by Volante, KT
When the World Flipped
for the Living and the Dead
K T Volante
A Sci-Fi Novel
When the World Flipped: A Sci-Fi Novel for the Living and the Dead
Copyright © 2018 by K T Volante. All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or translated in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of the author.
Characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Address all inquiries to: www.WhenTheWorldFlipped.com
ISBN: 978-0-999-6655-0-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017963805
Editor: Tyler Tichelaar, Superior Book Productions
Cover Designer: Phillip Gessert
Cover Photographs: Carol M. Highsmith, David Shankbone
Interior Book Layout: Phillip Gessert
Every attempt has been made to source properly all quotes.
Printed in the United States of America
First Paperback Edition: 2018
Published by Cauldron Press
Printed in the United States of America
2 4 6 8 10 12
For my bros, Bobby and Peter, who introduced me to sci-fi at its best, every Saturday Creature Features movie.
Chapter One
I arrived early and braced myself for a long shift in the Emergency Department. I work at Mt. Helena Community Hospital in a small town south of Seattle. With the fall comes the flu, and this year’s flu had hit us hard. Since the flu started, we’d handled double, if not triple, our normal capacity. Strangely, the vaccinated came in just as sick as those who didn’t take the vaccine.
Busy days mean no breaks for meals, sometimes rarely a bathroom break. So today I wore comfortable khaki pants, a short-sleeve shirt, and sneakers. I had loaded my backpack with a lot of granola bars and a water bottle. I had pulled my long wavy hair into a ponytail. I was ready for the day!
The staff lounge, usually loaded with donuts and snacks, was empty. I poured myself a cup of coffee, but it was cold and tasted days old. There’s an old medical adage: “The freshness of the coffee is in direct relationship to the number of patients.” Stale cold coffee meant we were busy once again. I poured the coffee down the drain and walked out to the emergency room. I stashed my backpack under the nurse’s desk and went to see what my assignment would be.
Mt. Helena’s Emergency Department has three large square sections; sections one and two are for general patient care. Each section has eight patient rooms and one nurse’s station. The third and smallest section is the trauma center. It has three large bays, is used for trauma cases, and if needed, as an operating room. It is seldom used for patient overflow. I walked through the hallways and looked at the number of patients. Two to three patients were in every room in every section, and still more were in the hallways. This was beyond overflow.
“Lacey, thank goodness you’re here. Most of the staff is out sick,” said Sharyl, our head nurse. “Here, you need to wear this.” She handed me a facemask.
“You’re kidding? We’re on diversion, right?”
“Nope to both. First, the facemask directive came down from the medical director. Too many sick calls and way too many really sick patients! You’ll get used to it. There are boxes of them all over the emergency department.”
I scanned the hallways. Stacks of disposal facemask boxes and over-flowing garbage containers were everywhere.
Sharyl continued. “All patients, visitors, and staff are to wear them. No exceptions! Change the mask every hour or two. Once the mask gets too damp, it no longer blocks out germs, plus it smells awful! Secondly, we tried to divert to the other hospitals. Believe it or not, they’re as overloaded as we are.
“Four providers are out sick. There will be only two providers for each section, one doctor and one nurse practitioner. Dr. Rossi will be with you. Dr. Kopplen and Jonathan will work Section Two, Dr. Scott and Penny will work Section Three. Rossi and Scott are pulling doubles, so cut them some slack. Most of the nurses have called out sick also—hopefully, only one per section. I’ll be working in Section Two if you need me. Oh, there’s no one from housekeeping. Sorry.”
She walked off quickly. Most days, Sharyl would talk your ear off, but today, she wasn’t chatty. If she had to work as a staff nurse, it had to be bad. I shook my head. It was worse than I had expected. The normal sanitized hospital smell had been replaced by the smell of vomit, various body fluids, and a new smell. I couldn’t place it, but it was horrible. I put my mask on. The news said this was one of the worst flu outbreaks in years, and from the looks of things, it was true.
I walked toward my sections. Patients put their arms up to me for help. It looked like a commercial from a Third World country. Patients were everywhere—in chairs, on stretchers, in rooms, in hallways. They coughed and moaned from every direction. A few looked unconscious, maybe dead, and they were all so pasty gray.
Then a loud metallic crash came from the front section. I jumped. I started to run toward the crash when I heard a blood-curling scream. It stopped me in my tracks.
“Security to the Emergency Department!” screamed the hospital operator.
“Security to—oh, hell, security to….”
This time the hospital operator didn’t finish her sentence.
Two nurses quickly ran past me.
“Hey, what’s going on?”
They never broke stride. I couldn’t imagine what made them retreat so quickly. It didn’t sound like gunfire, I thought. Cautiously, I walked through the many patients toward the noise. I saw an older gent with his hands around a nurse’s neck, his mouth on her face. I stepped back. Security guards tried to get the man off the nurse. The man threw off one security guard after another. I didn’t think that old man was that strong. The bodies made a thud as they hit the wall. He growled and the victims screamed in pain. The same thing happened in another cubicle. This time, a nurse was attacking a doctor. Now I couldn’t breathe. I was frozen in place. This couldn’t be the flu! Whatever this was, it affected almost every patient and staff member. That horrible stench punched through the smell of blood and vomit. It made me nauseated. I had to fight back the urge to vomit.
Confused and panicking, the non-affected started to run; they ran into each other like balls in a pinball machine. Something caught my eye on the floor—pools of blood. If I hadn’t been at work, I would have thought I was on the set of a horror movie. I had never seen anything like this. The sick had become crazed, extremely strong, and violent. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a patient bite and chew on another person. Okay, I thought, time to get out of here!
My head said turn and run, but my feet didn’t move. Only when someone bumped into me as he ran past did my feet get the hint. I turned and ran right into one of those things. She reached for me; her teeth snapped at my arm as she tried to bite me, but I managed to push her away. Her own clumsiness sent her into the wall. Sadly, another person ran by us and caught her attention.
I heard gunshots down the hall. I turned to see the police. I sighed and thought, Help is here. But the infected also saw the officers and attacked them. It took several shots to stop the infected. Blood sprayed everywhere. Then the infected swarmed the police. Now more screams. More blood.
/> “Doctor White!” a shaky panicked voice announced over the intercom.
That was our hospital code for evacuation. Evacuation? Evacuate the whole hospital? It was more than I could grasp. I ran toward the back of the Emergency Department where I found Patricia, one of our nurses, frozen in place.
“Patricia, let’s go. Move your feet! Patricia!”
She just shook her head. Too many of those things came toward us. I didn’t think we would make it out of the hospital. I looked around, and then I saw it—a safe place. The medication room! It had a lock-reinforced door. I pulled Patricia to the locked door.
“Patricia, unlock the door!”
Patricia nodded. We entered, and as the door started to close, I saw Harrison, one of our security guards. He had stopped a few feet in front of the door when he saw the tidal wave of infected and turned to run.
“Harrison, Harrison! Here! In here!” I yelled and waved my hand toward me.
He saw me and ran into the medication room. Before the door completely closed, an arm came around the door in an attempt to open it. Since the arm’s owner growled, we thought it best he or she didn’t come in. Harrison put his full weight against the door and the arm retracted.
* * *
We all breathed easier when we heard the lock engage. We looked at each other, scared and confused. Patricia and I ripped off our masks.
“What’s happening?” asked Harrison with a shaky voice.
“I just got here,” I replied with the same shaky voice. “I was told these people were sick with the flu. But, ah, I never saw or heard of the flu doing this!”
Patricia nodded in agreement.
“The patients yesterday didn’t do this, and we were just as busy. Some of these people have been here for days,” said Patricia.
Patricia was a thin woman in her late thirties, a single mom of two. She was a well-seasoned emergency room nurse, so it was very difficult to rattle her. But she was rattled now!
Harrison’s short haircut confirmed his ex-military status. He was slender, muscular, and in excellent shape. He had a cool head. Often in the past, he had deescalated incidents with hostile patients.
“What the hell is going on?” asked Patricia, weeping.
The small window in the medication room door was a porthole into a nightmare. But it drew us to look out. It was madness out there. A few of the infected hit the door and looked in. They clawed at the door to gain access. We reflexively backed away from the door. Each time something or someone caught their attention, the infected left us. I looked around and saw a paper towel dispenser. I tore off a long piece, cut medical tape, and taped the paper over the window.
We paced in the room. The screams and gunshots still made us jump. We were trapped in this room. But it was better in here than out there. We waited for someone to save us. After an hour, we realized no one would rescue us. We would have to help ourselves.
“Patricia, you know what is in this room; anything we can use?” I asked.
“Use for what?”
“To defend ourselves when we leave.”
“This is a med room; we have medications in here, not guns.”
“Sorry; that was a stupid question.”
Harrison took a deep breath.
“When things slow down out there,” said Harrison, “we have to get out of here. I don’t know what’s outside, but we can’t stay here.”
“I agree,” said Patricia. “If we were overrun by those things just in the emergency room, what will happen when the rest of the hospital moves down here? We gotta get out of here while we can!”
I looked toward Harrison.
“I don’t want to go out through the emergency department,” I said. “Patricia, do you know any other way out of here?”
She thought for a brief moment.
“The next room is the clean utility room. It has a back door to a hallway used only by employees. It’s how supplies are restocked, so it should have less people, or whatever those things are. We can take that hallway to an exit.”
“Good, good. Where does that exit go?” I asked.
Patricia looked away.
“Patricia, think honey; where does the exit go?”
“To Wallace Street. The hallway winds around radiology to the truck docks on Wallace Street, near the parking lot,” she said as she nodded.
“I think we just caught a break,” I said. “I park in that lot. If we can get there, to my car, we are outta here!”
We all sighed with relief. But then we heard screams.
* * *
Patricia walked to the window, lifted the paper slightly, and looked outside.
“I don’t see as many people…things…whatever they are…out there,” she said. “But there are still enough that I don’t think we can make it to the utility room.”
“We wait,” said Harrison.
“Do you think it’s like this outside? My kids are at school; do you think they’re safe?” Patricia asked with tears in her eyes.
Harrison gave her a hug. “I’m sure they’re fine. The teachers won’t let anything happen to them.”
It’s a medication room with medicine, I thought, so if we were in the middle of a massive infection, then medications would be a good thing to take.
I looked around for something to carry medicine in. I found a pillowcase. Most likely misplaced, but I thanked the lazy person who had put it there. I started to open drawers and took out medication that I thought would be useful. When I came to the locked cabinets, I turned to Patricia.
“What’s the code to open these cabinets?”
“1-1-6-7. It’s the code for all the locked cabinets. The code for the utility room door is 1-1-6-8, when we need it.”
I continued to raid the cabinets until I realized I had taken way too much. I dumped out the medication we could get on the outside and gathered up only the prescription medications.
Harrison spoke next. “How’s the traffic out there, Patricia?”
“Same.”
“Shit! My keys are in my backpack!” I realized.
I turned to Patricia and Harrison. Patricia started to cry. Harrison’s eyes darted around.
“Okay, okay. I’ll get your backpack. Where is it?”
“The trauma nursing station under the desk near the small computer. I should go; I know where it is.”
“No!” Harrison said as he shook his head. “It’s me. I would have a better chance against those things. You two get into the utility room and wait for me there.”
I thought of all the horror movies I had ever seen; it was never a good idea to split up. I bit my lip.
Harrison turned to us.
“Patricia, you and Lacey go to the utility room. Watch for me through the window. Are we clear?”
We both nodded. He looked one more time and then signaled for us to get ready.
“Go!”
Just the thought of those things made adrenaline course through my body. My stomach was in knots; my heart pounded. I knew I would have a heart attack. The clean utility room was less than twenty feet away, but it was the scariest twenty feet I have ever lived. Patricia’s hands shook so much she hit the wrong keys on the door lock. We heard noises.
“Patricia…!” My feet moved side to side like I had to go to the bathroom.
“Got it!”
We ran in. The automatic light came on. I noticed the back door did not have a lock. I was worried someone or something could get in. I looked around and saw a wooden doorstopper. At first, I thought it was strange to have a doorstopper there, but then I remembered it would be easier to have the door stay open while supplies were restocked. I wedged it under the door.
“Do you see Harrison?” I asked Patricia.
“No. Nothing but those things.”
I groaned. We waited, and waited.
“Anything?”
“Lacey, I’ll let you know when I see Harrison. This is taking too long.”
I wanted to agree, but I couldn
’t give up on Harrison.
“There he is!” she yelled.
We both jumped for joy.
“Open…the…door!” he yelled.
Close behind him were the infected. We didn’t open the door until Harrison got closer. The second he passed through the door, we pushed it closed. We heard the click of the lock, and then the thud of bodies.
Harrison bent over with his hands on his knees. He threw the backpack at me. I emptied my backpack of all non-essential items and dumped the medical supplies into it.
“Let’s get out of here!” I knew we all wanted to leave this craziness.
Harrison, having caught his breath, said, “I’ll check the hallway.”
“Hmm, you’ll need to remove that wedge,” I said as I pointed to the floor. “I didn’t want any of those things getting in here.”
Harrison removed the wedge and opened the door just a crack. Then he closed the door and turned to us.
“Patricia, you lead until we get outside; then, Lacey, you lead. Have your keys ready. We get into the car and get out of here. Clear?”
Patricia wanted to protest; then she realized why she would lead us out.
“Go!” he said once again.
We started out cautiously at a slow run, but we picked up the pace when we didn’t see anyone. Screams, groans, growls came from radiology.
We stopped where the hallway turned. Someone grabbed my arm. I screamed. Harrison was at my side with his fists ready to strike.
“It’s me; it’s me!” said Dr. Jeff Kopplen.
“What the hell is going on? I was examining a patient when he bit Sharyl—you know, Sharyl, the head nurse. My God, that patient is or was so strong. I tried to pull him off Sharyl, but I couldn’t. And Sharyl, she’s dead!” he said shaking his head. “Wait, are you leaving? I’m coming with you!”
“We’re getting out of here; no time to talk,” barked Harrison.
Jeff was one of our newer young doctors, a real asset to our hospital. Like Harrison, he was tall and physically fit. The staff would tease him about his beard. The man always shaved before work, but within a few hours, he’d have a five o’clock shadow.