It's a lot to take in. Seconds pass.
Then I spread my arms. I lock the horror down inside and plaster a smile to my face, stride over and gently hug the zombie-like man who wants to speak to me.
"God, Amo, I don't believe it," he says, and starts to cry. Up close he smells like death, worse than any zombie I've seen. His back feels like the grille on a car radiator, row after row of painfully wasted bones sticking through a thin layer of skin. His face is nearly a peanut of dehydration, so fragile, every curve of the bones in his face sharply outlined.
"Welcome home," I tell him. It's a line I've used numerous times, but never like this, and it rings curiously hollow. "We've got hot dogs, we've got soda pop, we've got popcorn."
"Amo," he mumbles against my shoulder through the tears. "Help us, please."
I lower him to the sofa beside an older dark-haired woman, just as thin, who is staring up at me with big, fear-widened eyes. She's wearing a new black jacket over a torn black evening gown of some kind. I glimpse red marks and bruising on her bare white thighs. "Is it really you?" she asks in a dry and raspy voice.
Lara drops by her side, resting one hand on her knee, one on her back. The woman doesn't even seem to notice she's there.
"It's me," I say, "you've come to the right place. You're safe."
She nods, then smiles a wide grin revealing perfectly white teeth. "I forgive you," she says, totally calm, almost blissful. "For Cerulean." Then her eyes roll back in her head and she collapses backwards.
Lara catches her, stares at me, and I stare back, but before we can say anything the man at my side drops to her knees and starts to shake her and cry.
"Abigail," he says, rubbing her shoulder and face, "no, wait please." He looks up at me with those wide dark eyes and begs. "Please do something, help her!"
Lara already is, laying the woman's withered legs out on the sofa and tearing her jacket and gown open to reveal a sunken chest dappled with dark bruises and old scars.
I flinch. My head's not working properly. Did she say Cerulean?
"She's not breathing properly," Lara says, "Amo, get Cynthia, get Adonis, get Ozark." She speaks without looking up, while setting her hands in position over the woman's breastbone. "Just get everyone, we need clean towels, hot water, clean rations, all the med crash kits, maybe an AED."
She looks up at me for second, then jolts me to action with a sharp, "Amo!"
It's enough, and I'm already moving before she looks back down to start emergency CPR. I grab my walkie-talkie and dial the button for our siren.
The wireless command starts our warning klaxons wailing, out in the forecourt mounted to a pillar, up on the rooftop overhead and scattered throughout our little community's complex. The sound wails out into the night.
WEEE AAAW WEEE AAAW
We've drilled for this, practiced it many times, but there's nothing like the heat of emergency to make it terrifying and fresh.
"All stations, it's a code two," I call into the walkie, "I repeat a code two, this is not a drill. Feargal we need your squad up on the roof looking out, Chantelle you're on immediate patrol, expect some incoming. Cynthia, Adonis and Ozark scrub up fast and get to the lobby right now, we have an influx of some twenty badly wounded survivors. Everyone else get down here too with all the clean towels, water and meds you can muster. Now, people, repeat this is not a drill."
A chorus of yesses comes back at me, as groggy people drag themselves up from the depths of sleep to answer their walkies. My signal went out to them all, overriding any other message. I repeat the whole command while I drop to my knees and take Abigail's wrist to feel for a pulse.
"Is Cerulean with them?"
The voice comes through on the walkie clear and sharp, louder than the others. Anna. I stand up and whirl in a circle scanning the lobby. It's carnage in here, a battlefield surgery with people moaning and crying and only a few harried and uncertain volunteers to tend to them, none of them really knowing what they are doing.
I don't see him.
"Get down here, Anna," I say into the walkie, "everyone get here now, we need all hands on deck."
WEEE AAAW WEEE AAAW calls the klaxon.
I hook the walkie into my belt and start running. I pat Ravi on the shoulder as I pass him. "Come with me," I say.
His face is pale and afraid but he nods, stops wrapping bodies in silver foil recovery blankets and runs after me. How many of these people are dying right now, I wonder?
We break out of the fog and run down the hall to the medical supply 'cupboard', actually the smaller indie screen 5 now filled back to front with bandages, surgical equipment and medicine.
I flick the lights on and run down the aisle to the place row D used to be, before we stripped the seats out. Now there are metal shelves with hundreds of intravenous drip bags hanging, and I grab two full armfuls of them along with two boxes of needles. "Two more," I say to Ravi, and he grabs another bunch. We dump them in a waiting cart like we're collecting items in the Deepcraft darkness, then I race on to collect five crates of water bottles, two operating kits, three packs of liquid antibiotic ampoules, a big jar of iodine, lots of small tables, rubbing alcohol, an Automated External Defibrillator in a bright red plastic case, and several big fluffy packs of gauze and twenty-odd rolls of bandaging.
I'm no expert but this is what we drilled. I race out with the cart and back to the lobby with Ravi at my heels trailing more drip bags and tubes.
"Macy, Farin, Christina," I shout and point at the cart. "Get drips into the ones you can. There's more water here, use alcohol on towels for cleaning up the wounds." I turn. "Ravi, fill up two of the soup boilers with boiling water and roll them out here, quick as you can. Wire them up to keep them hot. Did you get that?"
Ravi nods and runs off while the others gravitate towards me. I snatch up the red AED box and bolt back to Lara. Soon Cynthia and Adonis, both trained nurses, and Ozark our resident surgeon will be here, but until then it's just us and we need to do what we can. I've drilled enough to know the first few minutes after rescue are the hardest on the body, when the shock of survival hits and people die of relief. We need to stop that from happening.
I drop by Lara's side with the box open.
"Anything?"
She rises from giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation with bright blood smeared on her lips and face. There's frothy blood all over the black-haired woman's neck, and the man at her side is staring and squeezing her hand.
"I think it's TB but I can't be sure," Lara says. "Her heart's hardly beating, it skips and starts again. Do you know how to use that?" She points at the AED. I don't, not anymore than the drills have taught me to, but that's easily as much as anyone else here and we haven't got time to wait.
"No," I say, then crack the seal, open the case and start unspooling cables. There's a small digital readout atop a central plastic bulge that contains the battery pack, a big red button reading CHARGE, and four cables sticking out, two red and two yellow, each with peelable sticky pads on the ends. "Peel those off," I say, handing the red cables to Lara. "Stick them to her left side over her heart."
She gets right to it and I do the same with the yellow cables. Underneath the peeling plastic there's a conductive jelly coating, which adheres slightly to the woman's palsied skin.
"Done," Lara says.
WEEE AAAW says the klaxon outside. The lobby doors slap open and someone runs in.
"Macy!" I shout, too focused to look up. I'm sure she'll guide this new person in to the work that needs doing. No drill can prepare you for the stink, for the horror of so many suffering people, but we've all seen bad stuff before. Every one of us is a survivor.
"Clear," I call, unclasp the man's hand from Abigail's, then push the big red button in the center of the case. It hums, clicks, the small readout blips once, twice, then sends a jolt down the cables and into Abigail's body that makes her jerk up off the sofa.
"It's working," I say, "don't touch her."
WE
EE AAAW says the klaxon, and the doors slap again. The machine clicks, beeps then sends another kicking jolt.
Beep beep, the machine says. Beep beep, a pulse line says, then goes away. The man is curled on himself like a clutch of broken straws, so thin and wiry, staring like a terrified child.
The AED jolts her again then powers down. Abigail's pulse is gone.
I look at Lara and she looks at me. So that's it. It's only the second death in all of our history in New LA, after Julio killed Indira, and it stings like a bitch. I see that same feeling in Lara's eyes, but there's no time now to mourn.
"No more," I say, and Lara nods, then we're both rising and moving, grabbing up drip bags and needles, water and alcohol swabs, and starting the business of saving what lives we can.
2. PETERS
It's a nightmare that lasts long past the dawn, as one by one the twenty-odd souls delivered in a battered old white panel van pass through the best of care we can offer. They are all hideously malnourished, wasted to dry and emaciated sticks, though some are worse than others, with badly-fused broken bones, deep trenches of scars and burn marks that tell of years of constant abuse.
It is hard to look at. At one point Ozark operates on a young woman entering shock-induced labor, performing a Caesarian to rescue a tiny, stillborn boy-child from a deeply bruised womb. The infant has broken legs and a fractured skull and could never have survived. The mother, a Canadian woman called Tina, sobbed and clawed so hard she had to be sedated to protect her from herself.
We lose a broad-shouldered, bearded man whose name nobody knows, to heart and renal failure sometime around four, despite Ozark's best efforts at open-heart massage. He stands there in the middle of the lobby with blood up to his elbows and declares time of death, and we cart the body out.
We lay the big guy with Abigail alongside their van. Inside it we find three more corpses lying in the back, their bodies cold and stiff with rigor mortis.
"Who the hell are these people?" Anna asks me as I come back in.
I don't have an answer.
Outside the sun rises. Generators power up to start air conditioners, while the soup boilers bubble with steaming water. Old wounds are cleaned, stitched and bandaged as our three medical professionals work their way through the ranks of bodies like pickers on a Yangtze packing line. Antibiotics are administered, oxygen canisters carted in and applied via breathing masks, electrocardiogram machines watch over three hearts with irregular beeping, while hastily trained volunteers run blood tests on seven who may be diabetic.
Drip stands sprout up like saplings in spring. Steadily vital salts, fluids, nourishment and medicine are instilled into this mass sickness. The bulk of New LA, moving under ad hoc directions as best we can, flurry like blown leaves from patient to patient, swabbing down filth and stains with alcohol and replacing foul and ragged clothing with warm, sterile gowns. We roll in folding beds from our stores and supplement with winter blankets. We offer comfort and succor to people who can barely speak, who are barely able to breathe.
There are many broken arms, torn muscles, deep tissue damage. There are shoulder joints fused in an extended, locked position. Around 10am Ozark pulls me to one side.
"I've never seen anything like this," he tells me in a low and breathy voice. He's paler than ever, and sweat drips down his face. I have no illusions I look any better. "Amo, they look like something the Nazis might have done, like medical experimentation. It's the contents of a torture chamber turned to the air."
I nod and rest a hand on his shoulder.
"I know. It's a mess. You're doing amazing work, Ozark. We would have lost at least three more if not for you."
The compliment rolls off him. He's seen fields full of the dead walking, like all of us, but this is a different kind of thing. Over the hours that we've been here in the thick of it, I've been steeling myself to what it means, and there can be no question. This is the result of prolonged torture, of people suffering for months and years under the hands of a monster.
I don't want to say it was Julio. I don't want to think about Cerulean, or whatever he did to earn Abigail's forgiveness. I've checked every face three times and the bodies in the van too, but he isn't here. I've seen Anna doing the same thing.
"Shoulders fused like that?" Ozark goes on. "I don't even know if that's something we can repair. I saw a show about old religious guys in India once, who forced their bodies into weird positions then refused to budge for years, and it looked like this. Joints calcify. It's abnormal medicine, not the kind of thing you encounter even in a big city hospital. Perhaps a surgery might do it, of course I'll need X-rays, I'll need to read up on the procedures, but I'll have to crack the bones apart first with a mallet. Jesus, Amo."
I steady the big man with my hand on his shoulder, and guide him to look into my eyes. He's bigger than me but he never killed another human, that much is obvious. He's a gentle giant, father of three daughters who all turned when the infection struck, and that loss has left its mark on him like a hole through the middle. He didn't fight Don or shoot himself in the head, because he never had to.
"Look at me, Dr. You see me? Focus on the now. We're almost done with the emergency; fixing shoulders will be another day. Today you've done excellent work, and New LA is indebted to you. Don't think about anything else, OK? Think about the work and get it done."
A tear leaks from his eye, but he rubs it away and nods. It doesn't take long for any of us.
"What next?" I ask him, putting the ball back in his court. He looks around.
"Stitching," he says, pointing at a woman on the outer edge of the oblong of beds we've assembled. He points again. "Burns treatment there. Deep tissue massage here. We're waiting on blood test results for some, they may have gone septic. But this level of malnourishment? They should all be dead, Amo. If it weren't for the T4 virus in their cells, doing whatever the hell it does, I think they would be."
I grin. "It's nice to have some allies, right?"
He snorts. Some of the fog in his eyes begins to clear. "Cynthia and Adonis have been amazing. They've kept me on point throughout."
I nod. I'm not surprised. Cynthia is a rock, and well-loved in New LA now she's stopped making racist cracks, while Adonis is exactly the handsome, charming rascal you might expect from his name. None of them shirk from what needs to be done. "Tell them that," I say, "and finish up. We'll have a meeting at noon. Pass that along too."
He nods. He's got direction again now. He moves off to work on the burns victim.
I look across the room and pick out Lara, kneeling next to a fevered-looking man with his arms frozen up around his ears, dabbing at his brow and speaking softly to him while he struggles for breath. I find Anna next, by the boilers, preparing a chicken broth with a few others. We have plenty of chickens. She looks up at me and nods.
I get on the walkie and check in with half-Irish Feargal and his team on the roof, followed by mid-west Chantelle on patrol with her squad in their military Jeeps around the campus outskirts, but they have nothing to report. The streets are silent, nothing's moving, nothing's chasing these people at all.
That's a relief.
I gesture Lara and Anna over, then lead them away from the field hospital in the lobby, down toward the screen 4 storeroom.
"It's Julio," Anna says, her first words after we stop to face each other, spoken with utter conviction. "He's behind this, no doubt." I don't bother to argue.
"Or someone very like him," I say. "It's torture, and prolonged. Anna, have you spoken with any of them?"
She shakes her head. "Most of them can't even speak. I think some of them are missing tongues altogether, or they've shriveled up. Others just don't have the energy, and most of them have been unconscious since I came in."
I turn. "Lara?"
"Nothing more than earlier. Mumblings, whispers but nothing solid."
Anna looks between us, sensing something unsaid. Again I am glad that she is back. At this point it would usually be
Lara, Cerulean and me in consultation about the future of our little community. Now Anna takes his place.
"The one woman, Abigail, she mentioned Cerulean," I tell her, "before she died."
Anna's eyes widen, and abruptly she looks ready to rip off heads. Some time in the night her knotted braids came loose, so they're swinging like black ropes on a pirate ship around her shoulders.
"What did she say? Where is he?"
"Let's find out," I say, and lead them back to the man who recognized me at the start.
He's sleeping, tended over by Macy. There's a drip in his wrist, and Macy checks a clipboard hanging from the bottom rail of the bed as we arrive. God, how quickly we civilized the wreckage here.
"It's his third bag," she says, in her rich plains accent. Macy was one of the first to join us, wandering in one day with a KFC bucket filled with actual breaded chicken wings that she'd made herself, plus another bucket of fresh buttered corn. That day the feast was on her. "Usual mixture, plus amoxicillin for good measure. He's actually in great condition, compared to the rest of them. No fusing, no breaks, nothing like that."
She smiles. I know she's just as tired as the rest of us, but she never shows it. She's a damn dynamo and another of the pillars of our community. I've often thought she and Ozark would make a great pairing, but he may be too broken for that. I think they've started playing chess together though, which is great.
I nod. "Thanks, Macy. Did Ozark tell you great work?"
She nods. "Mhmm."
"You deserve it. Thank you. There'll be a meeting at noon."
"Got it, noon." She winks at Anna. "Hey kiddo."
Anna blushes despite herself. I often forget she's the youngest adult we've got here. Truth is, I never really thought of her as a child, not since I first saw her get out of the RV in her cute blue dress. It may be strange to bring her into the leadership so quickly, but she's seen and done more than all these people combined.
"Hey," Anna answers with a quick smile.
Zombie Ocean (Book 4): The Loss Page 3