Chapter 62 – Signs of Death

So this was the plan. The two SWAT guards were outside the bathroom, waiting for me to come out after I finished my business. I highly doubted that they would notice if I took a few minutes longer than usual. This was my window of opportunity. I just needed to take off the quarter-cylinder silver covering of the toilet paper dispenser, and stick it out the window so that I could see the reflection of the male restroom from the female restroom I was in right now, and finally confirm the reason behind the male restroom being out-of-order. My head wouldn’t fit through the window, but just an arm should be fine.

Simple enough, but I needed to consider a few things. First of all, if the first 30 year old patient did cause an incident at the male restroom that made it out of order, why didn’t they increase their vigilance around me?

If I was in the hospital or government’s shoes, I’d have me locked down like a lab rat, like I was during the first day… wait... I get it. Didn’t the doctor already say the reason why they were being more lax with me now? He said that during the first 24 hours after the seizure, patients were more volatile.

Makes sense. They didn’t see me as much of a threat or person of interest anymore, because more than 90 hours passed since my hospitalization. Whatever ‘volatile’ meant, they seemed to have ascertained that I was not volatile. In fact, if I stayed healthy for just a few more days I would be discharged from the hospital in good health.

Then, if they were being more lax now, there really wasn’t anything stopping me from snooping around a bit. After all, I currently had access to a section of the hospital kept so secret that the national government sent in special forces to keep it under lockdown from journalists and the media. As one of the four or so recovering patients on national news with access to the inside of the secretive hospital wing, I was in a unique position to take advantage of that.

I quietly removed the metallic cover off the toilet paper and walked towards the bathroom window, which was cracked open just enough for my arm to fit through. Clutching the metallic cover in my hand, I stuck my arm through the window.

After adjusting the angle of the cover so that it could reflect into the other bathroom, I squinted my eyes and took a close look at the reflection.

…

Huh?

The inside of the male restroom was blown apart, as if a small pipe bomb exploded in there or something. Bits of broken glass and blood surrounded what seemed to be an origin point for the explosion, in the middle of the restroom.

There were several dry patches in the bloody mess, in the shape of female bodies that were removed from the area. Probably nurses, by the look of it. The dry patches were in the shape of fitted medical scrubs, after all. It was unclear whether they survived the explosion or not, although judging by the smudges near one of those dry patches, I suspected that at least one of the nurses survived.

That must have been why the nurses caring for the first patient were hospitalized. They sustained injuries during some sort of explosive incident in the male restroom I was now peeking into through the reflection of an improvised mirror.

Overcoming my initial shock at the scene, I strained my eyes a bit more and examined the scene more closely, while trying to visualize what might have happened there.

So it seemed like the first patient was in the middle of the bathroom, when he started shouting or something, which got the attention of the two nurses attending to him. The nurses rushed in, only to get hit by the brunt of what seemed to be a pipe bomb explosion.

Or at least it seemed like the aftermath of a pipe bomb. I couldn’t tell for sure. But what else would be able to cause such an awful gory explosion? Nothing came up in my head as I racked my brain for answers. How the hell did the patient get his hands on explosives, in the middle of a hospital? It sounded more and more ridiculous the more I thought about it.

That was a mystery that I wouldn’t be able to figure out at the moment. Even if I managed to sneak past the guards and got to have a hands-on close up investigation of the taped off male restroom, I wasn’t some sort of trained detective or forensic investigator. All I could do was evaluate and guess based on what I saw. And what I saw right now was just blood all over the place, and damage on the sinks and stalls.

Anyway, regardless of what the cause of the explosion was, the patient could not have survived. After all, look at all the blood. There was no way he survived.

That must have been when the government stepped in and quarantined the hospital and blocked journalists and the media from entering. They wanted to cover up what I assumed to be some sort of terrorist incident.

So was that what the doctor meant by volatile? Emotionally volatile and irrational acting during the first twenty four hours after waking up from seizure? Were all the other patients acting crazy as well during the first twenty four hours?

…

It made some sense logically, but something was telling me that that wasn’t the whole story. I flashed back to the tear in my blanket from this morning. You know, maybe it really was my imagination… I could’ve just torn it during my nightmare…

I was reminded of something Bjorn said a while ago, that old sly fox… something about being alone and seeing strange phenomena like leaves falling upwards, but not knowing whether he could trust his senses because he had been alone and drunk for so long, that it was more than possible that he was just hallucinating.

That was exactly how I felt right now. The bloody mess in the male restroom next to the female one that I just saw was not a hallucination. That I was one hundred percent sure of. But the tear in the blanket? Was it really a dimension ripper tear? Could I really trust my senses?

I climbed down from the perch I was using to access the window, having seen enough for the male restroom. Putting the silver toilet paper dispenser lid back where it originally was, I flushed the toilet again and turned on the sink again, just to pretend that I just finished round two with the toilet.

Feeling satisfied that I gathered as much information as I could about my situation given the current tense circumstances, I headed back out of the female restroom and was greeted by the two SWAT team members who were assigned to guard me.

“Hands above your head.”

It seemed like they wanted to pat me down before they would escort me back to the room.

The SWAT member on the left brusquely patted down my pockets and shirt, as if I was going through airport security.

It seemed he was satisfied that I didn’t craft a weapon or anything in the bathroom. We headed back to the intensive care unit wordlessly.

------

The next three days passed rather uneventfully. I couldn’t do much without access to my phone, or any electronics for the matter, so I just sat there all day meditating and killing time.

On the third day, a government official visited me with a nondisclosure agreement, and news that the government was still imposing martial law on the quarantined section of the hospital.

I was given a choice. If I signed the nondisclosure agreement about what happened to me in the hospital, I would receive the 350,000 dollars compensation for my troubles.

Sensing that I was no longer in immediate danger, I decided to press the issue and negotiate for a higher compensation. After some insistence, I had the compensation increased from 350,000 to 360,000. Not bad at all.

Also, the conditions stated that I needed to visit the hospital once every two weeks for a mandatory check up. I was fine with those conditions.

Once everything was settled, the hospital gave me back my clothes and phone, and I was officially discharged. And so my hospital adventures ended without much conflict. That was for the better. This was real life, and it was better to live a peaceful life than an interesting one.

The first thing I did on the subway ride back home was check my phone. I had multiple unread messages from Euphemia, and a few messages from college and high school acquaintances that saw me on the news. No relatives, though. My relatives never really reached out, and the last time I saw them was for my parents’ funeral. Not that I minded much.

Although I had mixed feelings about Euphemia, it was kind of reassuring to know that at least someone cared about me to some extent, and lived close by enough to check up on me once in a while. And plus, she was very cute.

I read her messages first.

Euphemia sent me a ton of messages, especially after she saw me on the news. She wrote something about tidying up my apartment when I was gone. Her last message was a request for me to talk to her in person once I was out of the hospital.

I decided to head to Euphemia’s apartment before I went back home. For the rest of the subway ride, I closed my eyes and took in the sounds of the city, a far cry from the monotony of my hospital life.

Thankfully, the media did not publicize my face, so nobody on the subway recognized me as patient number two, Kim Taek-yong.

It took about an hour to get home. I passed through my apartment complex’s security, then headed up to my floor.

The door to Euphemia’s apartment was open like usual, although this time it was because she was expecting me. I walked into her apartment and called out for her.

“You there?”

“Coming,” she replied.

A moment later, Euphemia emerged from her room, wearing an oversized sweater. There was an unopened can of beer in her hand.

“Here,” she said to me, handing me the beer.

I nodded in appreciation. “Thanks.”

I sat down on the couch and opened the beer, taking a long drink of the icy cold beverage. After living off of nutrient meals for several days, I thoroughly enjoyed the ice cold beer. “So what did you need to talk to me about?”

Euphemia closed the front door, then walked over and pulled down the blinds as well.

Once she was done with that, she walked over to me. “Stand up first,” she said to me tersely.

“Hm?”

I stood up, and the girl circled around me a few times in her oversized hoodie, examining my clothes for some reason. “Hm...”

“What?” I asked quizzically.

“I need you to take off your clothes,” she continued. “All of them. There’s a fresh change of clothes from your apartment over here.”

She took a neat stack of a t-shirt and sweatpants from the side of the couch and handed them to me.

“Why? Do I smell bad or something?”

She shook her head. “Just trust me. And put your old clothes in the bin.”

I changed quickly in her room and came back out wearing the new clothes that she prepared for me.

“Hold on one second,” Euphemia said. She walked into her bedroom, and emerged a few moments later with my dirty clothes. She put them into the washing machine, and turned on the heavy duty cycle.

Once that was done, Euphemia turned to me and finally sighed with an exasperated look on her face.

“Let me cut to the chase,” she began. “You’re being watched.”

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

She shook her head and repeated herself. “I mean that the government has put you under surveillance. When I was cleaning your apartment, I found a hidden camera.”

“That’s why I threw your clothes into the wash.”