Abigail pushed a heavy, beige framed bed down the hall of the North wing, griping tight against its wide set plastic arms. The power had been flickering all night and finally petered out sometime before sun up. She wheeled Sasha’s bed down the dark hall, wheels groaning under the weight. She’d been put in a huge bariatric bed, Abigail doesn’t remember why. Sasha’s tiny, ninety pound body dwarfed by the enormous metal beast, but her bones were too brittle now after years of anti seizure meds to safely move her. Abigail maneuvered the bed into a room on the East wing where the last remnants of lighting remained. She feared what would happen to Sasha without her oxygen. They still had plenty of tanks, but those wouldn’t last long once the power was out. Not with Mrs. Harvey’s COPD making her eat up ten liters per minute just to stay above 85%. Sasha did fine on two most days and needed four liters at best on bad days. Abigail did the math and even with all the tanks and the three ambulances parked out in the bay with their huge 5300 liter tanks, it would only buy Sasha two weeks at most. That’s if there weren’t many bad 4 liter days and without Mrs. Harvey around sucking up 10 liters per minute. It felt hopeless and most nights all she could do was pray that the power would stay on. Just one more day, she thought, every night before falling asleep. But everyday was the same and no one was coming to save them. Not the police or government. No National Guard or FEMA. They were here alone at the end of the world. Abigail spiked and hung a bag of normal saline and attached it to the line coming from Sasha’s arm. She’d been up vomiting late in the night and needed the hydration. There was no shortage of fluids on the unit since everyone who couldn’t eat or drink had long passed. Sasha’s ID bracelet dangled loosely on her frail, thin wrist. With her birthdate printed in large, bold letters, 6/8/2375, Abigail was reminded of how soon she’d be turning ten. And how their world had been dying long before Sasha was born. Even without the medical complications that plagued almost every child born within the last 15 years, they never would have had a chance at a normal life. Not that Abigail’s life has been all sunshine and rainbows, either. At thirty five now, she faintly remembers a world that wasn’t falling apart at the seams. Her first memories of being oblivious to the idea that anything was wrong was around age 13. She remembered her uncle Mark, her father’s eldest brother, ranting and raving at dinner about the storms. “It just keeps getting worse every year.” He pointed to an article from The Rising Sun he had pulled up on his phone. “That’s the third hurricane this month!” Abbey’s father swatted his hand in Mark’s general direction, “Not at that table. Let’s save the politics for later.” Her father always tried to quiet his brother when he got heated. He was worried that Mark’s rants would scare Abbey, but she never put much thought into what he said. She knew Mark liked to follow a lot of doomsday bloggers and podcasters online and he was always posting up nonsense “news” articles from conspiracy websites like The Rising Sun that reported on alien invasions and communists who could control the weather via satellite. He was what Abigail’s mother lovingly referred to as a “cuckoo bird.” Although a harmless one, her mother did warn her that there were much more harmful cuckoo’s out there. And as she got older, the world proved her mother right. Abigail got good at discerning between the harmless cuckoos and the not so harmless. She remembers how so many people older than her parents and her grandparents were always going on about how much worse things were getting. So many storms, so much fluctuation in the weather year to year. But Abigail never noticed any huge changes. There were always at least five or six big hurricanes off the coast every month and tornadoes ravaging through the Midwest into the east every other week. The news was full of reports of some type of catastrophic destruction from an F5 tornado to 50 foot tsunamis. It seemed fairly consistent to her and not at all out of the ordinary. Surely not the stuff of conspiracies. But as she got into her mid to late twenties, things did seem to get worse. Only by a little at first, then exceedingly more and more dire. The first year that all the crops died across half of the country, it was called an anomaly. Then, it happened year after year and farmers began to abandon their farms. One year they had what was referred to as a “100 year flood.” The next, there would be a strange shift and a cold front would come through in the Spring, blanketing everything in five feet of snow for months on end. After a few years, there were food shortages, clean water shortages, then the power started going out and staying out. The electric companies couldn’t keep up with the freezes followed floods. And once they finally got everything back up and running, a tornado or hurricane would barrel through and pull half the poles from the ground and tear the power lines to shreds. They tried wind turbines and solar power, by that only kept a precious few sustained for more than a few days at a time. Abigail remembers eating dinner by candlelight and heating her bath water in a large pot over the fire pit in the winters. Back then, her parent’s were still hopeful and her mother would say how “rustic” it felt in a cheerful voice, like they were on a family camping trip. Most people starting moving south to get away from the cold. Places like Oregon, Washington and the Dakota’s became too harsh to survive without consistent heat. Her family moved to the south end of Texas and she remembers how crowded it felt, they were all packed into once place like sardines, everyone fighting over the same scant resources. When she initially heard about the new space travel initiative, Abigail was hopeful. She thought there was still a chance at a better life, although by then her parents had become cyclical and scoffed at every speech made by any politician given airtime. It may have been by mercy that they both died before their suspicions were validated. Eight years later, they had the second space station fully functional and ready to inhabit. The first was already filled with politicians, military and financial leaders and pretty much anyone from the upper crust of society. No one without money or connections made it to the first or second station. Once the third station was complete, regular everyday people began to hope again. Abigail remembers how her friends would always say they were sure she’d get on one of those ships. They always needed doctors and nurses. But she found out the hard way, they already had plenty of nurses they pulled from hospitals and offices in the wealthy parts of the country. They didn’t want a middle class, single mom who put herself through nursing school on her last few pennies, living off of Ramen and peanut butter crackers. They wanted Mitzi whose parents paid over 100 grand to send her to John Hopkins, not Abigail with her associates degree from a community college in nowhere, Texas. When the ships finally started loading at her meager 500 bed hospital, she stayed along with six other nurses and one doctor. They were willing to take all the staff, but only the most stable patients. And no patients that required equipment, like oxygen. They were too difficult to keep stable on the ship, they said. But Abigail knows they took four other patients on oxygen. Two senator’s parents and the mayor’s wife made the cut, but not Sasha or Mrs. Harvey. They expected the staff to just abandon the rest of the patients as a “lost cause.” Abigail knew she couldn’t and she was relieved that the other’s decided to stay, too. They had a nurse for each floor and one rounding doctor. For awhile, it was enough. Then the supplies started to run out and the power started to fail. They lost all the patient on ventilators within the first year. Then went most of the barely stable ones until the ICU was empty. The next year, less fragile patients went and once they were down to 10 patients in the entire hospital, four of the nurses got on a ship and eventually their doctor left, too. Now it’s just Abigail and Jennifer taking care of two patients each. Jennifer stayed to take care of her ailing mother and Abigail could never leave Sasha here alone, her only child who would never have a chance at a normal life. She would stay here until the power died and pray each day for just one more. She would light candles at night and heat her bath water over a fire in the winter and stay here with her until the oxygen ran out.