The Moxy Byrd

Chapter 3

5

Amia woke, screaming and panting. Her eyes frantically searched the room, looking for something familiar. Bright. It was too bright. A nurse darted in and quickly checked her over. The sudden movements, combined with the throbbing fluorescent lights were too much. Amia began to retch. There was nothing to bring up, so she dry-heaved painfully. The nurse, who smelled strongly of something sweet and flowery, patted her back. Amia couldn't stop gagging.

Another nurse with long curly black hair was using a syringe to put something into the tube attached to her arm. Amia wasn't sure what it was, and she tried to sit up and pull the tube out. The woman pulled her hand away from it. "Don't touch ... darlin'. You're gonna ... it ...." Amia helplessly closed her eyes as the other woman put a big cup of sorts over her mouth and nose. It smelled horrible and was making a painfully loud hissing noise. She tried to pull it off of her face, but the nurses held her arms down. Her brain went cloudy. "Daddy..." she sobbed.

• ● •

Tony was having a horrible day. Hours after the Dome fell, the military had arrived and immediately requested all available EMTs to be on call to help with the crisis. Crisis might not even really be the right way to describe whatever it was that was happening. It hadn't even been a day, but the sudden appearance Domers had already brought a thousand complications with no clear solutions.

For one, there was no way to know what diseases might lurk inside the Dome. Some concerned citizens had called for the whole area to be locked down until it could be better studied. But many of the Domers were experiencing too much physical trauma at the moment to simply treat on site. The sunlight was the most pressing problem, but most of them were also malnourished, and several had significant illnesses that needed immediate treatment. Tony had been sent out three times already.

The inside of the Dome, which he had spent countless hours of his childhood discussing with friends, had turned out to be sad more than anything else. The pale, yellow-green plants were spindly and stunted. The houses that he'd seen were like something out of a history book. The people were thin and sickly. And now it was crawling with soldiers.

The Domers cowered in their shacks and huts, eyes unblinking, mouths hanging open. They seemed too afraid to speak, too afraid to make eye contact with him, and too afraid to do much more than nod vacantly when he gave them instructions or asked questions. The hazmat suit the hospital had made him wear had probably not helped.

Add to all of that, the mobs of panicking citizens of Wytheville. The realization that there had been a whole unknown civilization living right next to them was leading to chaos. The zealots and conspiracy theorists had come out in droves, climbing onto buildings and declaring the end of the world, getting drunk and falling off of any number of high places, and wandering out into the wide stretch of desert that ran along the border of the Dome lands. The military had attempted to put up barricades to restrict access, but it was almost impossible due to the amount of area the Dome covered.

Tony was sitting on the bumper of one of the ambulances with his co-worker Carl. "Nuts today, huh?"

"End of the world, I guess," Carl muttered. "Just picked a guy up an hour ago who got bean-bagged for dressing up in one of those inflatable sumo wrestler costumes and running around Wal-Mart screaming about the apocalypse."

"I was supposed to be off today."

Carl nodded. "Wonder what the hell was going on in there."

"Yeah." Tony thought about all those starving, quiet people and shivered.

• ● •

Amia awoke a second time, only to realize that she had been tethered to her bed by her wrists. The chemically smelling mask was still on her face, hissing softly. The strange black machine to her right was still beeping as a bright green light jerked up and down across it. The florescent lights constantly flickered. People were shouting down the hallway.