“Can we get some volume?” Riley asked the nurses.
“No one can find the remote,” one of them sighed.
The nurses didn’t want any patients screwing with the TV, so they had disabled all the buttons on it. This meant though, that without the remote, no one could change the channel or the volume. The remote was supposed to be kept at the admit desk, but was always being found someplace else.
“Okay, okay.” Anderson broke up the crowd. “We’re the closest hospital to that park, so we’re going to be getting a lot of injured people in here soon. We need to prepare, let’s go.”
All the nurses broke away and got busy.
“What about Mr. Friendly?” Riley hiked a thumb over to where the giant had been.
“The security guards managed to move him elsewhere,” Anderson told her as he led the way to the trauma rooms.
“How?” Riley had always been curious about everything. Maybe that’s why she chose emergency medicine. Curious things always happened there.
“Not without a few bumps, bruises, and a second bite.” Anderson absently scratched at the bandage covering his own. “Apparently, when they got him loose, he ran after one of the guards. The guard managed to lead him into an empty room, get out, and lock the door behind him.”
“I can’t believe that guy can even stay conscious, let alone keep attacking people so violently. This seems like beyond what PCP can do,” Riley thought about it. “Maybe there’s some new drug on the street. Maybe those other patients who won’t go down took it as well.”
“I thought that too. It is a possibility.” Anderson handed Riley a gown.
“So what’s the plan?” Riley put the gown on along with a pair of safety goggles and a fresh pair of gloves.
“We’re likely to be getting a lot of patients, so we’ll have to work fast and get them out as quickly as possible.” Anderson broke down the game plan, “I’ll be taking trauma room 1, Ford is going to take trauma room 2, and I’d like you in trauma room 3.”
“All right. Who’s doing triage?”
“I think Brown should be on it.”
“You sure he can handle it?” Brown was only a med student. Gifted, but still a student.
“There’ll be nurses, residents, and attendings all over the place, just in case.”
“If we’re expecting a lot, we should put Cender and Guiles together in the suture room. Turn it into a makeshift trauma room.”
“We’re likely to need them in here, but it’s an option.”
Mason walked into the room. “The first ambulance just called in. Sounds like multiple crush injuries. They think she was trampled. ETA two minutes.”
“So close?” Anderson and Riley quickly followed Mason out of the trauma room.
“Apparently they’re having some radio disturbance out there, so no one is co-ordinated. They were just able to call in through the static now,” Mason shrugged.
“Okay. Dr. Bishop, you take the crush injury. I’m going to give everyone their jobs.” Anderson once again scratched at his bandage.
“Sure thing,” Riley started toward the ambulance bay, “and try to get the next shift to come in early. The more the merrier, right?”
Anderson gave her a thumbs up as she disappeared down the halls. All over the ER everybody was moving quickly to prepare for the coming patients. Even the drunk, who often came in and caused a fuss, knew something was up and shut his mouth accordingly.
“Need some help with this one?” Dr. Cender met up with Riley at the doors.
“Sure thing.” Riley led Cender outside. They stood in the bay waiting, both of them shifting feet due to an energy build for what was coming. “If we get way too swamped with traumas, I told Anderson to put you and Guiles in the suture room as a make-shift trauma room.”
“Really?” Cender smiled broadly.
“Guiles would be in charge though.” Riley raised an eyebrow at him. It did nothing against Cender’s smile.
The ambulance arrived in the bay, sirens screaming. It backed up near the doors and the paramedics jumped out. Cender and Riley ran over to meet them.
“This the trampled female?” Riley asked as the back doors of the ambulance burst open.
“What?” The paramedic shook her head. “No. Male, hit by a bus.”
They wheeled the patient out of the back of the ambulance.
* * *
Riley didn’t know how much time had passed as she worked. Once that first patient showed up, they just kept coming. She saw patient after patient, face after face. Tramplings, auto accidents, stabs, bites, and gunshots. One man had fallen off a building, another down an opened sewer grate. One girl came in with her right arm completely ripped off. She had fallen just as the subway train had arrived. They started getting more walk-ins than paramedic rescues as people came in off the streets. Blood, sweat, and broken bones.
And crazies. More and more crazies just kept showing up. Thankfully, they weren’t as big as the giant was, and some were slow and dim-witted. A lot of people got bitten by them before they could be restrained. Riley thought she heard a nurse at one point saying that they were nearly out of bits and gags to jam into their mouths. Supposedly, one of the patients in the waiting room stopped a crazy from biting another by using his sock.
One of the people who ended up under Dr. Riley Bishop’s care had a massive fever along with his life-threatening wounds. It was off the charts; his brain should have boiled. He flat-lined and Riley pronounced him dead. As he was being wheeled out to make room though, he suddenly woke up and started thrashing. He had become like one of the crazies.
They wheeled him back over for Riley to keep working on him. He was still hooked up to the heart monitor though and he was still flat-lined. He was one of the slower crazies and with Mason’s help, Riley was able to take a pulse. She found none. She used her stethoscope to listen for a heart beat or breath sounds. She found none of those either. Just an eerie, hollow silence. By all accounts, the man was dead. Riley backed away from him, breathing hard. She had finally come to realize something.
“Dear God, he was right,” Riley muttered to herself.
“Dr. Bishop?” Mason looked at her with concern. “Riley, you okay?”
The man on the bed managed to sink his teeth into Mason’s hand while he was distracted. Mason swore and shoved the man back down. Riley ran from the room, her heart racing. She stripped off her gloves, gown, and goggles and headed for the drug lockup. There was chaos everywhere. Crazies were everywhere. Riley now knew they weren’t really crazy though. She didn’t want to believe. It was a hard thing to believe, but she couldn’t ignore what she saw. What she knew.
No one noticed when Riley grabbed a box and started filling it with drugs and bandages. Or if they did, they just thought she was restocking the trauma room. The doctors, nurses, paramedics, and police officers were all busy handling the patients. Some of the patients causing problems weren’t even… the others. Riley wasn’t ready to use the word her dad had taught her. After filling the box, she made her way toward the ambulance bay. Outside the doors were a few ambulances, one just off-loading a patient, others waiting for the paramedics to return. Riley climbed into the back of one of the empty ones and took stock of the supplies there. She put down her box in the back and went to the rear doors. She swung one of them closed and it made a hard smacking sound
“Bishop?” Cender suddenly appeared around the side of the ambulance, in front of the remaining open rear door.
“Cender, were you bitten?” Riley was a little frantic. More than a little, actually. Her body was running on a kind of autopilot while her mind played catch-up.
“Bitten?” Cender was confused, he didn’t know. “Riley, what are you doing?”
“Were you bitten?” Riley shouted.
This took Cender aback as she was usually a calm person. “No, no. What-?”
Riley wouldn’t let him finish. “Get in the rig, Cender.”
“Why…?”
Riley was getting impatient. “Get in the rig, Josh!”
Dr. Joshua Cender climbed up into the back of the ambulance with her, his face bunched up in confusion. Riley closed the other door and headed for the driver’s seat. To her pleasant surprise, the keys had been left in the ignition. Riley sat down and started up the engine. She was beginning to pull out of the bay when Cender got into the seat next to her.
“What the hell, Riley?” Cender was upset as he buckled in. Riley didn’t bother. “Where are we going? We’re not paramedics; we don’t go get people from the field.”
“Shut up, I’m saving your life.” Riley pulled out into the street. Cars were jammed everywhere, but the constant string of ambulances and police cars coming through the area had left a clear lane.
“What do you mean by that?” Cender calmed a little. But only a little. It was likely that he was trying to calm Riley down.
“Do you remember when I told you my parents were nuts?” Riley carefully scanned the streets, inching the rig along slowly, so as not to risk hitting any pedestrians.
“Yeah, you said they were crazy,” Cender nodded, “a harmless crazy, but crazy nonetheless.”
“Yeah, well, I was wrong. They were right. Terribly right.” Riley’s voice cracked slightly. It even surprised her when it did that.
“What were they right about?”
“That the end of the world was coming.”
Cender blinked in silence a few times. “Umm… This craziness they have… It’s not from a gene is it?”
“No, Cender, I’m not crazy.” Riley turned down the corners of her mouth and turned the rig down a side street. It was a street that headed away from the park and didn’t have as clear a path as the others. “Where’s the siren on this thing?”
Cender turned it on but didn’t take his eyes off her. “It’s not the end of the world, Riley.”
“Maybe not the world, but our way of life is certainly going to change.” She got the ambulance to jump the curb to get past the abandoned vehicles.
“Why? How is it changing?”
“Look around, Cender. Look around us right now.”
Cender did. He saw the abandoned cars, the panicked and lost people, the fear, and even one of the attackers.
“We’re not close to the park right now,” Riley pointed out.
“You were working a long time,” Cender rebutted. “People have had time to run, hell, even walk, this far.”
“Then why are the attacks still occurring?” Riley asked. “They’re only increasing in numbers, getting worse. Why did the attack happen to begin with? If it was a terrorist thing, why is it spilling out this far?”
Cender shrugged. “What started you thinking about all this?”
Riley sighed. “A patient.”
“What? A patient mentioned it to you?”
“No, he flat-lined.”
“So did several others today.”
“He flat-lined, and then he became conscious again.”
“You misdiagnosed is all.”
Riley shook her head. “What were you doing most of the day? What kind of patients did you work on?”
“I was doing a lot of suturing. A lot of people came in with various lacerations, so I stitched them up and sent them out to get them out of our way.”
“So you didn’t see any of the patients in the trauma rooms? You didn’t see anyone who died?”
“No,” Cender admitted. He seemed almost disappointed by that fact. Almost.
“I had a man come in. He had been shot several times in the chest, and had a fever of 110.”
“110?”
“I checked three times. I tried my best to save him, but his injuries were too severe. He flat-lined and I couldn’t bring him back. I pronounced, and Mason started to wheel him out. The man started to thrash and convulse. Mason brought him back over. He tried to bite people, like those crazies we’ve been getting lately. In fact, he managed to bite Mason.”
“Maybe he was on the same drug. Perhaps one of the side effects is a temporary loss of vitals.”
“I thought that too. I checked for a pulse, breath sounds, and a heart beat. I found none. No signs of life.”
“None?”
“Has anyone been able to check for those things on the other patients?”
“Not that I know of.” Cender was clearly trying to consider other possibilities by the look on his face.
“Do you really think a drug could cause all that, for that long?” Riley pushed him to open his mind. “You saw the giant this morning, the congealed blood. We should have noticed it then, but he wasn’t bleeding as much as he should have been with those wounds. Most of the blood on the floor got there from his guts being dragged around on it.”
“So what are you saying? That he had no heart beat?” Cender laughed.
“Yes.” Riley didn’t find it very funny.
Cender’s laughter died in the face of her seriousness. “What are you thinking? What are you trying to get at?”
“You won’t believe me if I tell you.” Riley wanted him to think of it on his own, but she wasn’t sure he could.
“If I won’t believe you, then let me at least hear your thoughts to give me something to think over.”
“Zombies,” Riley finally spoke her thought out loud. Doing so made even her doubt it, but there was so much evidence.
“Zombies?” A grin tugged at the corners of Cender’s mouth. He was trying hard not to smile, not to laugh.
“If I’m going to be honest with you, yes. I think it’s some sort of infection that makes people very similar to zombies.”
The grin made it through onto Cender’s face.
“Think of the facts,” Riley frowned. “Increase in human bite wounds. A violent insanity. Desensitisation to wounds of all kinds. Congealed blood and vitals with no signs of life. And it’s spreading. Today was just the boiling point, when the number of infected became so high that they’ve spilled out into the public light.”
Cender sat in silence. He faced the passenger window, so Riley couldn’t see if he was still grinning or not.
“And your parents said this would happen?” Cender spoke with an emotion that Riley didn’t recognise.
“Not this exactly, but they always said something along these lines would happen.” Riley turned another corner. As they headed away from the centre of the city, there were more people still driving in their cars. More moving lanes.
“So what are we doing right now?” Cender’s use of the word ‘we,’ didn’t escape Riley’s attention. Maybe he was starting to believe on some level. “Why did you abandon the hospital? Abandon our friends?”
“No offence, Cender, but I would have abandoned you too if you hadn’t shown up when you did,” Riley admitted. Some inner part of her got mad about that. She couldn’t tell though if the anger was for bringing him, or for almost leaving him behind.
“Why?” Cender turned to face her. His face was completely unreadable, a rare occurrence.
“It’s just the way I was brought up. Save myself first, others second.”
“And you became a doctor with that motto?”
“I was hoping to bury that side of me. I guess I haven’t succeeded yet.”
“So where are we going?” Cender looked back out the window.
“My house.” Riley was relieved he had looked away. She felt as if his eyes were boring holes through her. “I have useful supplies there. I also want to call my brother. He works north of here as a pilot, flying wilderness tours. He has a plane that can get us to my parents’ place. If he hasn’t left already.”
“Why your parents?”
“I told you, they saw this coming. They’re prepared.” Riley finally got on a street that led straight out of the city. “But that’s secondary. My house should be safe for a while. The infection shouldn’t be as bad in the suburbs.”
“Pull over.”
“What?”
“I said pull over.”
Riley di
dn’t like where this was going, but she drove the rig onto the curb and stopped. Cender opened his door.
“Where are you going?” Riley thought she might know but asked anyway.
“Back to the hospital.”
“Why? I’m not crazy.”
“I didn’t say you were. Part of me believes you, despite how insane it all sounds. The difference between you and me, though, is that I can’t just abandon everyone. If you’re right, they need to be warned. You said you’re going to your place, right?”
“Yeah.”
Cender opened the glove box and dug around inside. He found a map and a pen and handed them to Riley. “Mark it on here. I’ll convince the others and try to meet you there. Then we’ll go north together.”
Riley quickly marked her home on the map and handed it back. “I won’t wait for you. At least not for long.”
“Just give me a day, two at most.” Cender gave her a smile that wasn’t as warm as it usually was. It was deeper though.
“One at most.”
“Fine.” Cender put the folded map into a pocket and hopped out onto the street. He was about to shut the door.
“Cender?”
“Yes?” Cender held off on closing the door.
“Be careful, okay?”
“Of course.”
“I’ll radio another ambulance to try and pick you up.”
“Thanks.” Cender slammed the door closed. As he started up the street, Riley called in his location over the scratchy radio. She watched him walk away in the rear-view mirror for a moment, wondering if it were the last time she would see him. He was the closest thing to a friend that she had ever really had. Then she pulled away from the curb and headed towards suburbia.
6:
Danny
Danny Cole was shot in the back by BioCat87 with a shotgun. He died instantly.
“Oh, come on!” Danny shouted. “Where the hell did they come from? Guys, one got in the base, they have a shotgun.”
“I got it,” the voice of TheLastLemon came through the earpiece on Danny’s head.
Danny grumbled, but grinned sadistically to himself as he watched Lemon take out BioCat87 on his kill cam. She used a shotgun as well, which made the vengeance even sweeter. Lemon was good at this. For a girl, anyway.
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