The storm didn't just arrive. It descended. One minute, Oaktown Hospital was baking in a flat, humid June afternoon; the next, the sky had turned the color of an old, deep bruise.
Inside the maternity ward, Dr. Peters was already sweating through his scrubs, and it had nothing to do with the weather.
"One more, Elara. You're doing great. Just one more good push."
He was lying. He was a man of science, and the woman on the table in front of him was a living, breathing, and currently dying insult to every textbook he'd ever read. Three years. This child had been in her womb for thirty-six months, a medical impossibility that had made Elara a pariah, a whispered-about freak. The scans had been a nightmare of false starts and unexplainable pauses.
Now, the delivery was its own special kind of hell. The baby's heart rate was a frantic drum, and Elara's vitals were a cascading failure.
"I... can't," Elara panted, her voice a reedy, distant thing. Her eyes, wide and dark with a terror that went beyond pain, weren't on him. They were fixed on the window, where the rain was lashing the glass. "It's here. The storm... it's in the room."
"Elara, focus on me," Peters commanded, trying to keep the tremble from his voice. "Forget the storm. We're right here. We're going to get this baby out."
A nurse, Davies, a young woman still new to the job, shot him a look of pure panic. He ignored her. "Vitals?"
"Dropping, doctor. She's... she's crashing."
The word "crashing" was punctuated by a sound he'd never heard before. Not the wind, but a low, subsonic thrum that seemed to come from the building's bones. His ears popped. The air pressure in the room was dropping.
The sterile, fluorescent lights above the bed began to flicker. Not a gentle fade, but a violent, arrhythmic strobe.
Click-dark-click-dark-click-dark.
"What's happening?" Davies cried out, grabbing the bed rail.
Dr. Peters saw it. He saw the heart monitor, its steady green line dissolving into a blizzard of static. He saw the drip-feed of the IV stop. A single drop hung suspended from the needle. He saw the rain on the window, frozen against the glass.
He tried to say, "Call a code."
The sound wouldn't come out.
It wasn't that he was mute. It was that sound itself had ceased to exist. He saw Davies's mouth open in a perfect, silent 'O' of a scream. The thrum was gone. The wind was gone. The beep of the monitors, the rain, the frantic orders—all of it, gone.
It was a perfect, pressurized, absolute void.
Time had stopped.
He was frozen, forceps in hand, a statue of a doctor. He could only move his eyes. He saw the droplet of IV fluid, unmoving. He saw the terror frozen on Davies's face. He looked at Elara. Her body was arched off the table, a single tear tracing a path to her temple, and in her eyes, he saw a terrible, final understanding.
Then, the main light directly above her popped.
Darkness.