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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 everyone 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 diagnosis 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. Pillarisetti as he walked by. “Doctor?” She said. “Dr. T is not going to be all right, is she?” And as Dr. Pillarisetti 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 doctors’ lounge, the people still on shift gathered around the TV.

The doctors’ 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 doctors’ lounge. 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.

Since the crisis, the TV was set permanently on news and all the remaining anchors sounded on the verge of hysteria. Though seeing one go full zombie on camera before chasing the other anchors around trying to eat their faces had been completely worth it. And it was a sign of how jaded they’d got in the last few months that it warranted no more than snorts from a couple of the doctors and Lucas Fiacre, one of the physician’s assistants, saying in his best camp voice, “Oh! That is nothing to brag about,” when the news anchor tore all his clothes off.

“The thing is,” Dr. Pillarisetti said when laughter died down. “When does it all come crashing down?” He spoke without drama, in a grinding, flat voice, that made his words seem more scary than if he’d shouted.

Beth, leaning against the door frame of the room, was so startled she said “What?” aloud, even though normally she tried to stay quiet when doctors and other trained professionals discussed things. It was okay, because hers wasn’t the only “what?” Just about everybody else said it too.

Dr. Pillarisetti swept the room with a concerned gaze. “Seriously? None of you has thought of that? An advanced technological society needs a certain number of personnel with knowledge and ability to keep it running.”

And Beth spoke in a gathering of doctors for the second time, somewhat shocked to hear the words coming out of her mouth, “But wouldn’t a small population be better for everyone? It seems like after the Black Plague in Europe—”

Dr. Pillarisetti’s ancestors came from the Indian subcontinent. He had very dark eyes and an unnerving way of bringing his heavy eyebrows down over them that made it look like he was contemplating where to hide your body after he was done ripping off your head and beating you to death with it. Now he turned the full force of it on Beth and said a word that, if everything weren’t falling apart, would certainly have got him a process open with Human Resources. “Is that what they teach you kids these days? Well, they’re wrong. The Black Plague did not hit an advanced technological society. Remember your first year classes and how many people dropped out of bio or chem or engineering to take a humanities degree? And that was from the ones who got into college to begin with. The pool of people who can handle math and science is limited. Not even an intelligence thing as the type of intelligence they have. Not all smart people can handle science. Given the morbidity—or at least the zombidity—of this virus, leaving maybe one per cent of the population untouched, how do you think technological civilization can survive? The virus is not selecting for intelligence.”

Beth bit her lip to make sure she didn’t say anything more. The certainty that Dr. Pillarisetti was right sank in, even as the TV flickered, and then an announcer said, in an eerily calm voice, “Folks, we’re getting reports that the lights went out in New York City.” The TV flickered again. “And now our lights have gone off and we’re working with backup generators.” There were screams behind the man, and the sound of breaking glass, and someone yelled, “Turn the farging lights off and shut up! Zombies are attracted to light and sound!” And the man in the screen who couldn’t be a regular announcer because he was wearing sweatpants and a stained T-shirt that read You Can Have My Coffee When You Pry It From My Cold, Dead Hands said “They’re tearing into the station now. Folks, stop listening to me and save yourselves. It’s the end of the world.”

The TV picture went to snow. Doctors, nurses, physician’s assistants and scribes had just the time to look around at each other with horror, when the lights in the hospital blinked. Then the backup generators hummed, and the lights came back on.

They looked at each other, each as pale as he or she could get.

St. Thomas the Martyr was not quite downtown, but was set right off Colfax. If the city was dark, and the uncountable population of zombies out there was attracted to light and sound the hospital had just become a magnet for a horde of zombies that would submerge them all.

Beth loved the hospital, wanted to be a doctor, and all she could think was, How do I get out of here? And read the same thought in everyone else’s gaze. She heard glass break from down the hall, at the emergency room. Then there were very distinct human screams. Of course, the hospital was modern and the façade was mostly glass. Beth choked on a chuckle at the thought that if they’d known what was coming they’d have built like the middle ages, with narrow windows and small doors. She gave herself a mental shake. Hysteria was one thing she didn’t need right now.

“We can’t go out the door,” Dr. Barfuss said.

“The roof,” Lucas Fiacre shouted.

“Why the roof? What do we do after?” Cody, an older scribe yelled.

“How the hell do we get off the roof?” one of the other PAs asked.

“Helicopter-ambulances,” Lucas said. “Bound to be some up there at the rate they’ve been bringing us patients.”

It made sense. St. Thomas the Martyr serviced all the southern suburbs and all the outlying areas up to Aurora, whatever wasn’t covered by the med school hospital there, so it had six helicopter ambulances, donated by a kind benefactor, which brought in the stroke cases, the heart attack cases, and the alcohol poisoning cases of a Saturday night.

“And who the hell is going to fly them?” Dr. Barfuss asked, in his annoying, superior manner.

“If the pilots aren’t with their ’coptors, hell, I can fly one,” Fiacre said, grinning over his shoulder. “Flew helos in ’stan.”

“And what about the others? We can’t all fit into one!”

Dr. Sarah Clithero, who had been looking out the door of the lounge said, “Oh, I can fly another. Learned to fly them when I was young.” As though anticipating the question, she said, “Was bored.”

“But the ambulance helicopters—”

“Are designed to be an easy to fly vehicle,” Fiacre said. “How does it look out there, Sarah?”

“From the sounds, they broke the front glass panes, and anyone who wasn’t a zombie in the waiting room is dead. We’re going to have to fight our way up. Grab whatever you find that can be used as weapons,” Dr. Clithero said.

It gave Bethany a little shock, and it was stupid. Of course they needed weapons, unless they just wanted to be zombie chow.

“It might surprise you,” one of the other PAs, Albert Schoen, a tall, blond man, said, “but the emergency room and this lounge weren’t designed to have a lot of impromptu weapons on hand.”

“Grab what you can,” Dr. Pillarisetti said, pulling a fire extinguisher from the wall. “Just try not to get bitten.”

“Gait belts,” a nurse said. “Attach something heavy to the end and you have a mace.” She ran out of the room, then back in and started distributing seven rainbow colored belts around. “We had some in the nurses’ lounge.” Some of the men were taking their own belts off and attaching heavy objects to the end of them.

Beth didn’t have a belt and she didn’t get a gait. In despair she grabbed a standing lamp, by the lamp end, holding the weighted base in a defensive position. As a weapon it sort of sucked, but not as much as the others. It was fine. She wasn’t sure she could look into a human face and smash it, anyway. She was afraid she wouldn’t last long.

Just then, she heard, at the back of her mind, what her dad had said, when she failed the first round of med school interviews, Of course, you’ll try again. If you’re sure that’s what you want to do you try again. Life is trying and failing and trying again and sometimes succeeding. If you stop trying for something you really feel you should do, you might as well be dead, Beth. And so she’d promised herself not to give up her dream of being a doctor.

“Come on,” Lucas Fiacre said. He hadn’t got one of the gaits or a belt either. He’d grabbed the curtain rod and tied a knife to the end of it with strips of curtain. He probably wasn’t supposed to have that knife in the hospital, a weapon-free zone, but she was damn glad he did. His grin looked entirely feral. “We have to get higher. We’ll go to the second floor and bar the stairs. Come on.”

Beth wondered why Lucas seemed more alive than she’d ever seen him. She knew a lot of PAs, Lucas included, were war vets. She wondered if learning to survive under fire changed you, if it made you even like it.

She wondered, if she survived, would it change her the same way?

And It Won’t Last for Long

It all turned surreal very fast. Beth had been going hunting with dad since she was about five, and, being a farm kid, she’d seen animals killed. In the hospital, too, she’d seen her share of bleeding and dying.

But all that was different. Now she was killing people, or at least hurting them very badly. No. Not people. She remembered what Dr. Hayden had said. Zombies. Vectors, who’d infect people. The back of her head screamed that this was a dangerous slippery slope, but damn it, they knew you couldn’t come back from zombie. Not to kill them just meant they took over the whole world.

Her mind was torn between do no harm and but it’s self-defense. All she knew was that as the zombies tried to come in, she and the others fought back.

The first time Bethany hit a zombie and heard the sick crunch of a breaking cranium and got splattered with blood and brains was bad, but she couldn’t stop. She turned her head not to get splatter in her eyes or mouth, but there was so much gore flying, she had to just hope nothing got in. Her mind said vector. Save people from the vector. She argued with herself, slippery slope. But then she looked at the vacant eyes, the gnashing teeth. There was no human there. There was no coming back. They were vectors. Just vectors.

She swung the lamp. Somehow they cleared a space so they emerged into the hallway. She found herself in the front lines, swinging the lamp at zombies’ heads, as they gnashed teeth and whined and tried to reach them. If you swung the base with sufficient force it stopped them. Vector. She was saving people.

Then a zombie grabbed for her. Dr. Pillarisetti’s fire extinguisher broke its shoulder and then its face. The hand let go of Beth’s arm, and she swung her lamp at a zombie trying to bite Lucas Fiacre.

She and Lucas—probably because they had longer-range weapons—moving back to back managed to clear the cluster around the lounge enough to get their group to the hallway that led to the service stairs up to the second floor.

They were stepping over zombies’ still-twitching corpses and she was glad she was wearing her ankle boots, otherwise she would have been bit thirty times over. Fortunately, the zombies slowed long enough to eat other fallen zombies. As it was, as they reached the second floor, Lucas Fiacre looked over his shoulder and said, “Stop. How about the patients?”

“What patients?” Dr. Barfuss asked. “Good God man, you can’t mean the zombies.”

“No, the other patients,” Fiacre said. “Second floor.” He squinted. “Oncology?”

“Mostly,” Dr. Clithero said. She was splattered in blood and gore, and held a blood-splattered reinforced computer case nonchalantly. “Right now. Usually anyone we need to do a lot of tests on, but right now mostly oncology. I don’t know how many patients we have, or how many are ambulatory.”

Fiacre looked at the door to the ward, then down at the door to the first floor they had locked in their wake.

Beth heard the glass on the door break and knew it was a matter of time before the zombies either squeezed through the door, or broke the handle. “I’ll go in,” she said. If they just let people be eaten, what was the point? “I’ll see how many of the patients here are ambulatory and how many we can rescue.” She didn’t say and how many have zombed out. But she thought it. Just because you were a cancer patient, it didn’t mean you couldn’t catch the zombie plague. Until now that had been their biggest problem: people admitted for other things turning and wreaking havoc in their units.

That much was obvious as they stepped out of the elevator. Whoever had been on duty in the hallway nurse’s station was dead. Even from a distance that was easy to tell because people are rarely alive with half their face missing. A trail of blood led deeper into the ward. As they got deeper in they checked the first room. A man tethered to the bed and to machines that were making a long, continuous beep was also very sincerely dead and partly eaten on the blood-soaked sheets. Then they heard from the end of the hallway the moaning growl of the zombies.

She and Lucas rushed forward, side by side, while Beth hoped that the people they’d left by the door would keep the zombies from attacking them from behind. The hospital smelled of blood and feces, overlaid on the normal disinfectant smell, and the polished tiles of the hallway were spattered in blood, which made it hard to run without falling on her face. Once she almost fell, but Lucas Fiacre grabbed her shoulder, without ever slowing down, and hauled her upright.

At the end of the hallway, they were faced with a knot of people, all wearing hospital gowns. It was clear a lot of them were zombies, covered in bite marks and groaning-moaning.

But the thing was, when formication—the sensation of something crawling all over their skin—hit, as people were zombing out, they ripped all their clothes off. With the hospital gown that was not easy—them being tied behind the back.

Which posed the problem.

“Shit,” Lucas said as he came to a skidding halt. “Is it just zombies fighting?”

“Oh, hell no,” a voice said from the middle of the melee. “About time you guys got here. I’m going to give this hospital a very bad review in my patient satisfaction form!”

He Left Yesterday Behind Him…

Zachary Zodiac Smith had been having a bad day long before this. Actually if you really wanted to be specific, he’d had a bad decade. Maybe a bad life. But he balked at that idea. His life hadn’t been bad. At least not until Mom had decided to off herself when Dad hadn’t come back from ’Nam. But even then there had been intermittent good times. Hell, yeah, very good times. Like Rosie.

But he turned his mind away from his first wife, Rosamund. Damn good thing, all things considered, that Rosie and the baby had died. Otherwise now he’d have to worry about her, and about a twenty-year-old son. Okay, maybe it wasn’t a good thing they’d died, but at least they hadn’t zombed out. Thank God. Until now ZZ hadn’t understood a fate worse than death. Now he did. Even if a part of him still longed to know that when he died he left something of him behind. But how many people would be able to do that now?

He stood with his back to the wall. He’d wrapped his arms in blankets, haphazardly because he hadn’t exactly had a lot of time when the patient on the bed next to him had started screaming there was stuff crawling on him and throwing the bed clothes around. ZZ wasn’t an idiot. Not him. He knew damn well what that shit meant, and he was out of his bed, wrapping his arms in sheet and blanket with a lot of it trailing, and grabbing the nearest defensive weapon. Which wasn’t a very good weapon, being the tray on wheels that they’d put next to the bed.

Given he’d come in for throwing up all his food and catastrophic weight loss and the stomach cancer and all, he probably wouldn’t have been able to lift a tray like that normally, but fear, like love, makes a man stronger. He was swinging the tray table around, and caught the guy getting up from the other bed, teeth gnashing and hands groping, on the side of the head and sent him flying.

Of course he came back. ZZ had seen zombie videos on YouTube. There was a reason people were calling this the zombie apocalypse. The damn things just. Wouldn’t. Stay. Down.

He tried to forget the guy had been named Bill and that he had cancer of the bladder, and that he had a two-year-old grandson and a granddaughter in Arizona. There was no Bill now, only a zombie, chomping and clawing as it dragged itself upright, and lurched towards ZZ.

Who, this time, managed to catch him harder on the other side of the head, and, when Bill dropped, rush him and smash his head flat with the tray table.

Apparently Bill was not the only one to have turned, because there was the sound of chomping teeth in the hallway and someone rushed in, running like a gorilla, on feet and knuckles, and dragging a mess of tubes and an IV stand behind her. ZZ had smashed her against the wall, hitting out with the tray and catching her head between it and the wall. Her head went crunch and then splat, with a sound not unakin to a cabbage getting dropped from a great height, and he turned his head just in time to avoid being splatted with blood and brain matter.

But there was another zombie. Right about the third, he realized that they had to be coming from somewhere, which left him with the question where in hell are all these zombies coming from? It was impossible they’d all zombed out at the same time as Bill. Okay, not impossible, but not likely.

Before he could think to investigate, he was surrounded by zombies, and then it was crunch, smack, hit. And he realized after a while they were going to get him in the end. There was only one of him. Which meant that they’d kill him and—

And he heard two young people talking, a man and a woman.

He called out to them. Then he thought that even as they waded into the fray they might have trouble telling the zombies from the not-zombie, to wit, himself.

As the young lady—and she was a looker too, with that braid of red hair—deployed a floor lamp—it occurred to him she might select his head for crunching. And like that, unbidden, came to his lips the song his mother had sung when they went walking when he was a tot, and he found himself singing aloud. “Rocky Mountain High, Colorado!”

The young lady redirected the club, the young man stuck his lance in someone else, and ZZ made to help them with the table.

In a moment—seemed like—they were panting and covered in sweat and blood, the zombies were down, and ZZ said, “Thank you.”

The man, a dark-haired guy, lean with a sort of sharp face, which made ZZ think of Caesar’s line about lean men, said, “No prob. But stop singing hippie songs, okay? I can still change my mind and stab you.”

“Hey, it was my momma’s favorite song, youngster, and besides get off my lawn.”

And then there was the sound of groaning and of teeth from the hallway, and zombies poured into the room.

“Where in Hell are they coming from?” ZZ asked.

“I don’t know. We have the emergency stairs blocked and we—” the guy said, as he turned to stab zombies. Fortunately this set was easier, as they stopped to eat their fallen comrades. But not too easy as there were at least twenty of them.

“The other emergency stairs,” the girl said.

“Shit. There’s more than one of them?” the guy yelled, putting his lance into a zombie’s eye and twisting.

“Fire regulations or something,” the girl yelled, swinging her club and spraying out brains. “I can’t believe we forgot.”

“Why not? I always used the elevator.”

To show he was willing, ZZ stepped up to stand with them and slam his table into zombies.

“But that means…” the girl said. It was weird that she looked even better like that, splattered in blood and fighting. She reminded him of Rosie is what it was, and he shouldn’t be eyeing a girl half his age. Particularly not when he was dying. But ZZ had never felt less like dying. He had trouble concentrating on the rest of her words, as they all killed zombies. When they had taken care of that wave she said, “That means the people we left blocking the stairway from the zombies below—”

“Might be overtaken?” the lean man said.

“No, might be lapped,” the girl said. “I mean, when we get to the other floors, there will be zombies there ahead of us.”

“Shit,” the lean man said. He turned to ZZ. “You—what’s your name?”

“Zeezee.”

“Right. I’m Lucas Fiacre, and that’s Beth Arden. Is there anyone else alive on this floor? Not zombies?”

ZZ eyed the door. “If there were, they’re probably eaten. Going to sue the fucking hospital for not issuing fucking guns to fucking patients when this fucking Pacific flu started.”

“Tell me about it, man,” the lean guy said. “I fucking hate that we have nothing designed to kill these sons of bitches on hand. I’m going to run down the hallway and check. Just to make sure.”

“Don’t,” Beth said. “Just call out.”

“It will attract zombies.”

“We are anyway.”

Fiacre stepped forward, while Beth and ZZ lent support, and as soon as they were through the door, Fiacre shouted, “So, anyone not a zombie in here? Scream or knock or something.”

There was no answer but the gnash of teeth and the groaning. “Hey, you hoo!” Fiacre said and did his best attempt at the hundred meter dash towards the door to the stairwell while slaying zombies—now that would have been a game for the Olympics—stab zombie, run, stab zombie, run, trip over zombie that Beth killed, almost fall and get eaten except ZZ caught him and pulled him forward.

Then both of them tripped on a still-live zombie—stab, scream, smash head with table. Beth saved them from falling and pulled them along.

By the end of the hallway, they were all fighting with one hand and holding the other up with the other, while jumping, dodging, tripping over fallen zombies.

I’ve Seen It Raining Fire In the Sky

When they got back to the landing there was pandemonium. Dr. Hayden was alternately opening and slamming the door, managing to catch some zombies in it each time, while Dr. Barfuss wanted to know precisely what this meant and why they were not going up as promised.

People recoiled from Beth and Lucas and ZZ as they came in. Dr. Barfy said something about contagion. Yeah, well, he should try killing zombies without getting it all over himself.

Lucas told them about the other staircase.

“Does that mean there will be zombies up ahead of us?” one of the nurses asked, dismayed.

“Yep. We’ll have to fight all the way up.”

“And where are we going once we get to the top?” Dr. Barfuss asked. “Bet you haven’t thought of that young man. Even if we can fly the helicopters—”

Do no harm, Beth told herself. It was weird, because with adrenaline pumping through her, she could have smashed Dr. Barfy in the face, like a zombie. She realized she’d have to control it. That’s the slippery slope, she thought. Kill zombies because they can’t come back and are just vectors, and then start thinking of people who annoy you as better off dead too. And she was almost sure it wasn’t true. Dr. Barfy might be an annoying paper-pusher, but what Dr. Pillarisetti had said about the collapse of civilization? If there aren’t enough people who can learn, who will be doctors? They might need even Dr. Barfy.

Lucas was saying something, answering Dr. Barfuss “…can. We’ll go to Plynth. You know, the new hospital, which was supposed to open on Monday. They’re fully stocked. They have generators. They’re empty.”

“They won’t be empty once the generators start and they have light and sound,” someone said.

The group was going forward, up the stairs. Beth looked back at where Dr. Jonna Hayden was still holding the door. “Doctor, do you see any way to secure that door? To delay them? This stairway seems to be free of zombies.”

“Only because they’re eating people in the wards,” ZZ, the man they’d rescued said. He was tall, middle-aged, a bit gaunt, but tanned. Black and possibly native American and white and who knew what else, Beth thought, looking at him, so that tan might be built in. It wasn’t displeasing. Whatever he was, he was a scrappy fighter, and he still had that table clutched in his hand.

Beth chose not to argue and Lucas inclined his head. “Probably. But all the same. If we can get to the top with a minimum of fuss.”

“Okay,” Dr. Hayden said. She’d taken something off her white coat and seemed to be jamming it under the door.

“What was that?” Lucas asked, as she started up.

“My cell phone,” the doctor said. “Figured end of the world, didn’t need it.”

They started running up the stairs, but Lucas stopped at the door to the third floor.

“What are you doing?” a woman asked.

“Going to see if anyone can be saved.”

“That’s insane. The zombies will just get ahead of us,” Dr. Barfuss said.

“Fine. You go ahead, then, run on up. You and whoever wants to go with you. I’ll go see if anyone needs saving,” Fiacre said.

“I’ll come with you, son,” ZZ said.

“Me, too,” Beth said, surprised to hear her own voice as she said it. But after all, she was here to save people, right?

Third floor yielded three people, all women, one coughing violently with the early stages of H7D3. For a moment Beth thought it would be faster to kill her now and easier on everyone, but after all you couldn’t. Maybe there was a chance she wouldn’t turn. At least the woman was wearing a mask. And all three survivors had been blooded in combat with the zombies. The coughing woman was holding an IV stand as a mace. People who really did fight as cornered cats were probably as valuable as normal doctors and twice as valuable as Dr. Barfuss.

Fourth floor, Maternity, yielded a desperate woman clutching a baby in one arm, and a jagged, broken flower vase in the other. The vase had blood on it, and there was blood sprayed up her arm and on her hospital gown. The problem hadn’t so much been rescuing her, as stopping her from stabbing them as they approached. But in the end, she’d staggered and sobbed, lowering the arm that held the vase, and sobbed, “My husband. He was visiting. He—”

“Turned?” Beth said.

“I had to kill him, I had to.”

“Of course,” Beth said. “You had to.” She said it because she needed to comfort the woman, but her brain told it was right too. “Can you run?”

And they ran.

By the seventh and top floor, as they emerged onto the terrace that held three helicopters, they’d gathered fifteen people in addition to their starting-out two dozen.

Beth almost expected to hear Dr. Barfuss greet them with “That’s too many people, you idiot. You’ll never take off.”

But he didn’t because Dr. Barfuss was dead. And Ron, the helicopter pilot, was happily tearing pieces of flesh off Dr. Barfuss and eating them.

“Oh, hell,” Beth said, and brought her lamp down hard on the head of the helicopter pilot, again and again and again, beating head and face, and neck to pulp long after he’d stopped twitching.

“Stop!” Dr. Pillarisetti yelled, and grabbed her arm. He was covered in blood and unidentifiable fragments and had just come from the stairway. “Stop, Beth. Stop. He’s dead.”

And then Beth had started crying. ZZ, the patient, had kind of gathered her in and said, “It’s all right. It’s better than freezing up, kid.”

He only let go of her as they were apportioning people between helicopters. He patted her shoulder as he called out, “Oh, hell, yeah, I can fly one of these. Better than the crap I flew in Desert Storm. At least no one will be shooting at us. Probably.”

When they were trying to cram more people than should be possible into each of the rescue helicopters, Beth found herself next to Dr. Pillarisetti and asked, “How did you get so bloody? You weren’t on the stairs.”

“No,” Nikhil Pillarisetti said. “I doubled back, to go…to euthanize those people we left behind strapped in carts. Some of them were our friends. And at any rate, leaving even a zombie strapped down and helpless to be eaten by other zombies felt wrong. So I cut their throats. Well, those I could reach. Definitely Dr. Tomboulian. I couldn’t leave her. Don’t look at me like that.”

“No. Thank you,” Dr. Hayden said quietly.

“Yeah, it was hell managing to get back here, though. Someone had jammed a cell phone under the bottom floor door,” he said, and grinned as he handed it to Dr. Hayden. The doctor just looked sad as she took it back.

* * *

When Dr. Hayden zombed out, as they rose high over the city—which was burning, flames licking up to the sky—it was Beth who strangled her, quickly, efficiently, and before Dr. Hayden could bite anyone in the press of terrified people. She would have preferred it, Beth thought, as she held her friend and felt her spasm and fight and finally go limp. There was no Dr. Hayden left, not really. This was stopping a vector. And doing no harm.

“I’m sorry, Beth,” ZZ told her as he got to her, just too late to help.

“It was a promise,” was all she said. To Dr. Hayden, and to herself.


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Framed