"Hey, you remember what I said last year, right? We're Zombie Boy and Ghost Boy. I'm not ever gonna leave you."
"Promise?"
"One hundred percent."
***
In which Alistair fights the monster that possessed his friend alongside his friends, while trying...
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Chapter Twenty-Two: The Hospital Visit
(The Flayed, Pt. 4)
***
It was nighttime when they arrived at the hospital.
All nine of them got out of the car and marched up to the hospital, Hugin remaining in the car—it was too risky otherwise. Alistair hesitated, already feeling the overwhelming aura of death radiating from the hospital, the cold, hollow eyes of the ghosts already turning to him.
Hospitals were a place Alistair hated even more than cemeteries—cemeteries were clearly places of death, where to many it made sense for death and ghosts to be. But hospitals were places were people were meant to be saved, where life should be prominent.
It wasn't.
Ghosts congregated in the hospital, so many it felt like Alistair couldn't breathe, death in the bleached walls, hanging as thickly as the sterile smell, choking him on it, crushing him under it. It was a wonder he didn't go mad the rare handful of times he had to go to the hospital from the death and staring, whispering ghosts.
It didn't help the last couple of times he'd recently been to the hospital, it had been when Will had just gotten out of the Upside Down, and when Rowan, Steve and Mike had to come to the hospital for their injuries—mostly Steve's.
Something lurched in Alistair. He couldn't go in there. It was too much—too much ghosts, too much death—and there was no one he cared about that he could push through it in there, and it was choking him, choking him like Rick did, it was crushing him, he couldn't go in there, he—
"Al?"
Alistair gasped, jerked back into himself, registering his pounding heartbeat, the vice around his chest—when did his chest feel so tight? He looked up and saw his friends staring at him in concern, Nancy and Jonathan farther ahead.
"You okay, man?" Mike asked, looking concerned.
"I... I'm fine," he said, glaring at the hospital, making himself bear it. "Let's set free a possessed old lady."
That seemed to work. Though he still felt concern, everyone was now refocused on what they were here for—letting Mrs. Driscoll go and following her to the source. As they walked up to the doors, El grabbed his hand and murmured, "It's your powers, isn't it?"
Alistair stiffened, but nodded. "Yeah. Lots of death, lots of ghosts."
El looked at him solemnly. "If it's too much, hold my hand and squeeze. Okay?"
Alistair looked at her, then nodded, squeezing her hand, his heart swelling—it was just like he told her years ago, in the auditorium.
"Okay, Jean Grey," he murmured, and together they rejoined the rest of the group, just as they opened the doors and entered the hospital.
