Cassie Alexander - Deadshifted

The crew member nearest me gave me an unsure look. “Why didn’t you come down then?”

“I thought I might have whatever it was. But I’m fine now, it was just allergies.” I tried to give the man a trustworthy smile.

It worked. He smiled back as the other coworker radioed down asking if they still needed help. He leaned forward so his voice wouldn’t carry far. “I don’t want to worry you, miss, but I wouldn’t go down there if I were you.”

The radio in his coworker’s hand crackled to life in response. “Send them down.”

I gave the first man an apologetic smile. “Too late.”

I walked down the central stair unescorted, although at each landing crew members/guards waved me on, until I reached the third floor.

“The hospital’s down that way,” one of them told me as they let me pass.

I would have guessed from the smell. My stomach lurched, and I pressed a hand to it to calm it. Not now, baby. Luckily no one else was there to see me waver.

There was a chance that in doing this I was making a big mistake. What if I did come down with whatever it was? I’d trusted in my nurse’s immune system before and it’d failed me. I didn’t want to catch anything, and I certainly didn’t want to hurt our child. But if Asher hadn’t come back, something was seriously wrong.

I knew from getting my pregnancy test that the medical office was on the first floor, and I also knew from that short trip that there’d be no way they’d have been able to fit everyone who was ill downstairs. As the smell got stronger, my path became more familiar, and I remembered that the medical staff had commandeered a restaurant. The Dolphin. Where Asher and I had eaten breakfast just two days ago.

The entrance to the restaurant was partitioned off with freestanding curtains like they use in waiting rooms so that people can privately change. They created a small room and blocked the view of the restaurant beyond, but they couldn’t keep out the smells or the sounds of people groaning and crying.

There was a table in the curtain-room, and the doctor I’d seen for the pregnancy test sat behind it, papers scattered everywhere in front of him. He had highlighters and pens out and was making copious notes—he looked like a cop near the end of a serial killer TV show: frantic, about to break.

“Name and room number?” he asked, without looking up.

“Edie Spence, room six thirty-one,” I said.

The doctor found my name somewhere on his list and checked me off with an orange line. “And you’re sure you’re not sick?” he asked, finally looking up at me. His eyes narrowed in recognition.

“Not yet, no.”

“And the results of your test?”

“Negative,” I lied.

He grunted. “Good. Why are you here?”

“To help. I’m a nurse.” There was a groan from the far side of the curtains that startled me. Asher said he couldn’t get sick—but what if he was wrong? He’d said I couldn’t get pregnant, and look what’d happened.

“Well, I hope you got in enough drinking before all this,” he said with a snort. He leaned back, pulling the curtains behind him aside enough for him to shout through. “Raluca!”

A short dark-haired woman wearing a cruise-themed polo shirt emerged through a gap in the curtain-wall. “Did you figure it out?”

He shook his head. “Not yet.” He snapped his fingers at me. “She volunteered to help.”

She looked me up and down. I looked healthy enough, so far. She nodded. “What’s your medical expertise?”

“Clinics and hospitals. I used to be intensive care.”

“Good. What you’re going to see—do not judge us, okay? We are doing the best we can with limited resources.” Her voice was slightly accented in an Eastern European way. I nodded to encourage her. Whatever it would be, I’d have to have seen worse already, back on Y4.

She pulled back to let me through. I realized the curtains were set up so that gawkers in the lobby, if there were any, wouldn’t be able to see in.

As I rounded the bend myself, I realized why.

The restaurant was like a hospital floor in a wartime film with a big budget, but nothing here was special effects. There was all the chaos with none of the sterility or equipment. It looked like a primitive insane asylum, the kind they’d kept people in up until recently, even in our own “great” United States. People were tied to the undersides of tables with tethers of torn sheets, lashed like so many Odysseuses to masts. That didn’t stop them from moaning, though, or puking, or shitting themselves from the smell.

“Oh, God,” I said, before I could stop myself.

People like me—healthy volunteers—gophered up to see who I was before sinking back down to the tasks at hand. I saw them feeding people carefully, offering sips through straws, passing pills, wiping away the excretia as best they could.

“I know how this looks. Like one of your horror films.” Raluca shook her head. “You probably think us inhumane. But if we did not tie them down, they would run outside and fling themselves overboard.”

It took me a second to be able to answer her, even though I knew she was telling the truth. It was just that the room was so horrible, so far beyond anywhere I’d ever had to nurse anyone before. My head started shaking again. “No—I believe you. I saw a man go over myself.” I could tell my admission relieved her fractionally. “How many people are here?”

“Total? Two hundred. Fifty well, a hundred and fifty sick. A hundred have already passed.”

A hundred deaths on Nathaniel’s hands. “Do you have any idea what’s causing it?”

She shrugged. “Dr. Haddad is working on that still. We’re treating the sick people as best we can in the meantime.”

I wondered if the woman Hal had clocked was down here—and found myself dearly hoping that Asher was not.

“What are you treating them with?”

“Restraints, ice—and Tylenol, Valium, Cipro.” She ticked off the medications starting with her thumb.

Cipro explained all the shit, literally. Nothing like one of the world’s strongest antibiotics to clean out your intestinal flora. And the people underneath the tables couldn’t warn you when they were going to go.

“Where do you put the people who get better?” I asked, still staring around at the horrors of the room.

Her lips thinned into a line. “No one has gotten better, yet.”

A young man moving between the patients lashed to tables stood and waved. “Raluca—we’re out of Valium over here.”

She frowned again, reached for her keys, and headed back to the curtains at the front of the restaurant. “Please, show her how to get ice. I will return,” she said, and then disappeared.

I was left in the care of a teenage boy with black jeans and a black T-shirt with hair clearly dyed to match. He was like the teenage version of a poison dart frog— Don’t touch me. Raging acne scarred his pale face, and his expression was not kind. He took me in and shrugged a shoulder. “Come on—the ice machine’s this way—”

I hadn’t finished looking around the room yet. Too many of the sick people were facing away from me. A few still had attentive relatives or friends nearby, but a lot of them were alone. None of them looked like Asher from here, but I needed to get closer to be sure.

“Can you wait just a second?” I asked him.

“Why?”

“I’m looking for a friend.”

He gave me a look that said that he didn’t have time to explain all the ways that I was dumb. “If they’re here, it’s too late. They’re already a zombie.”

“These people aren’t actually zombies.” I’d been in love with a zombie before. I knew what zombies were like.