Paul Hardy - The Last Man on Earth Club

She started at the sound of my voice, grabbed a shovel, came up and spun round to bring it down on my skull. I staggered backwards and caught the shovel high on my left arm. I shrieked at the pain, fell to my knees and Olivia suddenly realised where she was and who she’d struck.

“Oh gods. You idiot. You bloody idiot!”

She knelt by me and ripped the arm of my shirt open. “Don’t move! You’ll make it worse.” A massive bruise was coming up. She pressed the skin around it and made me gasp.

“It’s not broken. You’re bruised, that’s all. What were you thinking, sneaking up on me like that?”

I replied through gritted teeth, feeling queasy as the aftereffects kicked in. “Usually… the assailant… is the one who apologises…”

“I’m sorry. All right, I’m sorry. Happy now?”

“That’s… fine, Olivia. I thought… you weren’t… a doctor?”

“I can set a bone if I have to. Oh, look, here come the crows…”

A nurse came running out, along with a couple of security guards. “It’s all right!” I shouted at the guards. “It’s my fault. Olivia’s not to blame. I just need someone to take a look at my arm…”

“Sure?” he asked.

“Very sure,” I said. “You should never sneak up on someone with PTSD.”

“I do not have PTSD!” snarled Olivia as the nurse kneeled in the mud to take care of my arm.

“You can leave us,” I said to the guards. They holstered their stunsticks and left.

“Hold still,” said the nurse, administering an anaesthetic spray.

“Oooh, that’s better,” I said as the pain slid away.

“I don’t have PTSD, I bloody told you I don’t, it’s just reflexes,” muttered Olivia.

“I need to get you inside to take a better look,” said the nurse.

“Okay,” I said. “Olivia? Do you mind giving me a hand up?”

“Fine,” she said, and helped me to my feet. “I suppose you want help getting indoors now.”

“I’ll take care of it,” said the nurse.

“I hit her, I’ll bloody help her inside!”

“It’s okay,” I said to the nurse, and Olivia helped me indoors.

They scanned the arm and found no fractures, then gave me a dose of healing accelerant and put my arm in a sling. I’d be back to normal in a day or two. Olivia stuck with me — as much as she blamed me for provoking her, she still felt an obligation to ensure I was treated properly. And she didn’t mind the chance to spy on Elsbet, either.

“What’s up with her?” she sniffed. Elsbet was visible in her room, curled up on her bed, looking shell-shocked and occasionally nodding as Veofol explained things, which was as well as could be expected.

“She’s had a bit of a shock,” I said.

“I don’t understand her. How many of them are in there?”

“Just the two. As far as we know.”

“Is she dangerous?”

“Not if you treat her kindly and with respect.”

She narrowed her eyes at me. “What, and you think I won’t?”

“I just think you should be careful.”

“Yeh, yeh. Not much chance of me being able to hurt her, is there? Wouldn’t have got far with a shovel on her…”

“There are other kinds of hurt. Aren’t there?”

“Huh.”

I caught the attention of a nurse, and indicated the curtains around the examination cubicle I was in. He drew them and left me alone with Olivia. “I’m sorry about what I said.”

“What?”

“I mean for saying you had PTSD in front of other people.”

She shrugged. “Well, you weren’t yourself, were you…”

“I was rather lightheaded, I have to admit.”

“Stupid thing to do, creeping up on me like that.”

“Yes. You’d think I’d have learned by now.”

“Hah. Leave the crazy old bitch alone. Good lesson.”

“No, I mean I’ve had a lot of PTSD patients. I really should know better.”

That got her annoyed. “I’m telling you for the last time, I do not have PTSD!”

“Why?”

“What do you mean, why?”

“Everything I know leads me to think you do. So if you were in my position, why would you make the opposite diagnosis?”

“Because I’m not in your position and I know the difference. What I’ve got is a natural reaction to having revenants trying to kill me for thirty odd years. It’s why I’m still alive, for gods’ sake.”

“Hm. Actually…”

“What?”

“Well, you seem very opposed to the diagnosis. Was PTSD known in your world?”

“Because we’re primitive, of course…”

“A lot of species have trouble accepting it exists. You wouldn’t be alone in that.”

She sighed. “We knew about it.”

“What did you call it?”

“A gross moral failure.”

“That’s rather harsh.”

“I’m joking.” There wasn’t a trace of humour on her face. “The people who called it that were the ones who never saw revenants. Never had to put up a barricade and stay up all night in case they got in. Never had to kill their friends because they’d come back from the dead…”

“What was it really called?”

“Necrotic hysteria.”

“Wow. That’s quite something…”

“Or death-shock, if you read the newspapers.”

“So they associated it with the outbreak?”

“That’s right. Somehow they decided the dead coming back to life made people go round the bend. Wonder where they got that idea from.”

“Was it widespread?”

“Lot of people came down with it during the first outbreak. You could tell. They stopped fighting, just stared all the time. Lot of them got mistaken for revenants.”

“That sounds more like ordinary shock…”

“Well, probably was. But it kept happening after the outbreak. People who got through without a scratch did the same thing.”

“Yes. Sometimes the extreme cases are like that. In some species, anyway.”

“Well, I didn’t get it.”

“The extreme cases are just the tip of the iceberg. Did you have any particularly harrowing experiences during the first outbreak?”

“The dead got up and ate the living, what did you think I was having, happy little daydreams?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know what you did. I don’t know what a normal day would have been like.”

“I was in the Coroner Corps. We went house to house. If someone answered, we searched it for revenants. If no one was there, we broke down the door and searched for revenants. Either way we found ’em.”

“How old were you?”

“Twenty. Twenty year old girl with a revolver and a couple of marines behind me and they were the ones shitting themselves. The marines were supposed to protect me from the living. I was supposed to figure out who was dead and put down the ones that were. Never worked out like that.”

“So you had to kill. And not just revenants?”

“I didn’t have a choice.”

“And there was nothing… nothing especially bad?”

She sat there for a while. “You don’t want to know.”

“Is it difficult to talk about?”

“Of course it’s bloody difficult.”

“I’d understand if you couldn’t. It’s a common symptom.”

“I don’t have any bloody symptoms. It’s—” She pursed her lips. “Have you ever killed anyone?”

“No.”

“Then you don’t know. What’s the point of telling you?”

“I’d like to know.”

“Yeh? You sure about that?”

“Yes.”

“Balls.”

“If you don’t have any symptoms, then what’s the harm?”

She narrowed her eyes. “I was at Tanymouth. You’ve never even heard of it…”

“No. I’m afraid not.”

“Well it didn’t give me any damned death-shock!”

“What happened at Tanymouth? Is that where you got your reflexes?”