Page 75 of Mara

My friends were in there…my patients, my colleagues…No!

Glass was blown out of the front wing in a rain of screaming light. An orange glow swallowed the hallway windows from my view as I ran closer. The fire seeped through the bricks like it had been waiting its whole damn life to be born.

And that was when I heard it.

The screams.

Not just sirens. Not alarms.

People.

I heard them from inside, watching as emergency personnel tried to smash into the doors to no avail. Lines and lines of so many familiar and loved faces pushed against the glass.

Agonizing, blood-curdling screams clawing their way up through the smoke, begging, pleading…dying. Names I recognized, and people I’d seen every morning for so long: nurses. orderlies, and patients, who were too sick to know the danger they were in.

And I couldn’t do a goddamn thing.

“Help them,” I screamed, trying to get the attention of the firefighters, slamming a machine into the doors.

I watched as a nurse fell from the top floor window, her scrubs were on fire, her mouth open in a silent scream before the smoke swallowed her whole.

“It’s barricaded from the inside!” one of the uniformed workers shouted, sweat falling from their brow as they continued to slam a large contraption into the doors.

I watched a gurney roll out the window above us like it had been thrown, the patient strapped to it already blackened. Already dead before hitting the pavement.

The flames crackled and seemed to laugh around us. Metal shrieked, and the banging of the doors continued while the screams inside slowly faded into…

Silence.

The End…

For now.