April had tried to force them to talk to her. At first, when they said they couldn’t tell her anything, she had pleaded, insisted that she just wanted to know what was happening to her friend. It had been almost three days since anyone had heard from Aps. When that didn’t work she grew increasingly angry, pulling repeatedly at her emergency call cord and yelling for someone to speak to her. They stationed a nurse at her door who would peer in through the porthole window to check she was okay; rarely she would key the code to unlock the door, the airtight seal would hiss as the room decompressed, and she would try to reason with her patient.

The next morning April reached for her phone. If they wouldn’t tell her anything then perhaps the others could search Aps’ things, contact the University, try to get hold of her parent’s details and find out from them what was going on. Her phone wasn’t there. She fumbled around on the floor, swept her arm under the bed: nothing. The room was so small it only took a couple of minutes to search. There was no sign of it. She started to slap the window in her door, shouting for attention, until eventually someone came.

April knew the protocol. In six months in ICU as a kid she must have seen someone unlock the door, release the seals, pull the door slightly towards themselves and then slide it across. When they knew you, when you’d been there for a while and you weren’t showing symptoms, some of them would get a little lax in sliding the door back behind them and would carry out their checks with it open to the corridor. Some of them never did that, even when they’d gotten to know her. None of them had this time. If April had been thinking straight she probably wouldn’t have even tried but fuelled with rage and worry she jumped straight at the nurse as the slid back the door.

As April moved she had a vague thought that maybe she would be able to duck under an arm, squeeze through the gap between person and doorframe. As the door began to slide open she could already see that wasn’t going to work, the space was barely more than a person wide, designed to be either filled with a shut door or a person. There wasn’t supposed to be a gap. In sheer frustration she jumped at the door as it opened and screamed; a combination of her weight and an instinctive, protective, backward step from the startled nurse carried both of them out into the white-walled corridor. April moved quickly, not knowing which way to go, but heading away from the nurse who had started to shout for help.

They’d brought them in separately. They’d all been taken together to a waiting area and then individually led down to their own ICU rooms. She had no idea where Aps would be. April started to frantically look through windows, aware that the nurse was approaching from behind and two other people, both dressed in blue scrubs, were walking towards her from the other end of the corridor. She remembered coming down from that end when they’d brought her to the room, there was a nursing station further up, at an intersection, she thought it just led back to the waiting area. She wouldn’t be there.

The nurse she’d barged past on escaping her room was close, holding her hands up and reassuring her that everything was okay, that she just needed to calm down and return to her room. April nodded her head and raised her own hands in response and took a step back towards her room. As the nurse lowered her arms April broke into a run, sprinting past her up the corridor. She heard footsteps behind her also break into a run now. She didn’t stop at the windows but pounded down the length of the passage, towards a set of double doors at the end. She pushed through those and a set of plastic strips hanging from the ceiling behind them into a room that seemed to be set up as a disinfectant area, a run of showers along one wall, sets of hazmat suits along another. On the opposite side of the room was another set of doors, above it a biohazard symbol and the letters HDU. She didn’t notice the grey box set in to the wall, a small red light above it. The doors wouldn’t budge. People spilled into the room behind her.

April sank to the floor, her back against the immovable door, and wept. They watched it for a moment, wary, before a doctor she hadn’t seen before crouched down in the middle of the room. He pulled his face mask down from across his mouth and nose. April hadn’t seen him before, older, maybe mid fifties, thick black rimmed glasses. He was staring intently at her, mouth fixed in a straight line, expressionless.

“Just tell me she’s okay,” said April quietly.

He was silent for a long time, eyes never leaving her. Eventually he stood up and walked over to her, pulling an ID card from his pocket and swiping it against the grey box on the wall. April shifted forwards slightly as she felt the doors open behind her. He offered her a hand and helped her up before he pulled his mask back up over his face.

“Come on then,” he said. “Your friend is in high dependency. I can tell you more there.”

April looked at him. “Like this?” She gestured at herself. “Shouldn’t I put a suit on or something. A mask?”

He shook his head. “There’s no need, April. Not for you. You’re immune.”