Dead Already

Written By: John Sloan

Mike Flannigan is sharing a bed with dead people. Bodies are piled on top of him on a narrow hospital gurney. His face breaks the uneven surface between the shoulders of two corpses. He knows they are dead. Gray skin. No warmth. Why, then, does he sense movement?

He does not smell corruption, but an unusual mix of hospital disinfectants and aged mustiness. Struggling to get free, he looks to one side. There is a face, at least what is left of a face. Dried lips pulled back to bare teeth. Lids have similarly retreated to reveal milk-stained eyes. The jaw slowly hinges open. There is a dry rasp of escaping air. A skin-shriveled hand is reaching toward his face.

“Ah, nope,” he says. 

The bodies heave up a few inches and fall back into place as if the whole pile had taken in and let out a deep breath. On the second attempt, Flannigan sits up. The dead roll off the gurney to either side, thick thuds as they hit the black and white tiled floor like burlap sacks stuffed with rotted potatoes. 

***

He had been in pain for weeks. Perhaps something had torn during his regular bike rides. Just another symptom of middle age physical decline. But the pain and indigestion after eating suggested something gastric. 

Today it became unbearable. Leaving concerned colleagues at a morning meeting, he barely made it to the hospital. His worried wife, Marcia, met him at the emergency room waiting area. Head on her shoulder, holding her hand, they waited. He moaned from the gut pain and those uncomfortable chairs.  

“Where does it hurt?”

“Everywhere.” A circular motion around his belly.

“How much does it hurt? Scale of one to ten.”

“Nine, I guess.” 

They took his vitals, and there was more waiting on an emergency room gurney. He went for an ultrasound. No gallstones. Then, six hours after he arrived at the ER, an MRI scan revealed that Mike Flannigan was dying. 

***

Maybe my struggling just made it feel like the bodies were moving.

Flannigan can only entertain that thought for a second. The bodies on the floor are not still. With low, hissing moans from decaying throats, they clamor to get back onto the gurney. He jumps off. They continued to climb aboard and lie on top of each other. 

He is oddly unafraid of the dead. Repulsed. Horrified. Creeped out for sure. Some of them are quite mangled. Their clothing is ragged: shirts torn open to attach sensors to bare chests, pant legs cut off where medics tried to get at wounds, torn sleeves where IV tubes hang from arms. The gray matter exposed by open head wounds is the hardest to look at. 

 The dim hospital corridor is a neglected space. Dust covers everything. Most of the overhead lights are out. Others blink and buzz and glimmer. Abandoned hospital carts cast flickering shadows on grimy walls. His legs don’t seem to work quite right. He shuffles past rooms with more dead on the beds.  

Some corpses are also walking, passing without giving him much notice. It is quiet except for the occasional shuffled footfall and rasping breath. At the nexus of all the corridors, there is an island of light, a bright, clean nurse’s station. The nurse appears very much alive. Young and pretty, she is dressed in an old-fashioned white uniform. A nurse’s cap tops her pinned-up black hair. According to a tag on her chest, her name is Petra. 

“Excuse me,” he says. “I don’t think I belong here.”

“Name?” She pushes away from her desk to retrieve a file on a nearby counter. Rolling backward on her wheeled desk chair reveals white nylon-clad legs and white shoes. The uniform’s hem is at mid-thigh. He hasn’t seen an outfit like hers since the TV hospital dramas of the 60s and 70s. 

“Michael Flannigan. I was wondering … could I just leave?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Flannigan,” she says, glancing at the contents of the folder as she pulls her chair back into place. “We are quite jammed right now. Discharge will take time, even if there is somebody waiting to collect you.”

“Collect me?”

Nurse Petra only smiles. White teeth. Ruby lips. She nods down one corridor. There are large windows that shine with pale light. He shuffles down the corridor. 

It is a dreary November day. The lawn in front of University Hospital is faded green and brown with fallen leaves. A solitary figure stands near the bus stop. She wears a light gray trench coat, cinched with a belt of the same color, and a silky headscarf tied at her chin. 

“Mom?” 

***

“A thrombosis, a blood clot, in your mesenteric artery is causing acute bowel ischemia.” 

A sympathetic but somber surgeon delivered the news. Flannigan on his gurney. Marcia by his side. Where a clot in a heart artery leads to a heart attack, and a clot in a brain vein leads to a stroke, in your gut it leads to acute bowel ischemia. Inflamed intestines are starving for fresh blood.

“This is very serious,” she said.

Your gut can recover from ischemia but not from what could well come next: bowel infarction. Dead bowel leads to shock. Other organs will get on the death bandwagon. If it comes to that, Mike will need emergency surgery and will probably not come out of it with enough living gut to survive. 

“So, I may be dead already,” Flannigan said matter of fact. 

Marcia was moved to silent tears. She let go of his hand. It was a cold thing for him to say with a loved one standing right there. But he was already on powerful pain meds, and it was all happening so fast. Stoicism in the face of death or just your run-of-the-mill state of shock? Hard to tell.

They put a line in close to his heart and pumped him full of—hopefully—clot-busting anticoagulants. At the first sign of bowel death, they will open him up. Fever will be a telltale sign. They rolled the gurney into a small ward just off the emergency room. A nurse monitored his temperature and gave him one of what will be many shots of morphine. The lights were low.

“Try to get some sleep,” she said.

Sleep? As if I could slee—

Darkness until he woke up with the dead.

***

His mother had died 15 years earlier. During the funeral, Flannigan had a vivid memory of her. He was six years old, called out of his Grade One class to the St. Ambrose Elementary School’s main office. He was terrified. The only reason someone was sent to the office was for corporal punishment at the hands of Sister Principal. 

To his astonishment and relief, his mother had come to collect him for an appointment of some kind. He got to go out the front doors of the school! As far as he knew, no student had ever done that. He ran to her, down a walk that cut across the front lawn, to where she stood near a bus stop. 

She smiled down at him. On that brisk fall day, she was wearing a light gray trench and a silky scarf around her head, tied in a little bow under her chin. This was the image Flannigan had at her funeral, along with the thought that she was still out there, waiting for him to come running to her.  

“Hey, Mom!” he calls, rapping on the window. She appears not to hear him. The noise catches the attention of the wandering dead, who are pushing their tattered bodies in on him. 

“That’s my mom!” he says with stupid enthusiasm. 

Flannigan’s bare arm and hand, palm out, slapping on the glass summons another memory of his mother. It was 20 minutes after she had passed. Her skin had gone white, not bright white, but light-absorbing, almost gray. Freckles and moles, which had ranged from pink to brown, now looked black against that pallid tissue.    

His own skin color is light olive, from a Spanish ancestor, that barely hides the freckles from the Irish ancestors. On that outstretched arm on the hospital window, there are those black spots contrasting pallid skin. 

The dead are upon him. Dry, rough hands, like chicken bones wrapped in jerky, are around his arms and on his shoulders. He is led gently but insistently away from the window.

He doesn’t struggle against them, still stunned at the sight of his own dead flesh. Near the nurse’s station, Petra is pushing a wheelchair carrying a tiny, shriveled corpse with a mop of blue-gray hair toward the elevators. 

“Thank you for your patience, Mrs. Hereford. Your husband is eager to be with you.”

The elevator is also bright and clean when the doors slide open. He doesn’t know why but just knows that by the time that elevator gets to the ground floor, Mrs. Hereford will not be a shriveled old corpse but young and radiantly beautiful as the day Mr. Hereford married her, just as he is sure that when he takes that elevator ride, he will burst out into the lobby and out of the hospital with the unflagging energy of a running six-year-old. 

“I’m here, Mom. I’m here!”

And she will smile at him, not the woman aged beyond her 60 years by disease that he had last seen on a hospital bed, but a radiant young mother, happily collecting her little boy for an unknown adventure. 

The sepulcher entourage leads him down the corridor to where his crowded gurney waits. They are not nearly as frightening as somebody in a white coat saying they will have to slice him open to pull out his festering guts. Likely not leaving enough “good tissue” behind for him to live. 

***

Ceiling light panels above are sliding by. Not a single one is blinking or dark. Marcia is also there, walking next to the gurney. 

“Am I going to surgery?” 

“No, Mike,” she says, reaching for his hand. She has recovered her composure. Hardly any evidence that she spent most of the night crying. “We’re on our way up to an intensive care room.” 

“You’re still stable. No fever. A good sign,” says a nurse, whom Mike now notices on the other side of the gurney. She is dressed in the colorful hospital scrubs that nurses wear now. Her ID hangs from a neck lanyard, as is standard today, not pinned to a uniform. 

The pain persists for days. No solid food for a week. They call it “bowel rest”. The telltale fever never materializes. Marcia is by his side through it all. Every morning he wakes up to her smile and a cup of good, non-hospital coffee. Like Nurse Petra, she is an island of light he can focus on even as he sees the dead in the surrounding shadows, glimpsed in peripheral vision, waiting. When he recovers enough to make brief walks, he might catch sight of one out of the corner of his eye, walking with him or lying on a hospital bed among the living as he passes. The visions recede with the pain. Ten days later, he leaves the hospital.

***

Why me? 

It is the same question asked by somebody about to meet an unexpected end as by somebody who should have died but didn’t. Maybe he was spared so that years later, he will stand by Marcia’s side in the same hospital as she faces that line that he once put a toe across. 

She is with his mom now. Waiting for him.

Of course, Flannigan knows the dead will be back for him someday, as they will for all of us. When he feels that icy presence, he does not look over his shoulder for fear of again seeing one of them in the corner of his eye. Milky eyes and a skeletal smile. Reaching for him. 

John Sloan has been a writer in London, Ontario, Canada, for 40 years, mainly as a journalist, columnist, and technology analyst. He chose this path due to the TV show Lou Grant, a degree in journalism, and a need to eat. Sloan lives neither in a rambling Victorian house nor in a cozy flat. He does not own a cat.