Read Online Grid Down: A Strike against America – An EMP Survival Story- Book One by Roger Hayden - Free Book Online Page A

firefight in a hospital? It was incomprehensible. She had known that venturing back to her hospital would be difficult, but could never have imagined what she was seeing. She pushed on and hurried to the counter. The door had already been blasted off its hinges. It lay on the ground filled with bullet holes, spread out in clusters.
    “Wait,” Rob said. “Let me clear the room first.”
    Mila held up her pistol. “I can do it.” There were rows of shelves aligned from the front of the room to the back. At first glance, she could see that most of them had been pillaged and cleared and were now caked with dust. It was too dark to see what remained. She stepped over the door and gasped. A pair of legs was sticking out from the bottom of the fourth shelving unit down.
    “What is it?” Rob asked, running her way. He pulled a ChemLight from his pocket, snapped it and held it up in the darkened stock room as it glowed yellow.
    “A body,” Mila said, pointing. The familiar odor of death wafted toward them. Rob urged Mila back and walked past the shelves with his gun drawn and ChemLight held high. He turned and saw the body of a man lying on his back, motionless.
    His skin had turned blue. His shaggy hair spread on the tile floor. His mouth agape and eyes widened. White foam had crusted over his beard. Rob held the ChemLight over the man and saw a syringe lodged in his right arm and small empty bottles of morphine lying close by.
    Rob looked up. “He must have passed recently. Drug overdose, it looks like.”
    Mila approached cautiously and looked down at the man with sadness. “Follow me,” she said to Rob. They hurried down each aisle as he lit the way. Predictably, the pharmacy had been cleaned out, though she was still surprised by the sheer vastness of it.
    “This wasn’t random looting,” Rob said. “This was a calculated heist.”
    She stopped in front of a shelf that had a few small boxes on it. “Looks like they missed some stuff.” She pulled the bag from her shoulder and tossed the boxes inside.
    “What’d you find?” Rob said and held the ChemLight closer.
    “Just what we need,” Mila said. “Antibiotics.” She turned around looking across at the depleted shelves. “If I can just get some ibuprofen and IV bags, I think Reba will be fine.”
    “Gauze, cleaning pads, disinfectant, medical kits. Can you get any of that stuff? That’s what we need back at camp.”
    “Yes, storage room. Third floor. Hopefully that hasn’t been raided too.”
    “The only way to know is to check,” Rob said. “But we’re losing time. Let’s move.”
    “What’s taking so long back there?” Peter said nervously as he paced the lobby.
    “Keep your voice down,” Rob said.    
    They emerged from the pharmacy to find Peter eager and waiting to move on. “I don’t like this place. It reeks of death.”
    They followed Mila to the next door, which led to another long hall full of wheelchairs, gurneys, bedsheets, and papers strewn about. They took the next set of stairs to the third floor.
    The administrative floor wasn’t in shambles like the others, but was just as devoid of activity. Its carpeted halls gave them quiet travel to an unmarked room bolted shut behind two doors.
    “This is the room,” Mila said.
    “Stand back,” Rob said, holding up his crowbar. He thrust the end into the door and pried it open.
    Once inside, they were greeted by a darkened room twice the size of a janitor’s closet, with steel mobile shelving units standing against the walls. Rob quickly snapped two additional ChemLights and handed them to Mila and Peter. “Time to load up and get out of here.”
    There were only a few supplies left, but it felt like a bonanza. The staff had apparently rummaged through the shelves in haste and had left plenty of valuable items behind. They grabbed latex gloves, medical gauze, disinfectant, IV bags, aspirin, ointment packs, bandages, medical tape, slings, tourniquets, and hand sanitizer.