Echoes Of The Last Hospital

Consciousness did not return like a sunrise. It struck like a tidal wave—chaotic, breathless, and disorienting.

Elias opened his eyes to a world that had forgotten him.

The ceiling above him was stained with age and water damage, its once-sterile white now jaundiced and cracked. Dust hung thick in the stagnant air, glowing faintly in the slant of morning light that bled through yellowed blinds. The rhythmic beeping of machines—so familiar in memory—was gone. All around him, silence reigned, deep and absolute, like a cathedral long abandoned by prayer.

He blinked, slowly. Once. Then again.

Something was wrong.

The hospital bed beneath him groaned as he shifted. He felt brittle—like glass inside a skeleton. Muscles twitched unwillingly. Limbs refused to obey. His mouth was dry to the point of pain, tongue sticking to his teeth.

A slow, aching turn of his head revealed machines that once monitored his vitals—dark, dead, and dust-covered. A deflated IV bag hung like a limp sail above his arm. The smell of disinfectant had faded, replaced by something older—mold, rust, decay.

He wasn’t just alone.

He had been abandoned.

Panic tried to rise, but his body couldn’t follow. It took him nearly ten minutes just to sit up, legs dangling over the side of the bed like forgotten cables. He looked down at his knees—bony, pale, unfamiliar. His hospital gown hung from him like it belonged to someone else.

How long had he been asleep?

With a grunt, he pulled the IV from his arm. It stung. Blood welled and trickled down his skin, vivid red against the ash-white of his flesh. The pain was sharp—real. Grounding.

He stood. And nearly collapsed.

Walls and handrails guided his crawl into the hallway, which stretched out before him like the throat of a tomb. The lights flickered dimly, powered perhaps by some dying backup generator. There were wheelchairs left in mid-motion, a crash cart turned on its side, papers scattered like autumn leaves.

He called out. “Hello?”

Nothing.

Silence doesn’t just fill space—it presses against it. Here, it crushed him. He felt like an intruder in a place meant for the dead.

He reached the nurse’s station. Terminals were smashed or powerless. Phones dangled off their cradles. A calendar still hung on the wall, pages curled and yellowed. The date read: March 2, 2023.

That was nearly two years ago.

His breath caught in his throat.

He turned a corner and stopped short.

A skeleton lay slumped against the wall in a nurse’s uniform, a faded surgical mask still looped around its jaw. The fabric of her scrubs had fused with the bones. Her name tag—"D. Morales"—was the only sign of the life she once had.

Elias stumbled back, nausea rising. But there was no time for mourning. Not yet.

He found the stairwell. Descended slowly. His legs trembled, threatening to give out with each step. The fluorescent light above him flickered once… then died.

He made it to the lobby.

The glass doors were shattered inward. Debris littered the floor—shards, leaves, pieces of shoes and paper. A lobby once designed for warmth and comfort had been stripped bare by chaos. Vending machines broken open. Reception desks abandoned mid-action.

Outside… was something else.

He pushed through the doors into a sky the color of rust. The sun was there—but muted, distant, like a dying bulb behind thick clouds. The city lay in ruin. Towering buildings, skeletal and charred. Streets overtaken by weeds. Abandoned vehicles blocked intersections, some turned over, others burnt out. Crows circled above, but no other sound met his ears.

No horns. No shouting. No dogs. No life.

Only him.

It was then he knew: the world had ended while he slept.

He spent the next hour scavenging what he could. From the hospital’s emergency supplies he gathered a flashlight, a bottle of water that had expired, protein bars, and a first aid kit. He pulled a hoodie from a locker and found shoes that mostly fit. Then he found a map.

It was pinned to a corkboard in what used to be the security room.

A red circle marked "CDC—Fort Detrick." A note beside it, barely legible, read:

“Last known safe zone. Day 218. No contact since.”

That gave him direction. Hope, or at least purpose.

In the hospital garage, he found a motorcycle, buried in dust but still intact. After some searching, he located keys in a locker with the name "G. Chambers" on it. It took three agonizing attempts before the engine growled to life—angry, mechanical, alive. The noise felt obscene in the silence of this graveyard.

He kicked the garage door open with a crowbar and pushed into the sunlight.

The wind outside was sharp, dry, and smelled of ash.

He rode through the city like a ghost wandering the aftermath of its own funeral. Traffic lights blinked to no one. Windows stared blankly. Sometimes he saw shapes in the shadows—figures that might have been people. Or might have once been.

He didn’t stop to check.

After several miles, he passed a sign rusting on the side of the road:

"YOU ARE NOW LEAVING BALTIMORE."

He looked back only once.

The hospital stood tall in the distance, a crumbling relic of the old world. It had kept him alive—unintentionally. But it had also entombed him. He owed it nothing.

What lay ahead was unknown. The remnants of civilization. Maybe others. Maybe answers. Or just more wreckage. But anything was better than that still, sterile tomb.

He adjusted the crowbar slung across his back. Tightened the straps on his backpack.

And twisted the throttle.

The road cracked beneath him as he accelerated into a world that had collapsed without him—one he now had to navigate alone.

A man out of time. A witness to extinction.

And perhaps, the last to wake.