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One

A hypnic jerk, sometimes colloquially referred to as a night start, is an involuntary twitch that occurs just before going to sleep, often accompanied by a falling sensation and an elevated heart rate as if you’d just been shocked by something you weren’t expecting to see. Doctor Sparks had heard countless patients ask him about that ailment, and every time he gave them the same answer: it’s normal, it happens to everyone, just try to keep a regular sleep schedule and do relaxing things before bed. He told himself to do the same things whenever he felt one, and usually they worked. But every time he had experienced that phenomenon, it had been during hypnagogia, the last stage of consciousness before his brain shut off.

You weren’t supposed to feel it once you were already asleep.

Sparks awoke with a shout, his teeth gritted and his hooves clenched against the edges of the cot inside his office. For a minute or two, he just laid there without unwinding his coiled limbs, focused only on taking deep breaths and slowing his pulse down to a point where it didn’t feel like his heart was about to break through his ribs. Once he felt relatively calm again, he let his head fall back onto his pillow and pried his forelegs loose from the metal supports underneath his makeshift bed. As he stared up at the ceiling, his mind raced with questions. Where the hay had that come from? What kind of dream had he been having? Why were his muscles taking so long to unclench?

And why was the hallway outside so dark?

Sparks rolled out of bed and gingerly stood up, his legs sore from his earlier shift and still a bit stiff from what must’ve been a doozy of a night terror. Stars above, if only he could remember what it was! He’d been here at the hospital, he thought... something to do with a patient. A surgery, maybe?

Yeah, a surgery, and a tough one too: flying accident, severe spinal injuries, massive internal bleeding... familiar. Almost like déjà vu. Had he had that dream before? And then at the end, a throbbing hum, and a flash of light...

Sparks shook his head and forced himself to take another breath. There’d be time for interpreting his dreams later. Right now, he had more pressing matters to attend to. Like why, for example, the emergency backup generators seemed to still be about as useful as two three-hundred-pound paperweights. To be fair, he was sure the higher-ups had a lot of other things on their plates besides replacing the gennies. After all, he’d only been hounding them about the issue every single day since he’d transferred here two years ago.

Sparks swung his office door open and stepped into the hallway, mostly just to confirm what he’d been able to tell by looking under the door from his cot: against all manner of government regulations and public health codes, the power was out seemingly building-wide. He scowled and swung his door closed behind him, resolving to be much less civil in his next angry letter to the Board about proper maintenance and procedure. On the one hoof, it wasn’t terribly critical that they maintain power here every hour of the day. Unlike some newer hospitals, Canterlot General’s technomagical assets were mostly limited to overhead lighting and standard medical equipment.

But on the other hoof, what in Equestria was he supposed to do if something did happen at a time like this? Forget his nightmare a moment ago. They’d be living in a real one soon enough if a patient so much as caught cold with the whole building out of commission. Months of paperwork, a media scandal, probably a full-scale investigation and a mess of key personnel getting the ax... and the stars only knew what the Princesses would think. Thank the both of them that there at least weren't any patients in critical condition at the moment. With a bit of luck, he’d be able to corral some nurses and have this mess sorted out by morning.

Sparks took a moment to situate himself in the darkened corridor, then turned to the right and started walking. Every building looked different under the hood of near-complete darkness, and with its long hallways, outdated furnishings, and the musty smell that somehow pervaded even the new psych ward in the east wing, Canterlot General was the poster child for that effect. To be honest, it was nothing short of a certified dump. But it was a big dump and, as Sparks often reminded himself, an important one. And sooner or later, he’d be in a position to whip this place into proper shape.

Sparks rounded the corner at the end of the hallway, and a shudder crawled down his spine. Stars above, it was cold in here. Had the central heating gone down too? Sparks adjusted his course a bit and brushed his shoulder against the wall, and goosebumps rose on his skin as it rubbed against the peeling wallpaper. Ice-cold. This night just kept getting better and better.

He quickened his pace and kept going, and the fur on his back stood up again. There was another more personal reason he’d been so eager to solve the generator problem, and in fact it was a rather simple one: hospitals at night were just damn creepy. His hooves clacked against the tile with every step, and the noise receded far into the distance only to echo back a second or two later than he figured they should have, like the delayed response of some copycat at the other end of the hall. The silence, contradictory as the phrase was, felt deafening; there was no sound but that of his own breathing, of his heart pounding deep inside his ears like the thump of a hoof against a heavy wooden door. Hidden away in this wing were fifty-six patients and the rest of the night staff, but for all the world Sparks could’ve sworn that not a soul remained in the building besides him.

Sparks took another breath and rolled his shoulders. He’d come to a stop in front of one of the doors on the hall. A plaque on its front displayed its room number overtop a patient identification sheet too blurry to make out, and twenty feet down the hallway he could see the protruding corner of the nurse’s station. A part of him wanted to veer off course for a moment and push the door open, just to peek inside and make sure that there was a patient asleep in bed. Just to make sure there were other ponies in here still, perfectly content and blissfully unaware of the world outside their doors.

His hoof was half-raised to touch the knob, actually, when his neck prickled again and he tore his eyes away. As much as he was sure everything inside was completely normal, the hypnotizing, infuriating possibility that it wasn’t made the choice unbearable. The broken lights were messing with his head. He needed to get himself under control and keep moving. He needed to fix this.

He jogged the rest of the way down the hall and turned the corner ready to berate the night staff for not coming to get him sooner, but the words died in his throat as soon as they’d formed. The attendant’s station was empty—not just of anypony who certainly should’ve still been there, but of anything at all. The drawers on the dust-choked desks were ripped open and empty, and the big board showing the daily schedule was blank, its surface scratched and faded as if somebody had scraped it clean with the edge of their hoof. A single lit candle stood at the front counter, but other than that there was no movement. He shivered again. If anything, it was even colder now.

He made his way towards the candle, his eyes never straying from it despite the flickering shadows tugging at his attention. With no breeze to disturb it, the flame on the wick was still, and only a few thin strips of wax had dripped down into the pan beneath it. It hadn’t been lit for long. Somepony had to still be around. So where were they? And why weren’t they still here trying to figure out what was going on?

Another shout built up in his lungs, and as he took in a breath to fuel it, something caught in the corner of his eye. Movement in the window, whatever it was darting out of view just before he could turn to see it. He looked over anyway, and it reappeared: a tiny white speck, fluttering around on the wind. It was followed by another speck, then another, and soon the window was full of them. They bounced noiselessly off the glass. Piled up on the sill.

Snow.

It was snowing outside.

In August.

Sparks let out the air trapped in his chest, and it came away from his mouth in a shapeless white cloud. Something was wrong here, not just with the lights but with the whole building. There should’ve been somebody else here, should’ve been a functional generator, should’ve been some sign that he wasn’t the only pony left alive in the world, snowed into an empty hospital in the middle of summer. He stared back at the candle and watched the flame eat away at the wax, then shut his eyes and tried to reason out his next move.

Even if this wing was empty, there should still be somepony down in the lobby, or at least some other indication of what had happened. If not there, he could go outside, wade through the newborn drifts and check out a few other buildings down the street. There was an explanation for all this, and all he needed to do was keep his head on his shoulders and go hunt it down. He opened his eyes and turned in place, and the report of his hooves echoed back at him a second too late. The stairs. He needed to find the stairs. He needed to start moving and keep moving and keep calm and not panic and–

Beep.

Sparks twitched and whipped around, and the candle flame dipped and shuddered from the sudden motion. That sound. He knew that sound. Quick, sudden, like the sound of a glass cracking. Like the pulse in his ears.

Beep.

An EKG machine. There was an EKG machine somewhere in the ward, and if the machine was beeping that meant it was on, and if the machine was on then there must be power. And yet the lights stayed dark, and the hallway freezing cold.

Beep.

Down the right-side hallway. The noise was close. Once he walked over that way and peered around the corner, he could see the open door maybe forty yards away, the tiles in front of it lit up like the Solstice. Why just that room? What happened to all the other lights?

Beep.

Just one room. He had to check just that one room, then he could go downstairs. Sparks stared down the hallway at the door and the flickering light. He didn’t move.

Beep...

He had no choice. He had to go.

Beep... beep...

He had to go now.

Before he could think better of it, Sparks ducked out from behind the attendant’s station, starting off with a composed trot that soon evolved into a jog. His hoofsteps reverberated all around him, ever so slightly off pace with the motions of his legs.

Beep, beep, beep, beep...

The machine was getting louder, and behind it he could now hear something else: a constant rattling noise like somepony shaking a chainlink fence. He picked up his pace, and the echoes from his hooves got louder. Closer.

Beep beep beep beep beep beep...

He reached the door already breathless, his legs weak and his ears numb from the cold. The machine was reaching a crescendo. The rattling too. It was coming from inside the room.

He took a step forward and looked inside, and the air froze around him. Rusted tools and instruments were strewn everywhere, broken on the floor and embedded in the walls, and lit by a single flaring surgical lamp, a green-coated earth stallion lay convulsing on a spindly operating table, his chest peeled open and pinned back with black clamps coated with congealed blood. The straps crossing over him cut into his legs and neck as he thrashed around, and when a particularly violent spasm arched his back off the table and made his bindings screech in complaint, Sparks caught a glimpse of frothing, bone-white lips and half-lidded eyes rolled all the way back into his head.

There wasn’t time to think. There was barely even time to react. Sparks cried out and bolted inside the operating room, and the echo following his hoofsteps was almost immediate.

BE-BE-BE-BE-BE-BE-BE-BE...

“Code Yellow!” he screamed, his throat seared raw from the shout he couldn’t even be sure there was anyone around to hear. “Somebody get in here!”

Diving into a procedure without getting into scrubs or prepping in the washroom was a one-way ticket to a new career as a fry cook, but at the moment Sparks couldn’t have been paid to care less. The building was deserted, the power was on the fritz, and some despicable lunatic had left a patient alone on the operating table in the middle of a moondamned open-heart surgery. At this point, anypony still worried about regulations could go marry the freaking things for all he cared.

As best he could, Sparks got himself into position overtop the patient and tried to get a gauge on the situation, but the stallion was shaking with a strength he couldn’t begin to contain. He could guess well enough that the patient was in the middle of a full-blown cardiac arrest, but without full knowledge of his medical history he’d be shooting blind on a gut instinct. And that still didn’t take into account the gaping hole in his chest cluttered with distended intestines and broken ribs, the visibly battered heart beneath all of them frantically pumping blood out of it and into his exposed abdomen.

His lungs heaving, his hooves hanging helplessly in midair, Sparks stood paralyzed over the shuddering body. He thought of yelling for help again, but no one had come the first time. Why would this time be any different? He was alone. He was alone in an abandoned hospital, with nothing to work with and a dying stallion whose remaining life was surely being measured in seconds. He couldn’t do anything. He couldn’t help this patient.

He couldn’t save him.

Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee…

The stallion’s head lolled back, and the twitching organ inside his chest went horrifically still. Every hair on Sparks's body was on end, and every inch of skin beneath them was numb. Code Blue. Full arrest. No hope of defibrillation. No part of his body even intact enough for CPR. Nopony even left to share in the terror, to grasp onto and hide with and block out the screech of the EKG, scream over the terrible silence behind it.

He stepped back from the table, stumbling off the raised dias hard enough to smack into the wall behind him. Alone. The word sizzled in his mind like it had been branded there. Alone. One patient had died, more would surely follow, and here he was unable to move, struck dumb by the thought of being in a powerless hospital surrounded by countless clueless ponies whose countdowns to expiration had all started ticking down.

He barely registered the noise the first time it reached his ears. It was so faint, so obscured by the wailing machine beside him, he half-believed he’d imagined it. When it came again, though, he could no longer ignore it: metal clattering against metal, somewhere in the hallway that looked black as pitch from where he stood mutely staring out at it. Surprise compressed into fear, and from there combusted into anger. He wasn’t alone in here. Someone else was in the hospital. And Celestia help them, that someone was going to answer for this.

Sparks pushed away from the wall too hard and careened back onto the dias, bouncing off the edge of the table and jostling the limp, rubbery leg of the stallion still fastened onto it. He stared down at the corpse as the edges of his vision went red, then threw open a nearby cabinet and dug around inside it until he found a sheet to cover the body with. Once that was done, he shoved into the open door hard enough to send it careening back into the wall with a resounding crack. He stood waiting outside for one second, two seconds, five... and he heard it again. Creaking metal. Squeaking hinges.

A wheelchair, ditched in the hallway who knew long ago, rolling slowly into view from around another bend a few yards away. He could see a figure shambling away into the shadows behind it. They hadn’t noticed him yet. He was about to change that.

“Hey!”

The pony was close enough to be in earshot, but didn’t even miss a step as they continued their plodding journey down the hall. There was something odd about the way they were walking, like the hallway was tilted slightly and they were trying to compensate for it. As Sparks lurched into a jog again, it occurred to him that this might not even be another staff member, that it could very well be a patient trying to find someone to help them. Once he got closer, he saw the tattered gown hanging off their flanks and the loosened bandages trailing from their legs. He lowered his tone a bit and called to them again.

“Excuse me, I... I’m Doctor Sparks, I’m assistant chief of surgery. We’ve had a power outage and I need you to... hello? Hello, can you hear me?”

Still, the patient didn’t respond. It seemed to be a mare, as best he could tell, and with that clarity came a similar recognition of why her pace through the hallway was so odd. One of her hind legs was bowed out at a sickening angle, the bone clearly broken at the joint and not set with even a basic splint. The hoof dragged uselessly behind her, scuffing and bobbing against the floor as she clumped forward, and Sparks could hear her muttering to herself beneath the skittering noise.

A chill rose up on the back of his neck again. A normal pony would be lucky—or perhaps unlucky—to be conscious with an injury like that, let alone mobile. “Ma’am?” he said, no longer strong enough to let out much more than a whisper. “Ma’am, are you all ri–”

The mare’s breath hitched, and Sparks stopped dead in his tracks. She had frozen no more than ten yards ahead of him with her head low and her legs still as stone. It seemed for a moment she had even stopped breathing. Then without warning, she twitched again, and her broken leg scuffed at the floor. There was something wrong with her neck. Her head shouldn’t have bobbed that much. He should’ve been able to see it above her torso.

She turned around.

Sparks's mouth went dry, and his throat sealed over and stopped up with a silent scream. The mare’s head stayed suspended over her chest for a moment, then tipped over and sagged sideways in front of her shoulder, swinging back and forth at an almost perfect right angle at the end of a neck that had been snapped cleanly in two. Her mouth hung open under widened, veinless eyes, and from deep within her throat, her hoarse, wheezing voice resurfaced.

“Daaaaaah...”

Sparks tried to breathe, but his body wouldn’t obey. He stood staring at her, gasping for air that wouldn’t come, fighting against legs that would not, could not move.

“Daaaaahccck...”

Her moan was pitiful... plaintive. She was pleading with him. Begging him for help. Begging him to help her.

“Daaaahccktooooor...”

Sparks's jaw snapped shut, and his mind flashed blank. The mare lurched forward at twice the speed she’d traveled before, and he tore his eyes away and threw himself into a dead sprint back down the hallway.

His breaths came in searing bursts, each one bigger than the last and yet seeming to pull less and less air into his lungs. The clicking, ear-splitting sound of hoofbeats came at him from all directions, punctuated by an implacable ragged growl that seemed to be getting louder with every step. He had no way of knowing how close the mare who should have been dead—who must have been dead—who couldn’t possibly not be dead—was behind him, and he didn’t bother looking back. He didn’t care to know. He couldn’t bear to know.

Instead he just ran, slipping and streaking across the icy tiles until he reached the operating room again, until he crashed against the frame and slammed the door shut behind him with enough force to shake the whole room. Bits of metal and glass flew away from his hooves as they kept moving without any force to guide them, carrying him past the sheet-covered operating table and leaving him in a sprawling, shuddering heap in the far corner of the room. He scrambled a bit farther under the table, sending more debris skittering away from his uncoordinated legs, and kept unblinking watch on the door, counting off each second that went by without a sign that the mare had seen him come in here.

One.

Who was that?

Two.

What had happened to her?

Three.

What had happened to him?

Four.

What the hell was going on in here?

Five.

Sparks leaned his head against one of the support struts bolting the table to the floor. The cold steel gave him something physical to hold onto, something to anchor him down and clear out his mind. He let his eyes fall shut long enough to fill his lungs and empty them, and the piercing knot in his chest loosened ever so slightly.

Ten.

Something had gone horribly wrong. Not just in the hospital, but maybe in the whole city. The hospital staff was gone, vanished or imprisoned or something unimaginably worse, and in their stead they’d left... well, they’d left him. For whatever reason, he was still here, trapped in a ransacked OR beneath a stiffening, mutilated corpse and running from some unholy creature he had no way of escaping from.

Fifteen.

Unless he’d actually been quick enough. Unless she really hadn’t seen him come in here. Unless, provided he stayed out of sight long enough and waited for her to wander off, he could sneak out of the wing and make it out to the city proper to find out what was really going on. He took another breath, and his pulse finally began to slow. He was safe in here. He could wait her out in here. He could just–

Twenty.

The impact against the door was titanic, the frame groaning and the hinges shrieking in pain as they desperately tried to keep from breaking apart. Sparks's head banged against the table, and he cried out in equal parts pain and terror as stars floated in his eyes and sawdust sprinkled down from the door in front of him. Had she heard him yell? Did it even matter at this point?

The door shook again, and the deafening crack of splintering wood was even louder this time. With limbs carved out of stone, Sparks pulled himself up onto his hooves and faced the door, backing away without any thought or intention until his rump was pressed into the cabinet in the back. There were no windows in the room, nowhere else big enough for him to hide. He could attack her... and do what? Break her neck again? Tear off the head of a monster that clearly didn’t need it to pursue him?

A third collision rattled through the room and vibrated in his bones, and a jagged fissure split open down the center of the door. On the next hit, she’d break through. He’d have to run again. Sparks gritted his teeth and steeled his legs. He braced a hoof against the cabinet to give him leverage, and lowered himself into a runner’s crouch. And he waited.

But the final blow never came.

He waited ten seconds, twenty, a full minute, and the door held firm. With every moment that passed, his head grew lighter, and a buzzing keen grew louder in his ears. He swiveled his head around and let his eyes dart across the room as much as he dared, and eventually he realized the noise’s source. The EKG machine was still on, still moaning in alarm at the flat green line blazing a constant, redundant trail across its tiny monitor.

He slapped his hoof against the control panel on the wall, and when he finally managed to cut the machine off the silence nearly knocked him off his hooves. He’d be so concerned with the mare in the hallway that he hadn’t even registered the sound in the background, and now that it was gone it felt like a hole had been cut in his head and been left to eat outwards through the rest of his body. Once again, only his own breathing cut through the suffocating hush, along with a low, barely audible throbbing noise that seemed to be coming from deep beneath his hooves.

He’d thought before of leaving the operating room, of slinking away once it was safe outside and searching for somepony sane enough to explain to him what he was dealing with. He harbored no such heroic ideas now. Right now, all he could think of doing was standing here with his eyes closed, leaning against the wall and just breathing in and breathing out. Listening to the gentle pulse of the noise down below him. Feeling it reverberate up through his hooves and tingle in his stomach.

Was it getting louder?

Sparks opened his eyes and took a breath... and this time it echoed. Just like in the hallway, the noise from his body repeated a moment later. A moment too late. The pulsing was in the walls now, an immense heartbeat amplified by the very building that seemed to contain it. It was getting faster too.

His lips parted and he took another breath. The echo came two seconds late. With every pulse, the overhead light flashed a little brighter, painting the walls a cleaner shade for a split second at a time. Sparks turned his head and scanned the room, but there was nopony else inside with him but the stallion on the table, still covered with the sheet in the same place Sparks had left him.

One more breath. The echo came almost right on top of it.

It wasn’t the light overhead that was making the walls brighter. The walls themselves were glowing, pulsing with some unknown energy that grew in strength every time it surged through the building. In between flashes, Sparks watched the sheet on the table. The fleeting, quickening pulses made it look like it was moving, like the stallion beneath it was still thrashing around without the influence of a functioning heart.

The noise pressed down on him from all sides. The flashes were almost blinding now, and in the last second before he was forced to squeeze his eyes shut, Sparks turned his gaze towards the stallion’s covered head.

He held his breath. The echo came anyway.

The pulsing stopped and the light exploded with a colossal boom. And in perfect sync with the reflected sound, he saw the portion of the sheet covering the corpse’s mouth flutter.

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