Death's Awakening

Chapter Fifteen: Crash

Crash had been staring at his computer screens for hours. Days. He'd only taken short breaks since this whole thing began and his insomnia was in full force. He wasn't even sure how long it had been since he last slept.

He pushed off with his feet and his computer chair soared across the cement floor toward the mini-fridge. He grabbed a giant-sized energy drink from inside, then pushed back toward his desk.

Information was pouring in now, by the minute.

Facebook. Twitter. Forums. Every single social media site out there was being flooded with stories of the strange illness.

Most of it was the same—people posting that someone they loved was sick or had been taken to the hospital. Or worse. But Crash was looking for something more. He wanted answers. Where had this virus come from? How many were infected?

So far, social media wasn't giving him any concrete answers.

His friend Atomic had finally responded to him, but he didn't have much either. He said he'd been trying to hack into the CDC mainframe for days with no luck.

What they needed was more data. Crash wasn't even sure how he knew what to do, but the idea for a new program popped into his head. His fingers flew over the keyboard as he typed in code he didn't even know how to read two days ago. Suddenly, though, it all made sense to him. Like a new language. Maybe he'd picked up more information from his hacker friends than he'd realized.

He told the program to start pulling data from several online sources, collecting numbers of sick and hospitalized. Death tolls. He brought up a specialized map and started feeding the data into it, creating a program that would not only bring up the current status of the virus across the country, but would also predict how many would be infected in the next few days.

When he was finished, he took in a deep breath and pushed back. Holy cannoli. How had he even done that? The feel of it was exhilarating, like flying.

He shook his head and took another long drink. Now, he just had to kill some time while the program did its thing.

Crash opened a browser on his fifth monitor and brought up YouTube. If people were posting status updates and pictures all over the web, they were probably posting videos too.

His fingers hovered over the keyboard. What should he search for?

He thought for a second, then typed in "virus hospital videos".

Several videos appeared, and he clicked on the first one, titled "Inside the Quarantine, San Francisco, California".

A hospital corridor appeared and Crash leaned forward, clicking to make the video full-screen. The video was dark at first, but as soon as the person carrying the camera turned a corner, he gasped. The sheer number of sick people stuffed into the hallway was shocking. Some people were laid out on gurneys, while others were slumped over in chairs that lined the walls.

The screen bounced up and down with every step and the movement was choppy and too fast. If he had to guess, Crash thought it was probably taken with a cell phone. Whoever was running the camera began to narrate and he was surprised to hear a young woman's voice. She sounded terrified.

"This is Angela Burrow, I'm a volunteer here at San Francisco General Hospital." She quickly spun the camera around to her face. The image moved so fast, Crash's stomach lurched. When it settled on her face, though, he felt the breath knocked out of him. Angela looked to be about twenty years old. She must have been very pretty once, but now dark purple bruises appeared around her eyes and her lips were cracked and bleeding. Her skin was as white as a sheet.

"I showed up to volunteer three days ago, just before the hospital was placed under quarantine. No one has been allowed in or out in days and we're all going completely crazy in here," she said. She glanced from side-to-side, her face pressed close to the camera. "They took our cell phones after they initiated the quarantine, which we all thought was weird. Like they didn't want anyone outside to really know what was going on in here."

Her voice quivered and she cleared her throat.

"My supervisor passed away this morning," she said. A sob escaped from her, but she cleared her throat again and kept talking. "I stole his keys from his pocket and got my phone out of his office. There isn't much charge left, so I wanted to try to get this out before the phone dies."

The camera swung back around as the girl walked down the hall, turned another corner, then walked inside one of the patient rooms. Crash counted at least ten patients crammed into the small room. There were only two beds, and the rest of the patients were laid out on the floor with blankets and pillows.

Angela panned the camera around the room.

"This is the section of the hospital where the doctors have put all of the advanced stage patients, and as you can see, there aren't nearly enough beds for all of the sick. Every room in this section is packed to the limit, and we have started moving overflow into the hallways. There just isn't even floor space to lay everyone out. Some of these people don't even have the strength to stand on their own."

She moved back into the hallway, her camera passing rows of people sitting in chairs. Some were slumped over on each other, while others just leaned forward into their own hands or leaned up against the wall. Angela moved into a room at the end of the corridor and approached a patient lying in one of the room's two beds.

"When this virus first presents itself, it looks very much like the average flu. Cough. Fever. Aches and pains. Maybe some nausea. That's what they told us when they called us in to volunteer," she said. "They told us it was some kind of flu and that they needed all the help they could get. They told us since we'd been vaccinated against the flu, we'd probably be okay."

She sniffed and coughed. Crash winced when she turned the camera back to her own face. Blood trickled from the side of her mouth and from the tear duct in the corner of her left eye.

"As you can see, the vaccine didn't do shit to help me," she said, a crooked smile crossing her face. She coughed again and blood splattered across the screen. She tried to wipe it away, but it just smeared across the camera.

"This is what I wanted to show you," she said. "On day 1 of the quarantine, my supervisor, Bill Ross, was healthy and strong. He showed no sign of the virus. Day 2, he presented with a low-grade fever and a cough. This morning, Day 3, I came to wake him for his next shift and found this." She zoomed in on the face of the man on the bed and Crash's eyes grew wide.

The man's eyes were rimmed in black bruises streaked with blood. His cheeks looked hollow, as if he hadn't eaten in weeks. His hair had fallen out in chunks. Red sores dotted his face and neck, then continued down his arms. Many of the sores had broken and a yellowy pus ran out of them. Crash put his hand over his mouth and turned away.

"I have never seen a virus or any disease work this quickly," Angela Burrows said into the camera.

The woman began to cry.

"When they locked us in three days ago, we had just over sixteen hundred patients, nurses and doctors quarantined inside this hospital," she said. "Today, only six hundred of those are still alive. By the end of the week, almost all of us will be dead. Including me."

The screen went black and Crash sat in silence, trying to make sense of what he'd just seen.

What are you thinking of the story far? Who is your favorite character? Thanks so much for reading, and I'll post new chapters every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday!!