Chapter 1 - Medicine Chest

This is part of the April 2024 Theme of the Month Event. The theme is Freedom. Hope you enjoy, and please read the other contributions to the event!

https://fantasyfeeder.com/forum/post s?topicId=68814&postId=462151#462151

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Emmanuel collapsed on the concrete floor with Charlie partly on top of him, her body twisted. He took a shallow breath but stopped, a searing pain coming from somewhere on his back. It might have been from his lower back, where he landed first, or it could have been from his ribs, or just a pain so intense it was impossible to know the source. But Charlie was silent and limp, and he had to push through the pain and catch his breath. He reached up and held a rung of the rusted iron ladder lying partly on top of both of them. Daylight filtered in through the circular hatch thirty feet above, highlighting dancing dust and rust motes. It wasn’t much light, but it was enough to see his immediate situation.

The top two thirds of the ladder had completely pulled away from the wall, and then broken cleanly, sending the upper portion falling like a spear. If either of them had been six feet to Emmanuel’s right, they would have been impaled. Instead, they merely fell, with the bottom of the ladder pinning them down. Charlie still wasn’t breathing. He didn’t even know what to do? Check her pulse? He had never tried to do that before, he had no idea how to, other than touching somebody’s wrist. Perform CPR? His chest got cold as he realized she was probably already dead.

Ignoring the pain in his back, he pushed upwards, lifting the heavy ladder. It moved, enough for him to slowly slide his body under it, using his mass to support it as he detangled Charlie from him and pushed her out from under the twisted steel. He muscled it off of him with a loud bang and crouched over her small, limp body.

In the dim light at the bottom of the shaft, it was impossible to tell what kind of injuries she might have, but when he put the back of his hand near her nose, Emmanuel felt the warmth of shallow breathing.

“Charlie? Talk to me?” Emmanuel put his hand on her face, pushing gently against Charlie’s cheek. As he slid back past her ear to cup the back of her head, he felt something sticky and wet and pulled back. Emmanuel fumbled for his phone, and turning on the flashlight, saw blood on his fingertips and staining the concrete floor beyond Charlie’s pale face.

Emmanuel immediately dialed the emergency extension, but there was no ring, no bars, the words NO SERVICE emblazoned in the corner of his screen. He looked up at the tiny circle of wooded sky above him and screamed for help at the top of his lungs.

As if in reply, the heavy, hemispherical hatch they had climbed through slammed closed with a ringing metallic thud, sending dirt and rust and darkness down the shaft to cover them.

“I’ve gotta find a place with reception down here,” Emmanuel muttered in a panic, using his flashlight to explore the chamber. It was circular, and tapered out, making it a good ten feet wider at the base than at the top where it transitioned into the ladder shaft. There was nothing on the ground to speak of, but as he made his full revolution to look fully behind him, Emmanuel saw a door.

He took one step towards the door, careful not to trip on the ladder. It had rounded corners and a large metal wheel in the center, like how he pictured a door on a submarine. It was extremely heavy looking, and closed. He turned back to look at Charlie, limp on the ground.

“I need to get her out of here. Or I need a first aid kit. Something,” he whispered. In the beam cast by his flashlight, Charlie moved a hand slightly, really just a finger twitching, but Emmanuel’s breath caught in his throat. He took one last look at the door, and as he turned back around, his foot caught on something. A metal object skittered away from him, lost in the darkness.

He swept to his right with the light, and there it was, almost against the curved concrete wall, a green metal box with an unmistakable blue cross painted on the lid.

Emmanuel grabbed the scuffed and dented first aid kid, Father knows how old it was, and flipped the two claps open. The lid fell off and he rummaged through it, hands trembling, and pulled out a roll of gauze and scissors while taking note of other bandages, tape, jars of paste, a glass hypodermic and several small glass vials.

He stumbled and slid on his knees to kneel next to Charlie, carefully unwrapping the gauze. “Okay, just…be still. I hope this isn’t going to mess you up.” Emmanuel held his breath and winced as he slid his hand under Charlie’s head and lifted it as gently as he could. Hair stuck to the floor and he swore he could feel something in her neck click. He ignored it, though, despite the way his stomach sank and felt sick, and started wrapping the gauze around her head. Back to forehead to back to forehead, covering her ears and even her eyebrows. His phone was on the ground next to him, flashlight pointing up, illuminating the pair in a tableau of gently falling dust. The concrete dome echoed Emmanuel’s heavy breathing back to him.

Emmanuel wrapped the gauze until the roll was gone and then cut strips of tape to hold it closed. And then he stopped, watching her breathing, maybe watching her dying, afraid to move her any more. Even afraid to hold her hand.

Charlie was the one who found the rusted hatch in the woods on that sprawling property that used to be farmland back in the old days, but now was just pine swamp and deadfalls and murk. She found it first, but he was the one who went back with wrenches and penetrating lube and hammers and one by one broke the bolts that held it shut and greased the hinges that let it open. His tools were still up there.

He pulled a silver shock blanket out of the first aid kid and shook it to full size, barely big enough to cover her. But he tucked her in and listened for the crinkle of the Mylar as her chest rose and fell. Then he examined the first aid kit some more, noting with growing panic that he was at nearly fifty percent charge on his phone.

Emmanuel re-arranged the small containers inside the box: antibiotic cream in a round jar and colloidal silver ointment in an oval tin. Three identical amber vials with very different liquid ingredients printed on the tan paper labels: morphia, liquid extract of coca, nitro glycerin. Wrapped in leather, two surgical scalpels and a curved pair of stainless steel forceps.

“We’re both going to die if we can’t get out of here.” Emmanuel raised his phone high, barely lighting the circular shaft. He’d need much more light to investigate the way they came in. He lowered his arm, the unsteady flashlight beam coming to rest on the ugly gray door in the middle of the otherwise featureless wall. With one last glance at Charlie, he shuffled towards the door, his feet leaving trails in the dust.

The wheel was brass, darkened and pitted, with seven spokes leading to a central hub. Emmanuel crouched down and wiped the dust off of the hub, tracing a figure with his finger. It was a geometric shape, like a star, but irregular. He counted seven points as he followed the line continuously from start to finish, almost like two misaligned squares. The brass gleamed a brighter reddish brown from the polishing. He stood up, put the flashlight sticking out of the pocket of his jeans to give him a little light to work with, and with a silent prayer of righty tighty, lefty loosy, turned the wheel hard to the left. It rotated stiffly the distance of one spoke before coming to a hard stop, and he felt and heard some inner mechanism moving. He turned again, and the sound was louder, metal hitting metal, this time from the top and bottom of the door. The third turn was the stiffest, and Emmanuel’s back ached as he forced the ancient mechanisms to work. With a hollow thud the final bolts disengaged and the door swung slightly inward, soundless on massive hinges.

It was open.