Black Tide Rising - eARC (13 page)

“I need them close. We don’t have enough rounds to miss.”

“Jesus!”

“Shut up and let me aim.”

“…Oh shit.”

“That’s one.”

“I’ve got a couple on the wall, Jim.”

“Two.”

“Here on the right, Jim.”

“Three…uck! Three. Made me waste a round, runner.”

“Jim!”

“What!”

“Fucking zombies on the wall!”

“Four! I’m busy!”

“You’re the one with the rifle!”

“And you’re the one with the goddamn shovel! Use it!”

“You can
dance
! You can
jive
! Having the
time
of your
life
! Holy shit!”

“Five! What?”

“‘Dancing Queen’ has the perfect beat for hitting runners with shovels! It’s like The Boss knew!”

“That’s why she’s The Boss.”

“Guess so!”

“Hold up. Firing’s done.”

“I think we got them.”

“How many did you say you counted before?”

“I think fifteen.”

“…I’m seeing sixteen in front of the wall.”

“I was close.”

“Including two with their heads bashed in with a shovel.”

“They deserved it.”

“That’s hardcore, my friend.”

“I owe it all to you and your refusal to allow me firearms, Jim.”

“Tell me I was wrong.”

“I say you’re wrong. My foot probably thanks you.”

“I accept your foot’s thanks.”

“Now what?”

“What do you mean ‘now what?’”

“We just fought off a runner pack. There’s a pile of corpses at our door. Now what?”

“We stay on the wall, Keith. The Boss will assign a detail to deal with the corpses. We’ll guard them while they do. You keep the lookout. I’ll provide the firepower.”

“Makes sense.”

“It does. We make a pretty good team.”

“I think you’re right.”

“Glad you think so.”

“I still think I should have a gun.”

“I know.”

“You going to let me have one?”

“No.”

Do No Harm

Sarah A. Hoyt

The String’s Already Broken

Bethany realized she was watching the end of civilization when Dr. T zombed out on her COW.

Yeah, she knew she wasn’t supposed to call the second stage of the H7D3 virus zombing out, but that’s what all the Emergency Room scribes had been calling it, since it had overwhelmed all the ready beds at the hospital and got a designation and everything.

For that matter, she wasn’t supposed to call the Computer on Wheels a COW. Administration was very clear that it should be called WOW for Workstation On Wheels, but it was black and white and had four legs, and it was best not to get too attached to it, because sooner or later it would die on you. So everyone in ER called it a COW and Dr. T—because no one was always mispronouncing Tomboulian—was one of the cool docs. A little green-eyed china doll with an infectious smile, she had attached longhorns to the front of her COW and a bell beneath the screen, and she ran around with it every shift doing most of her own data entry, which was cool from where Beth sat because it was one less thing landing on the overworked scribes, most of them pre-med students.

The scribes were paid for by the doctors out of pocket, and in return were supposed to handle all the crazy paperwork the bureaucrats dumped on the docs. Some scribes were trained to deal with only one doctor, and that seemed relatively simple, but Beth hadn’t been able to promise she’d stay more than one year, and therefore couldn’t take that training. So she was supposed to handle other doctors, and most doctors weren’t so easy to deal with or so nice, and Bethany was trying to take dictation on a patient disposition from Dr. Barfuss when Dr. T zombed.

Dr. Barfuss had a bad habit of whispering to something other than the poor scribe following him around, and had just mumbled something about giving the patient hot sitz baths which couldn’t be true for a case of pink eye, and was now whispering confidentially about—Beth would swear it—playing tiddlywinks, when Dr. T yelled, “What is this? What is all over me?” and started ripping at her clothes.

Before Dr. T started biting there were two doctors and a patient on her, trying to hold her. The signs had become that well known. The bell around her COW’s neck was tinkling like mad as they tried to hold her, and she fought them, and her teeth started snapping at them, and Dr. Hayden yelled as she got bit.

Dr. Nikhil Pillarisetti—whom no one called doctor P because he’d just say “psych, not urologist,” must have been in ER for some psych eval because he yelled, “Hold on, now,” in his Texas accent and plunged across groups of people, to hold Dr. T in a headlock. He yelled calm orders to bring him restraints, and the next thing, Dr. T was on a cart, her hands and feet bound to the railing and two people from transport were taking her away to be evaluated, not that anyone doubted what the diagnostic would be.

Beth tried not to look at Dr. T’s face, as all personality and sense had gone from the doctor’s eyes, and there was nothing there.

She had a strange sense something had broken, that something had left the doctor and it wasn’t going to come back.

The world was coming to an end. Bethany couldn’t say it had been wonderful before. Sure, life with Mom and Dad on the ranch had been pretty great, but the ranch being kind of far from civilization meant she’d never had that much of a social life.

And it turned out that if you wanted to be a doctor you needed glib social skills. She’d volunteered at hospitals since middle school and she really wanted to heal people. But the applications for med schools all wanted you to say how you’d overcome adversity, and how you had some story of hardship.

Just wanting to heal people and do no harm wasn’t enough. Beth was starting to suspect she’d never get in when H7D3 hit. And now none of it would matter. She’d be a scribe until she caught it and then—

“Did you get the disposition for the patient?” Dr. Barfuss asked.

But Beth caught at the sleeve of Dr. Pillasiretti as he walked by. “Doctor?” She said. “Dr. T is not going to be all right, is she?” And as Dr. Pillasiretti looked back his lips tight, she realized he’d understood “she’s going to be all right?” and hastened to correct, “She’s not coming back, is she?”

He opened his mouth, and closed it, shook his head, and walked away, while Dr. Barfuss insisted, “Ms. Arden, did you get that dispo?”

“No, I’m sorry, Doctor, I couldn’t hear through the noise,” she said meekly, by habit avoiding mentioning that he dictated to the floor and his left sleeve, and sometimes his foot, but never to the poor scribe following him around.

He made a scathing sound at the back of his throat, and pushed his glasses up. He was a little, mostly bald man, who clearly thought he’d become a divinity the day he’d got his medical degree. There was a way he had of looking at people that gave them the impression he was looking down on them, even though for that he’d need a ladder. “The patient is to give his eye saline baths, or rinses, and put in the antibiotic drops, and observe proper hygiene in the future. And call us if anything changes for the worse.”

She typed the notes quickly into her tablet, while an irreverent voice at the back of her head said,
Like it matters. He’ll probably get his face eaten on the way home, pink eye and all. Why did Dr. T have to zomb out? Why couldn’t it be Dr. Barfy?
Then she shuddered, because really she didn’t want anyone to zomb out. One moment there was a person there, and then nothing. Just a feral critter with human shape. But the person was gone, as effectively as if they’d died. And it was worse that the body stayed around to bite and spread the virus.

She knew that the disease had been transmitted by fake air freshener units with an ecological slogan put in the bathrooms at international airports. She wondered if it was really the enviros who had done this. It seemed to her there was a branch of them who was sure that the Earth would be better without humans. Better for what she didn’t know, but they seemed very sure.

Dr. Hayden was waiting to dictate a dispo, and Beth hurried to take it. She’d considered getting trained to be an individual scribe, but she’d been hoping against hope to be in med school next year, and if she’d taken the training then she would have had to work for the scribe service for a year to pay it back. Of course, she was very much afraid she’d fail in the application this year as she had last year and would be here forever.

And on that, she stopped, some inches from Dr. Hayden as her mind readjusted. With the emergency room and all available beds filled, with more and more people, like poor Dr. T, zombing out and becoming mindless killing apes, what prospects did she have in the future? What part of her carefully laid med school plans was still operative? Would there even be a medical school? Were any med schools still even interviewing?

“Beth?” Dr. Hayden asked. “You all right?”

“Uh. Oh, yes, Doctor. I was wondering when this will end, and what it will mean for me. I mean, I was hoping to go to med school—”

Dr. Hayden snorted. She looked hot, like a fever had come on her suddenly. Her cheeks were flushed, and she was trying to fumble a bandage on, one handed, where Dr. T had bitten her. “I’m supposed to tell you everything will be all right, right?” she said. “That if you work very hard everything will turn out all right. Only that’s not true, if indeed it ever was except in rare cases. It wasn’t ever just hard work, but hard work and aptitude, and contacts and confidence and all that. I don’t believe in lying to the young. It might not have been all right even in the past. Oh, thank you,” she said, as Beth slapped the bandage over her wound. “I disinfected. They say this will lessen the risk of transmission, but I’m not sure I believe it. Not from what we’re seeing here.” She frowned at her arm. “You know, Beth, I don’t believe everything will be all right. I’ve studied epidemiology. I know this is exponential, and without an official vaccine or a cure, we’re…” She paused and it was obvious she was moderating her language. “In trouble. At the very least there’s going to be a serious…” And she just stopped.

“You were dictating a dispo?” Beth said, seeing tears sparkle in the older woman’s eyes. Dr. Hayden, like Dr. T was one of her favorite doctors to work for. She wasn’t as tech competent as Dr. T and so wouldn’t do her own data entry, but she was always kind to the scribes and didn’t treat them like serfs or blame them for her mistakes. She had a daughter about Beth’s age, who lived in Seattle and who had stopped answering her cell a few days ago. That Dr. Hayden hadn’t mentioned her daughter since was part of why Beth knew she was worrying about her all the time. Before, she’d always had her cell in hand, texting back and forth.

Beth’s parents…Beth’s parents also weren’t answering their phone, and she hadn’t been able to, or had the courage to, drive all the way to the ranch near Goldport to check on them. She wished she were back at the ranch, as hard as she could, but her name wasn’t Dorothy. Maybe she should never have left. “The patient you were seeing when Dr. T zombe—came down with phase two of the H7D3 virus.”

“Oh, that,” Dr. Hayden said, and blinked her water-shiny eyes. “Yeah, admitted and restrained for H7D3 virus, second phase. We’re down to carts on the corridors, Beth, and I don’t know where we’ll put the next zombie.” She smiled, a wry smile. “Even if it’s me.”

“Some people don’t catch it. It happens.”

“Yeah, but everyone I’ve attended for bites has caught it, and some caught it within hours,” Dr. Hayden said, as Beth copy-pasted the normal dispo for H7D3, second phase, on her portable work screen. She no longer bothered to even try to type it individually. “The odds aren’t good, and I never even won a cent on the lottery. I’m not the lucky type.”

Beth opened her mouth but said nothing. What in hell could she say? The doctor was right of course. The chances of her still being herself in a few days were about none. And Beth didn’t want to lie to her.

“If I zomb out,” Dr. Hayden whispered, urgently. “Kill me?”

“Doctor—”

“Yeah, I know, do no harm and all, but Beth I’ve autopsied zombies who died. There’s nothing there. All the parts of the brain that make us human are gone. I don’t want to live like that and be a danger to others. Shira…Dr. Tomboulian, and I have been friends since med school, and it’s harder to think of her as a zombie than to think of her dead. So—Just put an end to me.”

“Doctor, I want to go into medicine,” Bethany said. She didn’t want to talk back, but it was important to make Dr. Hayden understand. “I don’t—I don’t want to kill people.”

Dr. Hayden gurgled with laughter at that. “Sorry. If you get into medicine, I guarantee you will.”

Beth felt herself go red. “No, I know,” she said. She tried to explain. It was the same trouble as med school interviews. She could never explain properly and it came across like she didn’t care. Last year an interviewer had actually asked her if she was only doing this because of prestige and told her to go back to the farm. She struggled for words. “No, I know you kill people accidentally and all. But I mean I never wanted to kill people on purpose.”

Dr. Hayden looked intently at her and sighed. “Of course not. But with H7D3…Don’t you see that you have to kill to save? Look, I never believed in all that crap about
community medicine
they gave us. It seemed like an excuse not to do the best you could for the patient, with some nebulous social justification. But in this case, you can
do
nothing. Once the patient zombs out, he or she isn’t coming back. There’s nothing in there to come back to. All you can do is save other people from catching it. If we’d started killing them when we realized that, Dr. T would still be fine, and I…I wouldn’t have been bitten.” She took a deep breath. “I, too, never wanted to do harm, and I don’t want my body to do harm after my mind is gone. I need to know someone will stop me before I spread it. You’re a ranch girl. You’re practical.”

Beth wanted to say that it wasn’t as easy as all that. She’d killed deer in season, but they needed culling or they’d destroy the crops, and she’d killed chickens. Of course, being made into nuggets probably raised a chicken’s intelligence. Killing a
person
or what had once been a person was something else again.

But she met Dr. Hayden’s eyes, and nodded.

Later, in the doctor’s lounge, the people still on shift gathered around the TV.

The doctor’s lounge was really just a small room, with a loveseat in a corner, a TV on the wall, and a table where people tended to throw whatever sweets they’d brought in from home. It was a dirty little secret that doctors and most medical personnel in the ER lived on sugar, like some form of bee. In what Beth was starting to think of as the good old days, before H7D3, there weren’t many people in the lounge. Even in these days, there weren’t as many people in the lounge as now. For one, the nurses had been failing to come in when scheduled and didn’t answer their phones, so it was anyone’s guess whether they’d zombed or hightailed it out of Denver. Which, Beth thought, was arguably the sane reaction.

The few nurses that were in just used the doctor’s lounge anymore. And the physician’s assistants who kept coming in did the same, as did the scribes. The weird thing was that nearly every doctor dragged himself or herself in, by grim determination, as though their presence there could stem the tide of the infection. As Dr. Clithero, a beautiful Samoan woman with an inability to suffer stupidity gladly—or indeed at all—had said that night, in desperation at the seventh H7D3 patient, “I feel like I’m trying to empty the sea with a conch shell.”

But that hadn’t stopped her coming in, and now she was munching on a brownie and drinking coffee, while about ten doctors, half a dozen scribes, and a PA took a break from the mess in the emergency room.

From behind the break room came the low-grade growl-screams of the infected, housed in all the rooms of ER and in all the hallways. Since all their space for H7D3 was taken up, St. Thomas the Martyr hospital had started a divert to the other hospitals in the city. Which meant there was a lull that allowed doctors to gather and socialize for the first time in days. Weirdly, there weren’t many patients otherwise. Not even frequent flyers or drug seekers. Then again, maybe it wasn’t weird. After all, if you got eaten on the way to the hospital, it was not that easy to get in for that pain in your left foot that had bothered you for three years but was an emergency now that you were bored.