The Obelisk of Healing Truths: When History Heals, the World

The smell hit first. It always did.

It was a rank, many-layered thing, the smell of a public hospital at the edge. The sharp, clean slap of bleach fought a losing war with the sour undertones of sweat and stale urine. Underneath it all, under his beard, like a rotten foundation, was the vomit-inducing sweetness of infection and the metallic undertone of blood. Dr. Alexander Carter had years ago self-aware ceased to be aware of it; it had simply become the air he inhaled, the existence he led.

His existence, which now numbered in the shallow, distressed respirations of the woman on the gurney before him.

She was Eliza, and her sunken eyes stared at the wet ceiling tiles, unable to see. The IV in her arm pumped saline, a feeble counterattack against the flood of liquid that her body was being compelled to expel. Cholera. A medieval disease, a plague of the Bible, and it was tearing through the city's poorest quadrant with brutal, anarchy-scarred glee. And here, in the overstuffed, underfunded bowels of St. Brendan’s Hospital, they were trying to fight it with bandaids and prayers.

“BP is dropping, sixty over forty,” a nurse, Sophia, said, her voice strained but steady. Her forehead was sheened with sweat, a stray curl of dark hair stuck to her temple. “The last liter of lactated ringers is almost gone. We’re out. The central supply…”

"Finish it," Alexander cut in, his voice a low rasp. He did not want to hear the rest of the sentence. Central supply is out. The shipment was delayed. The budget was cut. He had heard all the variations. The excuses were as abundant as the line of patients, but the supplies were not.

He went up and placed two fingers on Eliza's wrist. Her radial pulse was a thready, frantic flutter against his skin, a hummingbird trapped and dying. He looked at her chart, though he knew already. Young mother. Two children. Admitted eight hours previously. Had progressed from moderate dehydration into severe septic shock during the time it had taken Alexander to have a cold coffee and look at twenty other patients who were all taking the same fatal path.

He could feel the heavy, crushing burden of the past descending upon his shoulders. It was the burden of knowledge without power, of ability without tools. He was a mechanic trying to fix an engine with a butter knife. 

"Get another line going if you can," he said to them, his hands already moving to the next patient. "Use whatever we have left. I'll…"

A crash at the entrance of the emergency ward made him whip his head up. The double doors had been flung open, crashing against the walls. There was a man there, standing in silhouette against the fluorescent light of the hallway, and holding tightly to a small child against his chest.

"Oh, please!" the man exclaimed, his own voice cracking in a raw fear that pierced the ward's low moan of pain. "My son! He is not breathing!"

The boy lay still, his face an eerie shade of grayish-blue.

Triage. The harshest mathematics of medicine. Existence for one against existence for another. The resources available to one against the hopes for another. Alexander's eyes jumped between the woman dying on the floor and the child dying at the door. Two equations with the same, impossible sum: zero.

Over here! Now!" Alexander bellowed, pointing to an empty gurney—empty because its previous patient had just been zipped into a black body bag a few minutes before.

The chaos escalated. The ward, which was already overcrowded by three times, absorbed the new crisis like a water-soaked sponge, beginning to ooze at the peripheries. Nurses ran past, their shoes squeaking on the perpetually wet floor. A porter pushed a cart of soiled laundry through the throng, adding to the reek of despair. The odor stuck to gagging, crying, and the incessant, slow beep of monitors that had nothing more to monitor but flatlines.

Alexander worked. He padded from bed to bed, a lesson in controlled despair. His own head, once a clean closet of medical books and diagnostic protocols, was now a map of lost outposts drawn in red ink. He administered the last doses of precious antibiotics, replaced IVs that had been ripped out by desperate patients, grasped the hands of terrified and dying ones.

He passed a mounted television set, its screen oscillating with an over-smooth newsreader. "—assure the public that the situation is under control," the man was saying, his lips curving into a serene smile. "The Health Commission and our private partners are working day and night to make vaccine distribution a priority for high-risk communities…"

A lie. A smooth, clean, television lie. The vaccine was an illusion, a guarantee by clean-jacketed politicians who never ventured into St. Brendan's stinking, gut-level reality. Anger, fiery and acid, boiled in Alexander's belly. They were dying there, suffocating on their own secretions, as men in air-conditioned studios spoke of prioritization.

His pager vibrated on his hip. Another code blue. Third floor. Probably another cholera case that had aspirated, their heart giving out under the strain.

He turned to Sophia. “Hold the fort. I’ll be back.”

He elbowed through the doors, fleeing the cacophony of the ER, and stepped into the apparent silence of the main corridor. It was an illusion of quiet. Muddy footprints scarred the linoleum floor. Gurneys lined the walls with patients who had nowhere to go. They eyed him as he passed by—pleading, empty, accusatory.

He climbed the stairs two at a time, his body weighed down by more than bone-deep fatigue. Soul-deep fatigue. Fourteen hours of double shift, and he knew they would not be enough. They would work through the night. They would drop, and others would take their place, and the plague would not care.

He was so lost in his own mind that he didn't catch it initially. A subtle vibration along the soles of his boots. A dull, thrumming noise that was felt rather than heard, the growl of a buried monstrosity.

He stopped on the landing of the stairs, his hand on the cold metal railing. The trembling strengthened. Below him, from the floor above, a sprinkling of delicate powder sifted through the cracks in the concrete ceiling and glittered in the dim light. A water pipe in the wall groaned in protest.

An earthquake? he thought, dismayed. They weren't sure of the neighborhood.

Then the world exploded.

The sound was blinding, a screaming of torn metal and shattering glass. The stairway lurched jaggedly up from beneath him. The railing he grasped spasmed like a licorice whiplash and tore from the wall. He was swept backward, his head crashing into the steps with a flash of white-hot pain.

Darkness attempted to consume him, but he fought back to life, clawing his way from the depths. The lights in emergency started to flicker on, bathing everything in a hellish, strobing red. White dust filled the air. Debris and plaster rained down on top of him.

Screaming. Echoed, muffled, and then rising into a frantic chant. The building continued to creak, groaning into the new, broken reality.

The hospital… it's collapsing.

The concept was bitter in his blood. The patients. Sophia. Eliza. The man and his blue-lipped son. Hundreds of lives, already dead, now locked up in a collapsing crypt.

Adrenaline washed through his weariness. He struggled to rise, but a blinding agony stabbed his leg. He looked down; a ragged piece of rebar had pierced his calf and pinned him to the steps. Blood, black and ominously life-like, seeped into his scrub pants.

He tried to struggle free, but agony consumed him. He was trapped.

The dying structure groaned and creaked more loudly. A low, vibrating crack thundered down from above, louder with each passing second. The ceiling was falling in.

He could see the emergency ward doors from his chair, now askew on their hinges. Through the cloud of dust, he caught a fleeting glimpse of movement—Sophia, leading a disoriented patient, her expression etched in fear and resolve.

"Sophia!" he tried to yell, but his voice was a dusty rasp. "Get out!"

She didn't notice. The noise was too loud.

His pager beeped again against his hip, a final annoyingly mundane movement amidst the apocalypse. He thought of the Obelisk in the city square, an ancient, mysterious stone monument that he passed by each day on the way to the office. He'd never actually thought of it, another relic from a superseded era. An evanescent, solitary image flashed before him: its smooth, stern face, steadfast as the rest of the modern world crumbled around it.

The creaking above reached a crescendo. He looked up.

The entire stairwell ceiling gave way. Tons of wire, steel, and concrete fell on him. No time to react, no time for a final thought, no time for anything.

The Last Breath.

It wasn't a sigh, it wasn't a gasp. It was ripped from him, substituted by the weight of the world. The sound was gone. The light was gone. The pain was present for that one moment, searing moment, and then it vanished.

It was all gone.

Silence.

Not the silence of a vacant room, but the utter, bottomless silence of non-existence.

Alexander Carter was not.

Then. a sensation.

Not of body, but of presence. A concentration of awareness in the boundless space.

A light. A single, pinprick of blue, cold light in the blackness. It grew, not by coming nearer, but by unfolding, defining itself. It cohered into a shape. A huge, hulking shape of dark, smooth rock.

It was the Obelisk.

But not as ever he had seen stone. Not as if time and grime had weathered it. Clean, unmarked, and utterly other. Its four faces rose up into a darkness that had no edge. And on its face, patterns of soft, blue light came to grow bright, inscribing themselves across the stone with impossible, geometric precision. They wrote patterns, symbols, and scripts that were old and meaningless, yet somehow seemed. medical. Anatomical. True.

The scored lines pulsed with a gentle, rhythmic light, as if the universe itself pulsed slowly and regularly.

A line of type, exact and constructed of that same cold light, appeared in front of his mind. It conveyed no feeling, no urgency, but simply a stark, oppressive fact.

[System Initializing.]

Welcome, Dr. Alexander Carter.]