Chapter 17: Necropolis

Dr. Katherine Whitaker removed her blood-stained gloves with steady hands, peeling the latex from her skin and dropping them into the waste bin beside the operating table.

The mask followed, damp with her breath and streaked faintly at the edges where sweat had dried.

She scrubbed in at the sink without speaking. The soap dispenser wheezed weakly. Only a thin ribbon of diluted foam slid into her palm. No resupply had arrived in three days. And yet, she washed anyway.

Behind her, the body on the table lay still beneath a stiffening sheet.

The generator hummed overhead, unevenly. It had begun to fluctuate twenty minutes into the procedure. Just a slight flicker in the lights, enough to notice, but not enough to save him.

She shut the water off and dried her hands on a thinning stack of paper towels. Her reflection in the metal cabinet across from her looked older than thirty-three.

The shadows beneath her eyes were deep enough to suggest she hadn’t slept in a week. It had been thirty-six hours.

She exited the operating room into a corridor that smelled faintly of antiseptic and too many people confined in one place.

The snow beyond the windows pressed up against the lower panes now. It had been just over a week since the first flakes fell.

The hospital had been on backup power for four days, and by now she had stopped asking when the National Guard was coming.

If the ambulance bay was still buried in drifts and no plows had cut a path to the entrance, then the answer was obvious…

They weren’t.

A code alarm began beeping from a room down the hall. Nurses sprinted past her. A young resident glanced at her for instructions.

Katherine didn’t look.

“Handle it,” she said evenly, continuing toward the staff lounge.

She poured herself coffee from a machine that sputtered as if offended by the request. The liquid that filled her cup resembled dirty water more than anything brewed.

She drank it without flinching.

In the last week she had treated more hypothermia cases than she had in her entire career. Frostbitten fingers blackened beyond salvage. Elderly patients whose hearts simply slowed and stopped in unheated homes.

But hypothermia wasn’t the majority. The usual causes of death were ever present, but exaggerated by the storm’s effects on supply lines.

Diabetic children without insulin, dialysis patients turned septic, gunshot wounds… So many gunshot wounds.

The shouting started again near the nurses’ station.

“No! This is bullshit! My son is dead! You failed him! And now you’re telling me I can’t even leave because of snow? I want the administrator!”

Katherine didn’t turn toward the sound.

Her mother would have known exactly what to say in that moment. Something calm, structured, and contained. But this was not a containment problem; this was structural collapse.

Security was down to two officers, and half the nursing staff hadn’t reported in two days.

Families were sleeping in hallways because the roads were impassable. And as she sat there Katherine began to realize one thing… The hospital was no longer a hospital. It was a warehouse for the dying… A necropolis in the waiting.

She set the empty coffee cup down on the bench beside her and stood.

“This isn’t going to end well….” She muttered beneath her breath before walking back toward the supply wing.

She wasn’t in a hurry. She moved with deliberate calm, as if nothing around her had changed at all.

Inside the storage room, she paused, scanning shelves with clinical precision. She knew the burn rate; she had been keeping track since the first snow began to fall.

Antibiotics had less than forty-eight hours at the current usage. Morphine was critically low and already being rationed. Saline was practically gone, and blood bags had six remaining units, all O-negative.

But that wasn’t the worst of it; the generator fuel reserves were rumored to be under seventy-two hours. Even if the snow stopped now, help would not arrive in time.

She selected what mattered, not everything. Just what could change an outcome in the field: broad-spectrum antibiotics, sutures, saline, epinephrine, portable surgical instruments, a small quantity of morphine.

She grabbed just enough for mobility, and yet more than enough for purpose before packing them into a duffel with measured efficiency.

From her perspective, this was not theft; it was a reallocation. In less than two days these supplies would be wasted in hallway triage. And it was better that they be used where stabilization was still possible.

In that moment, a crash echoed down the corridor followed by a scream. She stepped to the doorway and saw security wrestling a man to the ground. A scalpel clattered across the tile. A nurse sobbed in shock.

The collapse had begun. No one noticed her move back inside the storage room; but this time her hands moved far more swiftly. She changed out of her three-day-old scrubs quickly. Replacing them thermal layers: wool socks, snow pants, a proper pair of boots, a parka with a fur-lined hood, gloves, and a scarf wrapped high across her face.

She removed her hospital badge and set it on the shelf beside the empty morphine tray. That was the only dramatic thing she allowed herself.

As she approached the emergency exit, the generator flickered again.

The lights dimmed, then came back, only to dim again. Somewhere down the hall, a ventilator alarm began to scream.

She paused.

Her phone was still in her locker. She hadn’t checked it in hours. But it wouldn’t matter; there was no signal, and her parents would assume she was still working… they always had.

The alarm continued when she opened the door.

The wind struck her immediately, sharp and violent. Snow whipped sideways across the parking lot, erasing tire tracks that had never led anywhere.

The hospital doors closed behind her with a heavy metallic thud. The generator’s hum faded beneath the howl of the storm.

She did not look back again. She didn’t have a destination in mind. It was not as if she could go back to her apartment because it was likely already compromised. The roof had not been designed for this volume of snow accumulation.

Nor did she have a snowmobile to swiftly carve through the storm. Her car was useless, buried under feet of snow. And even if she could clear it instantly, it would not get far in this weather.

Plows had not cleared the roads in days. No… there was no cavalry on the horizon coming to save her. Only distance and the cold in between.

Even though her journey was uncertain and fraught with peril, staying had become synonymous with waiting to die.

So she stepped forward into knee-deep snow and began walking. The storm swallowed her silhouette within minutes.

Behind the ghost of her footprints, the hospital lights flickered once more, then went steady. It was a city of the dying, held together by borrowed power.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep