Chapter Text
The grenade moment. Life has been trundling along and then, bang, with no warning, it explodes. Something makes your soul cry out, whacks you in the stomach with an iron bar, makes you feel that some outside agency has reached a fist into you, unfurling angry fingers and tearing your heart from your body. Life has changed forever; perhaps it has now become unlivable.”
“That’s what the grenade moment does. It separates the old life from the new and there will forever be a divide. The blade has come down. Life as we knew it has been detached, truncated. What lies on the other side is both unknowable and unthinkable.”
From A Manual for Heartache by Cathy Rentzenbrink
June 3, 2010
What once was Alex Ybarra’s refuge - the one place where she felt in control of life - has disintegrated into complete chaos. When she came in for her shift after a spare few hours of sleep at home, the higher ups said that the military is helping to evacuate, and initially, they do. Alex’s tiny, delicate charges are long gone, airlifted from rural King County to Atlanta or other sites considered more secure in their infrastructure. Her place of employment is only a Level II for the nursery, rating only a special care nursery, not a full NICU.
“Alejandra? What are you still doing here?” She turns to see the tall form of the Head of Pediatrics, Dr. Samuel Myers, striding toward her.
“Checking to see that we didn’t miss any pediatric patients.” Her reply is distracted as she checks the overfull clipboard, stuffed with patient overviews originally printed in multiple copies. Copies went with patients on the aircraft that flitted them away to safety. She keeps having the eerie feeling a baby or child might have been missed.
“I arranged for you to leave with the last of the newborns.” Dr. Myers looks genuinely distressed, almost to the level she would call distraught. One of the reasons Alex chose pediatrics as her specialty was that the doctors tended to be more human and less overbearing, and Myers is a prime example of the kind and gentle aspect of the profession.
“They said, but they’re short on nurses to get the other patients covered until we’re fully evacuated, so I stayed.”
She frowns, because Myers flinches. What does he know that he isn’t telling? He glances back over his shoulder down the deserted hallway. Unlike Alex, the other two nurses did evacuate with their small patients. As far as she knows, she and Myers are the last two employees left on the floor, now that she’s finished her bed check.
“Dr. Myers?”
Myers whips his head back around to look at her, and she notices for the first time that he’s disheveled in a way she’s never seen him. He’s never been a peacock, not like the younger pediatrician that works here, but he’s always been carefully tidy. Now, his salt-and-pepper hair looks like he spent hours yanking on it, and he is without his colorful stethoscope and its little animal face snap-ons that keep the children entertained. She’s never seen him without it.
“Alejandra? You really shouldn’t be here.”
There’s loud noises from the floor above, and the sound of the elevator moving. Myers grabs her, the move so unexpected that Alex doesn’t even begin to fight him as he drags her bodily toward the medication room. He jabs his code in and shoves her inside.
“Hide. Do not come out no matter what.”
“Dr. Myers? What’s going on?”
He fumbles at a pocket and shoves a crumpled piece of paper at her. “Hide. Please, just hide. Be quiet and stay safe.”
The push backwards he gives her tumbles her to the ground in sheer shock, and he yanks the door closed. She hears the electronic locks engage, even as her bruised palms and posterior begin to sting. Still sprawled on the floor, she carefully unwads the paper, seeing the fax headers that label it from the army medical center at Fort Gordon.
It’s scrawled in barely legible writing, not typewritten.
“Evacuate your staff. Orders given to consider all adults as contagious and to terminate without hesitation.”
It isn’t signed, but Alex has heard Dr. Myers mention a colleague who chose military service over civilian. It explains his hurried advice as the first cases of the so-called flu drifted into the hospital, to disable the brain of any deceased patients. He’s had military contact all this time.
But surely the military won’t execute civilians simply for being on the staff in an infected hospital? The public would never stand for that level of martial law and paranoia. She rolls to her knees, standing with a wince.
Despite her mental rejection of the idea, she can’t shake Dr. Myers' almost palpable fear. He’s one of the most level-headed men she’s ever met in her life, and he was terrified.
Just as she reaches the door, she hears voices. They’re muffled by the solid wood of the medication room door, but she can tell the newcomers sound angry. Myers’ reply is even more muffled. Before she can open the door to peek out, there’s the sound of gunfire. Rapid shots, like Alex has only ever heard on television before.
She only keeps from crying out by pressing both hands hard over her mouth. She’s beginning to hyperventilate as she creeps backward from the door, eyes frantically scanning the room for a place to hide.
Can they get into a room secured by an electronic code? Will they even bother to search a place not intended for people anyway?
Alex can’t take the chance. The room is too open, meant for preparing medications to dispense on the floor. But there’s a sink, and it’s the first time in her life that she’s been grateful for her small stature. Folding herself into the cabinet quickly, she pulls the doors shut.
Curled in the darkness, she prays, clutching the rosary out of her pocket and trying to draw comfort from the cool stone beads and metal sliding through her fingers.
Hours pass, judged by the brief glimpses she risks of her watch in the darkness. The building rocks a few times by what she thinks are explosions. She wonders if she’s escaped the fate Myers feared only to die in a pile of rubble, trapped under a sink.
Finally, she can’t stand the claustrophobic location anymore. If she’s going to die, she’ll die, but it won’t be under a damn sink smelling of metal and disinfectant.
It takes a good five minutes, sprawled in the floor on her belly, for her limbs to move past the driving pain of circulation returning. Once she can stand without feeling like she’s walking on hot coals, Alex eases the door open. Slow. Easy. Hopefully without being noticed if anyone is still on the pediatric and maternity floors.
The lighting is dim, only the pediatric wing lights still on in her limited viewpoint, and the nursing area lacks windows due to design reserving them for patient areas. From the flickering down the maternity wing corridor, damage is causing the lack of lighting, not that someone actually turned them off. She creeps along against the nursing desk, glad that the hospital design places the medication room behind the bulky half circle desk.
Listening, she hears nothing but her own carefully modulated breathing. It’s so quiet Alex thinks she can hear her own heartbeat.
Risking being seen, she rises slowly to her feet in a crouch, peeking over the desk. There’s no movement toward either corridor, but it lets her spot the most horrifying thing she’s seen so far since the damned world started falling apart.
Lying sprawled in the brightly lit pediatric corridor is Samuel Myers. The wall bears witness that he was standing when he was shot, bits of blood, bone, and brain matter splattered like some scene out of a Dick Wolf crime show. Blood pools around the body, soaking his white coat and navy blue scrubs. She whimpers, fear of discovery battling with the need to make sure he’s so deathly still because he really is dead. Her nursing training wins over terror.
But it’s to no avail. The kindly man who always treated everyone with gentlemanly respect, from doctors to janitorial staff, is dead and probably has been since she heard the gunshots hours before. There’s no chance it’s an accident. Even without police or military training, with only Hollywood to go by, there’s no mistaking Myers was executed.
Three wounds to the chest, one to the head. He was kneeling by the time of the final shot, with the evidence of his position like gruesome graffiti on the wall behind him.
Alex does make it to the unisex visitor’s bathroom before she vomits, body wrenching over the toilet as she sobs. Fear, loss, confusion - all war with one another. She flushes the toilet and rinses her mouth before venturing back out.
He did his best to save her, first with the evacuation orders and then by stuffing her in a room those unfamiliar with a hospital are unlikely to search. She cannot leave this man to rot in a hallway, even if the world’s gone insane.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, a little voice spawned by her medical training babbles about shock, but she ignores that information. It takes nearly an hour and the help of one of the patient lifts because he outweighs her by a good eighty pounds. When she’s done, Samuel Myers is reclined on a bed once reserved for his own patients.
Nothing can truly hide the damage to his body, but she’s done her best. As long as you ignore the smudges on the surgical cap tucked too low on his forehead and the complete stillness of his chest and limbs, he could be sleeping. A doctor gone exhausted by too long on duty, stealing a catnap in an empty patient room.
It takes another half hour of scrubbing to remove the evidence in the hallway.
Alex spends a full hour sobbing and naked in one of the patient showers on the maternity wing, the patient room mostly dark from the damaged electrical. Sunlight still streams into the big, bright windows meant to keep new mothers cheerful, as if the world hasn’t given itself over to madness and the cold-blooded murder of gentle old men who spent their entire lives dedicated to healing children.
Her body is frigidly cold when she finally shuts off the water. She towels off mechanically, her brain feeling as dull and foggy as it did after the one and only hangover she experienced in college. She has no scrubs or clothing, so she wraps herself in one of the extra towels and ventures toward the tiny staff room where all the nurses keep spare changes of clothing.
The black jeans and red T-shirt seem alien to her when she tugs them out of her locker. She stuffs them back, opting only for the spare underwear and socks. Her shoes survived the cleaning spree, so after she dons a new set of scrubs. The bright yellow worn by pediatric nursing staff never seemed so completely out of place.
She could go home, but there’s nothing there for her to go to. After the warning of military slaughter, she doesn’t trust the radio broadcasts that were telling people to evacuate to Atlanta, either. She knows the hospital evacuation was not complete. Her floor went first, and the last helicopter left only half an hour before Myers found her. There’s no way they got the immobile, long-term patients out.
Disassembling one of the low-tech, telescoping IV poles, she arms herself with the metal rod and heads into the stairwell. She knows why the executioners shot poor Dr. Myers in the head despite the damage done to his chest. This might not be one of the larger hospitals, but they did learn, after losses in the emergency room and surgical floors, that whatever reanimates the dead requires an intact brain.
Alex very carefully doesn’t think of the colleagues who died to learn that theory and damns the government for not sharing. There’s no way they didn’t know, especially faster than rural hospitals like her own.
The third floor is an exercise in terror. She puts down three walkers the military failed to execute properly. Two are patients, gowns trailing around their grayed bodies. The third is a nursing student that Alex knows and wishes somehow, someone had looked after the girl like Myers tried to do for Alex. But there’s no signs of actual life anywhere on the floor. She does her best not to look directly at the four bodies in staff clothing near the elevator, all executed the same way as Dr. Myers on the second floor.
She heads for the fourth floor, where the long-term care patients reside. Someone’s blocked off the doors to one wing, chaining it shut and declaring ‘DON’T OPEN, DEAD INSIDE’. She wants to tell the culprit, ‘no shit’. Fingers strain at the door, skeletal and oozing. The odor alone is one of the worst she’s ever experienced.
Near the elevators, bodies lie in a row once again. Seven. Four staff, three in civilian clothing she thinks were probably family members desperately trying to see their loved ones evacuated as promised. She carefully ignores the distinctive haircut and professional color of the one in nursing scrubs. She isn’t ready yet to recognize more colleagues.
Not yet. Maybe not ever.
Room by room, she makes her way down the long-term wing. Patients lie dead in their beds, evidence of their passing splattered in their forehead. In some rooms, machinery still bleats warnings, with enough power - emergency or otherwise, she isn’t sure - keeping unneeded computerized IV medications going and monitors trying desperately to alert staff that the patients the monitors supervise are well beyond the limitations set for the equipment.
She switches off the alarms methodically. Unplugs IVs so they don’t join the cacophony of alerts once their meds and fluids run out.
It’s such a routine, almost muscle memory, that when she finally finds the room where the machines aren’t crying out for attention, she almost doesn’t notice.
There’s no bullet wound in the man’s forehead. Somehow, someone got sloppy. How or why, she will probably never know. But she’s cautious still, remembering nurses eaten by patients they tried to help. She waits until she sees the barely noticeable rise of his chest. Breathing, and on his own. There’s no ventilator in the room, unusual for long-term care, but not impossible.
Her hand trembles as Alex reaches under the covers, grasping his ankle and letting her fingers find the posterior tibial artery. From the foot of the bed, she’s got more of a chance to defend herself if he turns. She grips her improvised and gory weapon so tight her hand aches.
The pulse is faint, but there.
She risks moving higher, pressing her fingers to the inside of his elbow to a better pulse point.
Medical training kicks in as her eyes stay on her watch, held so she keeps the metal pole between herself and the man. Bradycardic, feeble, irregular.
She realizes she knows this patient. It’s the deputy shot ten days ago, and his care is both gossip and prayer around the hospital like few other patients. He was taken off the medications keeping him in a medically induced coma three days ago, but did not wake.
Now he’s abandoned in a building full of the dead, unaware of the world dying around him. She prays none of the dead by the elevator were his family.
Perhaps the kindest thing would be to let him go. To complete what the military started and failed to finish. But Alex trained as a nurse, six grueling years of education to save lives, not end them.
She scrambles for a terminal, praying the servers are still functioning and accessible. The printer whirs and grumbles, spitting out document after document. He isn’t her patient, and she desperately needs this information to even begin to stabilize him.
Alex knows it is illogical, but she doesn’t fight the growing feeling that she has to stay, has to save this man to atone for Dr. Myers’ willingness to sacrifice himself while she hid behind a locked door.