. I saw buildings on the other side. I saw a walking path leading to an abandoned park. I saw a shadow.
I ran for the shadow… Or, tried to run. My body was not cooperating. The air burned my skin raw, and I sensed the uncomfortably familiar feeling of life draining away. My vision became a narrowing tunnel. I was going to pass out soon. And if I did that out here, I was as good as dead.
The sound of my steps turned into crunches against dead grass as I left the asphalt and found the shadow–a long, rectangular shape about as wide as a school bus and longer than I could see. What’s even casting this thing? I looked up and saw a structure hovering in the air, way higher than I could reach. I blinked, and nearly lost my balance, but I managed to stay upright. Spaceship, I decided. It’s a small, really low to the ground, rectangular spaceship.
No, that didn’t make any sense. Of course, none of this made any sense. No part of my life made sense. Demons in the hospital especially didn’t make sense. I was missing something. Something painfully obvious. And I was running out of time. I could barely stand the heat, barely move my neck, barely follow the shadow to where it intersected another building…
Parking garage!
Aha! I was standing in the shadow of the pedestrian skybridge connecting the second story of the hospital to the parking garage, which meant I probably didn’t even need to leave the building at all. Oh well. What’s done is done. Now, time to run.
The surprise pain that struck me once I touched the sunbaked metal door lever felt like I’d grabbed hold of a hornet’s nest. I jerked my hand back, but the pain persisted. I quickly double-wrapped my wound in the belly slack of my shirt and tried again, opening the door and rushing inside before I did any more damage. The relief of falling into the shady, covered building was short-lived, though. On my knees, I looked at the dark red blisters on my palm and-
BLAAAURGH!
-immediately threw up.
As I spat the lingering taste of stomach acid onto the floor, I couldn’t help but notice how strange it was that there was even that much stuff inside of me to throw up. Skeeter had told me that this was the first day I was lucid. Did that mean I was awake this whole time? Eating, sleeping, moving freely about in a room with another patient? Something just… didn’t add up.
Maybe, another voice needled, coming from somewhere deep inside and adding more chaos to the noise, none of this is real. Maybe everything you think you know is all simply happening inside your head.
I shook the voice away, but just like the burn on my hand, it lingered.
Cars. Go. Find phone. Steal car, maybe?
The parking garage was about halfway full, give or take. I didn’t see any cameras, but that didn’t mean much. I was about to commit some breaking and entering whether anyone was watching or not. The first few doors I checked were locked. I lost track of how many. I couldn’t keep it together well enough to see how far I’d gone. My brain was cooking, and not in the good way. I was about to resort to smashing windows with the fire extinguisher when the door of a pickup truck popped open as soon as I pulled the handle.
I crawled across the driver seat and dug around inside the cupholder and center console, looking for keys or maybe a cell phone, but there was nothing there. I went for the glovebox next, but all I found was a stupid pistol. I took it and stuffed it inside my waistband, knowing very well that it would almost certainly end up causing more problems than it fixed. I pulled down the visors next, hope quickly disappearing as I ran out of places to search. I’d seen Jerry hotwire cars on how many occasions? And yet I never thought to pay enough attention or learn how to do it myself. God, I’m stupid.
I rolled out of the truck, slammed the door shut, and took off across the lane towards the next car… but I didn’t make it. The ground came up and smacked me in the chest and face. My body was revolting against my mind’s commands. It was too hot, I was dehydrated and sick, and I’d been pushing way too hard for way too long. All I wanted to do was close my eyes and stop. And rest, maybe. Just for a little while. A little rest to regain some strength. Then, maybe, I could get back up and keep going…
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