Near midnight, Tran Huu
Loc was still sitting in the security office, the duty log and a flashlight in
front of him.
In the drawer of the desk,
he kept an old photograph of his two children when they were small. An Nhien
standing to shade little Dong from the sun, holding her brother’s hand, her
face solemn as a tiny old woman. From the day their mother died, his girl had
simply grown up like that, shouldering the housework, worrying over her
brother’s medicine, rarely ever letting him catch her crying.
Tonight he’d taken the
shift for a young guard whose small child had a fever. Rain had drizzled since
afternoon; the hospital was empty, nothing but the steady hum of the
ventilation fans overhead. He had just finished pouring a cup of water when the
signal board on the wall blinked red once.
A fire alarm, from the old
research basement, Lab Seven. After the blaze that had burned down nearly half
the outer storeroom six years ago, that basement had been sealed tight; no one
went near it. On his rounds he passed by it a few times, but almost never saw a
single footprint. And yet tonight, from that basement, alarms were ringing out,
sharp and insistent.
Loc frowned. Zone Seven had
been sealed for years. By the books, no one held a card to go down there. A
fire alarm sounding on its own and then cutting out, to someone else it might
just be a short circuit. But to a man who’d stood guard for nearly two decades,
it was not the kind of thing you let slide.
He took the flashlight,
threw on his coat, and strode out into the corridor.
The deeper he went, the
more the cold seeped in. The basement lights burned only at intervals, the
smell of chemicals thick in the air. A little way along, he stopped and tilted
his ear. Beneath the low drone of the fans, he caught another sound, faint but
steady, like air hissing out of some valve. The hair on the back of his neck
stood up. Nearly twenty years in the trade had taught him that the thing to
fear most wasn’t a loud noise, but the small sounds coming from a place that
was supposed to stay dead silent.
He walked the length of the
corridor, the flashlight dragging a long streak of light across the floor, his
ears straining after every sound. Near the end, he stopped short.
On the ceiling, a warning
light was blinking red.
He advanced to the last
steel door. Through the frosted glass, a white mist was curling up inside, and
behind that mist, he saw two figures collapsed on the floor.
He shone the light straight
in and pressed his face to the glass.
One of the two was his
daughter. That face, that hair. He knew them at once, even pale as she was
behind the mist. At her throat, a small necklace caught the light, the one
she’d been wearing home these past few days, laughing that the young master had
thrown it out so she’d claimed it.
“An Nhien.”
His voice broke out, dry and
cracked.
“An Nhien! My girl!”
He slammed his hand against
the door. It was locked tight, the electronic lock glowing red; swiping his
card again and again did nothing. He pounded on the door, calling his
daughter’s name, then bolted back up a few steps to the fire cabinet at the
head of the corridor and wrenched loose the iron bar that hung beside the foam
extinguisher.
“I’m here, sweetheart.
Dad’s here now.”
He shouted it more to
himself than to her, his hands shaking so hard he nearly lost his grip on the
bar. He jammed the tip into the seam of the door and threw the full weight of
his body into it. The first time, the door only rattled. The second time, he
braced a foot against the wall for leverage. The door let out a long shriek,
the bottom hinge tore loose, and the whole steel panel burst from its frame.
At that same moment, above
his head, footsteps came thundering down the stairs. The night-duty staff,
hearing the alarm shrieking, had come running.
“Uncle Loc! Don’t open
it….”
The warning wasn’t even
finished before the door swung wide.
The white mist, pent up in
that room for a full hour and waiting for any crack, now flooded into the
corridor like a river bursting a dike. Loc barely had time to drop into a
crouch, thread both arms under his daughter’s shoulders, and pull. He had no
idea what that mist was, gave no thought to his own safety; the only thing in
his head was to drag his child out of there.
He got An Nhien across the
threshold and laid her down on the corridor floor. Inside, a young man still
lay motionless. He meant to turn back and haul him out too, but his chest
suddenly clenched, and a fit of coughing tore up his throat. Before his eyes,
the red warning light smeared and bled at the edges. His knees went soft.
“Uncle Loc!”
“Pull… pull them both out…”
That was all he managed.
The man who had spent nearly twenty years standing guard so others could come
and go in safety fell tonight right before the door he’d just broken open, one
hand still reaching after his daughter’s wrist.
The staff who rushed in
staggered too. Those who covered their noses in time managed to back out; those
who took a single breath reeled where they stood. One young man had bent to
lift Loc when both his arms flopped limp to the ground beside him. The alarm went
on shrieking from the ceiling, piercing and steady, as though it had no idea
that beneath it, people were dropping one by one.
From the floors above,
voices called out to one another in a clamor. Someone shouted to shut every
vent, to call the emergency team, to lock down the whole basement. Minutes
later, figures in full hazmat gear came racing down, masks on, dragging air
tanks and stretchers. They threw up a barrier at the head of the corridor,
herded everyone still on their feet up top, and began carrying out the
unconscious one by one.
They carried An Nhien out
first, because she lay nearest the door, pulled clear earliest by Loc. Then the
young man from inside, and the staff who had gone down in the corridor. With
every stretcher that passed, a name was called out, a patient ID scrawled
hastily into a log. That night, the emergency ward of Vinh An Hospital blazed
with light until dawn, gurneys lined the length of the corridor, and the
on-call doctors phoned in colleagues from home and still couldn’t keep up.
Loc was carried out last.
A young guard, the one he’d
recommended for hire years before, ran alongside the stretcher, calling as he
ran.
“Uncle Loc, hang on.”
But the hand he laid on the
man’s chest met only a stillness that gave nothing back. Outside, the rain
still fell. The whole hospital forecourt glared white with the lights of
ambulances and fire trucks, people running back and forth. A night that should
have held only two people dying quietly in a sealed room now dragged with it a
whole row of bodies laid flat in a nameless white smoke, and a father lying
still on a stretcher, his hand still slightly curled, as if reaching toward the
child he’d just pulled from the blade of death’s scythe.
In the middle of the chaos,
in a corner of the yard beyond the reach of the lights, a man in a dark coat
stood with his hands clasped behind his back, showing none of the panic of
those around him. He only watched, quietly, now and then leaning to murmur a
few words to the person beside him. A while later, a new directive came over
the guards’ radios: Zone Seven was an old wing awaiting demolition, tonight’s
incident was a gas leak from deteriorated piping, and all statements to the
press were to wait on the corporation.
Before anyone had even had
the chance to weep for the man just laid low, someone had already tidied up the
matter of their deaths.
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