Day 529

The hospital I work at is forever ordering new ambulances as well as borrowing from other areas.
Nobody really bats an eyelid over it but there have been a few whispered tales in the breakroom.
The ambulances are always on call, always fetching emergency patients and never returning.
It was the norm until one returned only to be hidden away by steel construction fencing.

I made the mistake of getting too curious and heading in through the old department exit.
When it arrived I hadn't managed to get a decent look at it but I knew it wasn't our normal design.
As I stood in front of it I took multiple photos with my phone, aiming to search for a matching one.
Honestly it looked more like an army truck with a red cross sticker on it.

I was going to head back the way I came but I noticed the rear doors were wide open.
Yes it was a bad idea but in my defence I was concerned about someone stealing hospital property.
I certainly didn't expect to find a patient still inside, much less conjoined twins.
The look on their face was somewhere between fear and relief.

They spoke so softly, recognising me as a nurse and asking when they were going to be seen.
I asked for their names and they said they'd never been given one.
They didn't even have a name for each other, they just knew who they were addressing.
I saw they were hooked up to some kind of heart monitor.

They asked for it to be turned off, said they were tired and it kept them awake.
How was I supposed to know otherwise when there were no notes with them?
I'll never forget the sound they made as I turned the machine off, that gurgling sigh.
In the following silence I ran back to the breakroom and never spoke of what I had done.

After that I vowed to get into the next ambulance I saw and see where they were heading too.
I had no idea what I was getting myself into but at my next shift the on-call paramedics went off
with me waiting in the back, gazing out the windows as we left the city altogether.
It had taken a lot of bribery to get the two to agree with this but it was worth it to find out.

They eventually went through a long tunnel, under railway tracks.
The paramedics had stopped talking as soon as we reached the other side so I joined them in silence.
As I looked outside everything seemed to have a different tone, everything was tinged green.
Even the people had the hue, dressed from another century and all carrying large cloth sacks.

Our ambulance pulled up outside a school, one of the medics opened the back and led me inside.
There we all changed into different uniforms and headed to a gymnasium full of dying children.
All of them were conjoined to one or more siblings and all had been born that way.
Our mission is to separate them and restore this world to mirror our own, whether it's wanted or not.