The smell was the first thing that hit us. It was ’trosh, worse than garbage day on the hottest day of the summer. It was worse than a sewer backing up. It was both of those things at once.

It took us a minute to get our bearings after the smell hit us, but when we did we looked up and realized that there were lights on. I could hear, under the sounds of yelling and moaning, the sound of a machine hum, a big generator. I could hear other machines buzzing away.

After blinking in the light, I looked down. There were people everywhere. The ones from the boat faded into them. There were blue rubber mats on the ground, kind of like I started seeing slung across people’s backs when the Jillian Studio opened up in the neighborhood. But these weren’t fancy Jillian Studio people’s mats, they were some state-issued variety, thin and dirty. People were lying on them and sitting on them. They were lined up all down the hall.

I felt resistance on my arm. The boy was standing dead still, pulling me back. He didn’t want to go any farther. I couldn’t blame him.

“It’s okay,” I leaned down and whispered in his ear. But I was sure it wasn’t.

On either side of the hallway were classrooms. We peered into the high window on one of the doors on our left and saw hospital beds on wheels and people in them and machines next to them. The people were old and wrinkled and looked like they were completely unconscious, except for one who kept repeating, “Let me go home, let me go home, let me go home.” In the corner of the room, there was an empty bed with bloodstains on it. There was one person dressed in white moving from bed to bed, checking tubes, checking pulses. I turned the handle of the door and opened it slowly.

“What’s going on here?” I called to her.

She turned to me with a scowl on her face.

“Can’t you see I’m working? Do you think I have time for questions? Find somebody with a uniform on and try to ask them.”

Suddenly a scream erupted from the throat of one of the patients. It was long and drawn out and high pitched. It went on and on. I backed out of the doorway, pulling the kid with me. I shut the door behind us. I turned to see Jaden looking wide-eyed around the hallway.

“We have to get out of here,” he said. I looked down the hallway where he was looking and saw two people waling away at each other with their fists. As I watched, one man’s face bloodied as he took hit after hit to it. He fell to the ground where the other man started kicking him. Nobody came to break it up. In little pockets in the hallway, there were families with children trying to pretend it wasn’t happening, looking down at games set up before them, or at phones that were still working. The kid at my side burrowed his face into me. I rose my arm up and put it around him as the man on the floor’s face became unrecognizable as anything human.