Emergency
A story of The Suburban Dead
By T.A. Sorsby
This is a work of fiction. Similarities between any location, character or undead creature in this book and those in the real world are purely coincidental. That said, if you see any undead in the real world, you should still probably run.
All rights reserved. All of them.
Yes, even that one.
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Copyright T.A. Sorsby 2018.
For the NHS and Thin Blue Line.
This book started as a short story.
It ended up longer than I expected.
Bit like one of your shifts, eh?
T
Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty One
Twenty Two
Twenty Three
Twenty Four
Twenty Five
Twenty Six
Twenty Seven
Twenty Eight
Twenty Nine
Thirty
Thirty One
Thirty Two
Thirty Three
Thirty Four
Thirty Five
Afterword
Acknowledgements
One
My mobile was ringing. I knew it’d be The Call.
I was standing in the kitchen doorway, looking into the living room, cast in the dim midmorning light. Dani and Laurel were sat on the sofa, watching the TV. The news was on. Things were bad. But I already knew that – and I knew it’d get a whole lot worse in the days to come.
However, I wasn’t watching the news anchor, or the pictures in the corner, or the scrolling advisory at the bottom of the screen. I was watching them. My housemates. My friends. My little family.
There was a weight in my chest, a great burden that I carried in my heart. I wanted to say that the TV couldn’t tell them everything, that I knew more. But I was sworn to secrecy. There were some things the public weren’t ready to know. Not yet. Not even my family.
‘Katy, your phone!’ Laurel shouted up at the ceiling, not realising I was three feet behind her.
I looked at it, ringing away on the kitchen table, the screen flashing up with the word “Work”, in time with the rhythmic beeping of a heart rate monitor. For a moment, I entertained the idea of not picking up, of letting it go to voicemail and telling Laurel and Dani everything I knew.
I let out a deep sigh.
‘Go on,’ I answered, already able to hear the background chatter of a busy nurse’s station, ‘lay it on me Jerry.’
‘Nurse Cox. How nice of you to pick up.’ Jerry started, making an attempt at our usual banter, but he quickly abandoned it. ‘We’re about to be overrun, K. They’re posting shitloads of police and Sydow Sec to the hospital for security, but we’re short on hands.’
‘Aren’t we always?’ I sighed, already getting myself into the workplace headspace. I’d been expecting this.
‘You know it,’ I heard him smirk, ‘I’m calling everyone today, we’re in emergency protocols. The Trip-C. All hands on deck, no holds-barred medical readiness. Everyone’s pulling together. You coming or not?’
‘Don’t you sass me, Jerry,’ I told him, ‘you know better than to ask. I’ll be there as soon as I can. Is this going to be an overnight deal?’
‘Probably, there’s no telling when it’s going to be over. Emergency hotbunks are on standby. Bring clean knickers.’
‘Shit me…’ I spat, running upstairs with the phone pressed to my ear, the bannister creaking as I hauled myself up. ‘Fine Jerry. I’m packing a bag. When do you need me? Right now? Or do I have a couple hours?’
‘Sorry K, I know its short notice, but we need you quick as you can. Fresher’s have sent a care package, so if you haven’t eaten I’ll save you some, and make sure you’ve got coffee for when you get here.’
‘You almost make me want to be there.’
‘Well…there’s talk…’ he said, hesitant.
‘Don’t keep me in suspense, Jerry.’
‘Nothing official yet, just a rumour. There’s some CDC high-up here and they’re talking about turning this place into a fortress so he can research the virus. There might be a lot of reinforcements coming for the soldiers here, bunch of police already showed up too,’ his voice dropped to a slightly lower, conspiratory tone, ‘this could end up being the safest place in the city.’
‘You almost sound excited?’
‘Be nice to show up to work and not worry about being physically assaulted for one, right?’ he asked, ‘With all the guards around here, people would have to be mad to start some shit.’
‘Hah, well now you’re selling it to me. See you in a few.’
‘See you shortly, K.’ he said, sounding almost like himself for a moment. Almost.
I stowed the phone in my jeans and went to the bathroom, debating a professional touch of makeup. My short platinum blonde ‘do was growing a little longer than I liked – it was getting harder to spike up, but I didn’t feel much like it today anyway.
The side of the sink was covered in Dani and Laurel’s bits and pieces, but I kept all mine tucked away in the cabinets, including a toiletry bag I used for overnights or the occasional holiday. It’d been a while since we did that. Meeting his parents, I think.
As I reached for the little bag, I saw the ring on my finger. It felt like it’d always been there, it took me no getting used to, yet my eyes fell on it now. My “sisters” might have been downstairs, but there was one member of my family absent, and right when I could have done with him the most. I needed to see him. In person. To explain. But there just wasn’t time.
I took the little bathroom bag and went out onto the landing, slowing down before I turned the corner to the bedrooms. The three of us shared the mortgage on this place now, an old student house we’d bought out after graduation. The rooms were a little pokey, but it was homely and extremely affordable – we’d never gone out so much, at least since Laurel got back from her national service.
My room was at the end of the hall, one of the two with a view over the back garden, Dani’s being the other. I pushed open my door and closed it behind me, blocking out the distant murmurings of the TV downstairs.
Unlit fire hazards adorned every surface. Big ones in glass jars that smell like apple pie, little ones in tea-light lanterns that carry a festive, fruity scent, and long tapered ones that burn for hours of intimate, romantic candlelight. I put a fair slice of my salary up in scented smoke every month, but as the knot in my stomach grew, as that vice grip tightened over my heart, I knew even my most potent vanilla and lavender incense wouldn’t help me now.
I threw my toiletry bag on the bed and reached under for my sports bag, a small black duffel, with plenty of side pockets for heaps of carrying space. My hockey kit was neatly folded inside, shorts, sports bra, undershirt, jersey, with my boots in a plastic shopping bag in one of the end compartments. I took it all out, and started packing for a few nights at the hospital. I was probably going slower than I should have been, given the state of things.
See, every medical professional in V
oison takes oaths. Whether you’re a guy like Jerry who, in theory, just works the phones and shuffles papers, or you’re Dr McEwan, Head of cardiology. The oaths are obviously different between the two, but one thing remains the same across the board – the Crisis Code of Conduct, or Trip-C, as we call it. When there’s a Crisis, you need to be there. You’d better be bedridden yourself if you don’t show up for Trip-C.
I’d only ever been called to one of them before, and it turned out to be a false alarm. Big influenza health scare that never quite got rolling, but it familiarised me with the rules.
The shift starts, and it doesn’t end.
That’s basically it. You show up because there’s an emergency, but the emergency doesn’t stop just because you’re tired, hungry, or have body odour that is, of itself, hazardous to public health. There’s a job to do, and you’ve got to do it, no matter how long it takes and no matter how desperately you need to shower.
Of course, this is the Voison Health Commission we’re talking about, so they’re not going to let you “doc till you drop”, as some of my colleague put it. They aren’t ones for putting people in danger unnecessarily, or whipping their staff to the point of nervous breakdown. That’d be insane, right?
People keep an eye on each other. Shift managers and administrators look up from their paperwork every few hours and point at the worst looking sets of scrubs, tell their owners to go away for a few hours, and slump back onto their desks.
During this time, the canteen staff will be supplying you with damn-near intravenous caffeine from the roaming trolleys – in a hospital, even they’re on Trip-C duty, though I imagine their duties are a little lighter than ours, no offense to the catering industry.
I’ve heard stories about people crashing on day two – coffee wears off when they get sent out for a bagel and they pass out in the café. Also heard about a guy who took a sleeping pill on his break to counter the caffeine and woke up with the ward sister throwing a bedpan at him. Story conflicts on whether it was full or not.
I got changed into some loose slacks and a long sleeve top, and threw in some changes of clothes, just in case. Clean undies, comfy jeans, t-shirt, undershirt, along with two fresh pairs of trainers. I found on longer shifts that a change of footwear helped keep my dogs from barking so much.
When I was a paramedic, I’d favoured boots to trainers, but as a nurse, on night shifts I found the clomping and squeaking of my favourite pair made me incredibly self-conscious. I just accepted that every now and then, I was going to lose some footwear to bodily fluids.
If I got some time out, I’d get changed and go to Kelly’s place. He couldn’t know much about what’s happening. I’d have to tell him. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could talk about over the phone.
He’d be worried sick about me as it is. If he knew what was going on, he’d find a way to show up here, stop me from going in. But I take my oaths pretty seriously – and forewarned, as they say, is forearmed.
I know how the sickness spreads. I know what we have to do to keep the patients in check. In fact, I had a damn info pack about it.
I rifled through my jacket pockets, the casually biker-looking one hooked on the back of my door. Out of place amongst my newer many-toothed house keys was a simple, older key. It fit the bottom drawer of the bedside table, where I kept my financial information and work phone.
Not everyone had one yet, just something going into trial recently. The notion was you could log in to the hospital Wireless and access patient records, medical references and receive tasks without having to rely on hard copies or schlepping from one end of the department to the other just for your line manager to tell you what you were going to do anyway. It also got news bulletins from the medical world, and right now, contained some pretty need-to-know information.
There’s an oath about that too, of course. At first I thought it was pretty draconian, but it never came up, so I figured I wouldn’t really have to test my convictions with it. Not until I received a copy of this ebooklet. If this thing hit the papers, the radio, the TV, there’d have been a panic long before now. I know I literally just said forewarned is forearmed, but if the general population read what was in this booklet, they’d flip their collective shits. I accessed my stored files and brought it up.
“ERHR – What We Know”.
That was the title. East Rojas Human Rabies. But it also read a hell of a lot like “What We Don’t Know”. We know how it passes from person to person – it’s in the saliva, and it’s in the blood.
You get bitten, you somehow get blood into your mouth or an open wound, that’s it for you. The race is run, the book is read – and it’s not long before the end begins to show.
Researchers are working on treatments that might help that initial exposure – one had been described as an “immune-response atom bomb”. Promising, with a lot of side effects, but that was early days stuff. Another lab had been working on a blocker, a sort of immunisation agent, active in the bloodstream, but it loses potency pretty quickly.
Neither of those solutions were going to be ready any time soon. They were testing on lab mice last I’d heard from it in Rojas, maybe a fortnight since. Perhaps those labs had been compromised by their own subjects since then.
Either way, once the cold sweats start, it’s past the point of no return. Necrosis from bites sets on within a couple of minutes, and the additional poisons in the blood produced by the dying tissue accelerate the rate of infection.
Anecdotal evidence from hospitals in Rojas suggested it’s possible to amputate a bitten limb and save the patient’s life, but the timeframe speaks about minutes between the biting and amputation, pure barber-surgery, no time for an ambulance and an operating theatre. No time for anaesthetic – just a bonesaw and a belt in the mouth.
We know that those who succumb to the infection lose all higher brain function. The booklet included a brain scan, but neurology isn’t my speciality, so I didn’t understand what I was looking at, just had to take the researchers at their word. Activity is still marginal in the “lizard brain”, and appears to manifest mainly as an aggressive carnivorous hunger.
The most disturbing part about that is the infected subject’s desire for human meat – living, preferably. A gruesome experiment had been conducted with dead human tissue, and while the subject would still eat it, a living human in the room would always hold the infected’s attention. Likewise with animal meat. The booklet was written clinically, but it got pretty fucked up when you consider people had actually performed these experiments.
It was pretty heavy, and no doubt there were places on the Wireless that people were talking about this. No file is totally secure if it’s been anywhere near a Wireless connection. Conspiracy theory forums, tabloid news sites, they probably knew a thing or two. Likely a few loose lips or dodgy firewalls here and there, but no real whistleblowers, no traction in mainstream media.
My guess would be nobody’s saying much because that means we have to admit what we don’t know, as well as what we do. So far, what we don’t know makes the whole thing read like the VHC is making it up, like some elaborate practical joke.
Nobody has seen this virus before. Nothing this aggressive seems to have existed on Terra, at least since the dawn of scientific record keeping – since the days when man first started hammering wheel designs onto stone tablets, right through to mobile phones and television; the closest anyone’s come to describing this virus are a few folk tales about evil magic and vampires.
Speculation at the hospital is it’s either a tailor-made bioweapon, or some prehistoric plague, mutated B-movie style and back for revenge – that was Jerry’s contribution and given what we have to go on, his piss-take guess is as good as anyone’s.
I’ve got nothing. Full on stumpage. My medical background is trauma – I was a paramedic, now I’m on the A&E. In medical terms, I’m basically a mechanic. If you’ve got structural problems – you need a bone setting, a wound stitching, I’m your gal.
Hell, I once did CPR with my partner for forty minutes and the patient walked himself to the Obs Ward.
My general practice ain’t too bad either – I’m no doctor, but a nurse in Voison isn’t like a nurse anywhere else in the world, not to talk my international colleagues’ skills down or anything. The nursing tradition in Voison is more like a physician’s work than a carer’s, if you see what I mean? The history of the job here goes back to shield-sisters administering emergency medicine in the days of swords and spears. Bonesaw. Belt.
So when people start talking about haematology, neurological defects and improper immune response, I just have to open my ears and hope for the best. So far, all I knew on that score, was that the neurological symptoms of human rabies ain’t anything like this virus. Whatever mad scientist cooked it up, or whatever primordial broth it seeped out from, rabies wasn’t in the mix.
I threw the taskphone into my bag, and as I was looking about for other things to throw in, my real phone started ringing again. This time it wasn’t work’s ringtone.
‘One, two, three, four!’ it began, before launching into “Midnight Ride”, by Some Bad Men. It was a chunky classic rock song, about a guy who rides around sleeping with different of women. Smitty, the lead singer, was basically my idol in my formative years. I pulled my phone out so quickly that I nearly fumbled it.
‘Kelly? Oh, thank Gods, I was so worried.’ I sighed, relieved. I was about to ask him if he was still at home, tell him to stay there, but he must have been anxious to speak to me, getting his words out quicker.
‘I was too, I called as soon as I got back home,’ he said, ‘do you know what’s going on at the hospital? Are they sending East Rojas patients to County?’ he added, the words landing heavy.
‘Yeah,’ I said, hopefully in a calm and reassuring manner. ‘I don’t want you to worry though. Mercy’s just getting a little overcrowded, so we’re getting some of the overflow. But I shouldn’t be treating any ERHR patients, that’s the CDC’s job. Mainly I’ll just be admin, paperwork.’ I lied.
The Suburban Dead (Book 2): Emergency Page 1