Night Zero- Second Day

by Rob Horner

  Chris enjoyed this part of the job, and the guests seemed to enjoy talking to him. More than a few women—and some men—went out of their way to compliment him on his manner and presentation, and he received no shortage of speculative glances, subtle inquiries into where he might be found off-duty, and even one thirty-something who flat out invited him back to her stateroom later. He took it all in stride, thanked people for their compliments, and politely used the excuse of professional impropriety to elude the more aggressive suitors.

  Tall, with sun-dark skin, Mediterranean features, and a close-cut crop of curly black hair, Chris knew he was good looking. His easy smile allowed him to turn down men and women both with little embarrassment as he made his way along the assigned patrol route. He knew not to use the reason of being married or having children at home; most of the randy women throwing themselves at him were in the same situation, just looking for something new and exciting to spice up their trip. Neither of the above reasons were true anyway, and he worried he’d be caught in a lie if he tried to use them.

  The simple truth was that he’d found happiness in the last place he ever thought to look.

  Mrs. Young did remind him of his grandmother, but she wasn’t the only reason he chose the route leading past sickbay.

  The crew never wore lanyards; their identification and pass cards were kept in their pockets. It was too easy to imagine a passenger snagging a card off a dangling string and using it to enter spaces no passenger was ever meant to see. It was all about optics. If a crewmember fell sick, they entered one of the infirmaries through a back entrance rather than the front lobby used by guests. Crewmen were discouraged from visiting the large, centralized sickbay for just about any reason.

  Chris swiped his card across the unmarked back entrance to the main sickbay and stepped into what looked, to him, like a miniature hospital emergency room, full of shiny chrome and flashing lights, spinning centrifuges and a back section for X-Ray. A large cabinet with locked glass doors held a wide variety of medications which could be administered as needed. The only pharmacy on the ship lay across the hall from the main entrance, overstocked with medications for motion sickness and gastrointestinal upset, but carrying a complete compliment of just about everything else. Guests were always forgetting to pack something, so the ship had to be ready to provide everything, from blood pressure to diabetes medications, antibiotics to antivirals.

  “Hey, baby,” Andy said as he turned from his computer.

  Smiling, Chris walked over to his boyfriend.

  “Uh uh,” Brian interrupted, jumping up from another terminal. “I can’t have my booty call in here, so you can’t either.”

  Andy settled for placing a kiss on Chris’s cheek. Brian was smiling as he complained, and his tone was good-natured, but Chris was aware of how uncomfortable other people could be around a gay couple. He might be more aware than most. Up until just a year before, he’d felt the same kind of twisting awkwardness around any overly expressive couple, gay or straight. But seeing two men together always hit him harder, making him turn away, a fire in his cheeks which he never put a name to. It took the patience and steadfast guidance of someone who recognized the truth hidden inside Chris to strip away the perceived stigma and bring out his true self.

  Chris had never been happier. He felt free. And he owed it all to Andy.

  “First day calm?” the seaman asked, noting the patient-free waiting area and the empty beds in the back.

  “So far so good,” Brian replied. “Had one case of the ‘I-forgot-my’ and sent her across the way.”

  Brian was good people and had been nothing but supportive of Chris as he eased his way one baby step at a time out of the closet. A former Navy Corpsman, Brian transitioned to Physician’s Assistant after leaving the service. The salt never left his bones, though, as the saying goes. Now he combined both his love for the open ocean and the desire to help others by serving on the cruise liner. He had an open, likable face with prematurely gray hair but a personality that could still get him nubile eighteen-year-olds just by flashing his smile.

  Still did, Chris amended, remembering Brian’s latest conquest.

  “What brings you by?” Andy asked as Chris sat down on an empty stool. “Assuming it wasn’t just to come see me, of course.”

  Andy was a beautiful man, and Chris knew he wasn’t alone in thinking it. For every girl trying to talk him into her cabin there would be three more gushing about “the hot medic” in sickbay. Tall and lean, Andy looked ten years younger than he was, with expressive brown eyes and curly brown hair kept only a little longer than Chris wore his. When Brian found out about their relationship his response was, “Thank God, you’re gay! Otherwise there wouldn’t be any women left for me!”

  “That’s one reason,” Chris answered, smiling at Andy. “But for the other, well, there was this passenger—”

  * * * * *

  A light flashed on the patient call monitor. Cabin 1MS102.

  Shannon clicked her mouse over the indicated cabin. “Central Station. How many I help you?” she asked into her headset.

  At first there was nothing.

  Probably just an accidental bump of the button, Shannon thought. An automatic Mississippi count started up in her head. Per protocol, even without a response, they had to allow ten seconds before shutting off the connection.

  “Hello, how can I help you?” she asked again.

  A sound came through her headphones, low and long.

  Registry information populated the screen next to the room number.

  “Mrs. Young? Are you in need of assistance?”

  The sound didn’t repeat because it hadn’t stopped. It remained low, a deep sighing rumble of air. Then came a sharp hiss, followed by a loud and protracted wail of pain and what sounded like a balloon deflating, one of the things kids did at parties. Blow one up and let it go.

  Shannon didn’t identify the third sound until much later, when she compared notes with the response team. The wail was enough.

  “I’m sending help, Mrs. Young, and I’ll keep the line open. Can you tell me what’s wrong?”

  Even as she spoke, she clicked other buttons on the screen, notifying security and sickbay.

  “Mrs. Young? Can you hear me?”

  The wail stopped and only the low moan remained.

  * * * * *

  A red light flashed over both computer consoles, a warning of a shipboard medical emergency.

  Brian spun on his stool, hitting buttons to pull up both an information screen and open a line to the ship operator.

  “Sickbay.”

  “Hey Brian.”

  “’Sup Shannon?”

  “They had a thing,” Andy whispered to Chris, who resisted the urge to chuckle. Shannon had to be at least ten years older than Brian.

  “Got a call from a Chelsie Young.”

  “I’m looking at the information on the screen. What’s the emergency?”

  “I was going to tell you about her,” Chris whispered back.

  “Her who? Shannon?”

  “No, Chelsie. Mrs. Young.”

  “What about her?” Andy asked, but Chris shushed him.

  “I dunno,” Shannon said. “She was moaning and crying, I think. Not sure what was going on.”

  “All right, Shannon. Andy and I are on our way.”

  Brian closed the connection and turned to Chris. “Andy, grab the Go Bag and a foldable. Chris, you’re coming along. Fill us in on why you thought you needed to tell us about her.”

  * * * * *

  God, I never want to be a medic, Chris thought.

  The smell struck them as soon as they unlocked the door to 1MS102. If someone took a gallon jug of swamp gas and boiled it in a copper pot with a handful of fresh dog shit and vomit, it still wouldn’t be as bad. He was gagging before they got through the tiny stateroom and to the lavatory door.

  Mrs. Young was naked except for her bra, a huge thing of beige swaths and stainless-steel clips. H
er round bottom nearly eclipsed the small toilet seat, but at least she was still seated on it and hadn’t fallen to the floor. There was brown and red splashed everywhere, like even her ass hadn’t been enough cover to keep it all inside the bowl. Streaks of…stuff ran up her broad back, coating the wall behind the toilet.

  He couldn’t see over her but Brian’s report, “She’s vomiting blood” gave him enough to know he desperately wanted to be anywhere else but there.

  “Chris, open the foldable and get us some help,” Andy said, pushing him out of the way.

  God bless you, Chris thought, staggering away from the bathroom.

  The smell filled the small cabin, but it was somehow more manageable just knowing he wouldn’t have to get closer. Brian’s voice reached out, discussing things with his partner. “BPs stable but heart rate and respirations are rapid.”

  “Little early for the GI bug.”

  “Not if she brought a little case of diverticulitis with her. We’ll know more in the bay.”

  Chris reached for the cabin phone, entering a special code to page all medical personnel, then backed into the passageway.

  The “foldable” was a portable stretcher broken down into a profile small enough for a single man to handle while navigating the often-narrow confines of a ships’ passageways and cabins. Heavy but manageable, it expanded into a slightly-smaller-than-normal conveyance for passenger transport. Every ships’ crewman had to be proficient in their use, and Chris was no exception.

  Max weight 400 lbs.

  The warning was stenciled on the upper end, where the patient’s head would rest. Chris wondered if the thing’s capabilities would be tested by Mrs. Young, then immediately regretted the thought. Just because he could barely tolerate the smell in the room didn’t excuse such mean thoughts.

  Sinful thoughts are still a sin, his mom used to say. In thinking as in doing and acting, always behave the way you would want others behaving toward you.

  His mother was the one person who’d surprised him the most with her acceptance. He’d been afraid to tell her, worried her religious convictions would force her to denounce him as immoral and a sinner. Her church wasn’t necessarily progressive, after all. But she just turned a smile on him and said, “I always knew, baby. I’ve just been waiting for you to figure it out.”

  While he waited for other personnel to arrive, Chris unfolded the stretcher. Its length was too great to manage the ninety degree turn from the passage into the room without some X-axis assistance, so he used his identification card to unlock the cabin door across the hall. Currently unoccupied, though the luggage piled on the bed said it wouldn’t be for long, the doorway to 1MS101 provided just enough extra space for him to turn the stretcher into the patient’s cabin.

  Her bowels emptied with an audible splash as he entered, sending a fresh draft of bloody fecal matter through the room, and this time Chris couldn’t help himself.

  Squeezing past the stretcher, he hurried across the hall and vomited into the toilet of 1MS101.

  * * * * *

  Brian Huggins had seen a lot during his career in medicine, first with the Navy, then as a physician’s assistant. He’d worked on Naval bases and in the field with a Marine battalion, had treated everything from disseminated gonococcal disease to the traumatic amputation of a man’s leg when an IED exploded. After the Navy, he spent ten years in an emergency room, treating cardiac arrests and patients under arrest. It was, perhaps, the most rewarding and draining time of his professional life. The never-ending run of patients, most of whom were only there because they had nowhere else to go, threatened to do something to him he never expected.

  It made him want to stop caring.

  The solution came when he answered a headhunter’s email about working on a cruise ship. It still wasn’t the challenge of battlefield medicine, where his hands were often the first on a patient and his choices might mean the difference between a patient living and a patient with a life worth living, but it replaced the tedium with a sense of adventure. No matter how bad a day he was having, no matter how many people came in with same litany of four or five complaints, he could go outside the walls of the sickbay, and there was the ocean. Something about the miles of open water under a clear sky just drove away his fatigue, rejuvenating his very soul. He knew what the others said about him, the comments about his charm and luck with the ladies. How could he explain it? He didn’t chase women for the sake of conquest, didn’t use the conquest as an argument against aging. Instead, the sea air imbued him with life, and women were attracted to that vibrancy.

  Who was he to turn them down?

  Brian tried to force his thoughts in two directions as the group hurried back to sickbay.

  On one side was his patient, Mrs. Chelsie Young, who followed in his wake on the stretcher. He had her positioned on her side to avoid the possibility of choking on her vomit. Sadly, that increased the risk of vomit and diarrhea spilling to the floor, especially since the young crewmen moving her were trucking along as fast as they dared. Andy had already called for a cleaning crew to walk their backtrail, and to be ready for a complete hose down in the patient’s stateroom.

  The other half of his brain was on Jolene, a pretty brunette whose bed he’d shared during the last cruise. It wasn’t anything special about her which lingered in his thoughts. It was her scent, a near-cloying bouquet of wildflowers and strawberries. He pulled at the scent, teasing it from memory so that it was almost there, right in front of his nose, so to speak. It was the only thing keeping him from joining poor Chris in hurling his last meal.

  The smell coming off the woman was god-awful, somehow worse than any combination of vomit, feces, and blood he’d ever experienced. Which didn’t make any sense. The copper-crap smell was ubiquitous to nursing homes and GI wards, where every other person had C. Diff. And those on the ward free of the bacterial infection still had some kind of GI bleed, be it from a ruptured ulcer or diverticulitis.

  And the quantity! He didn’t know how long Mrs. Young was on the toilet, but it had been long enough to brand the shape of the seat in red and purple on her generous bottom. The shower stall was a riot of red and green, though there didn’t seem to be any feces in her emesis.

  He almost wished there was. There weren’t too many things which could cause a person to vomit stool. With as sick as she was, he could use an easy diagnosis.

  Arriving at the back door to sickbay, he hurried to hold it open, also holding his breath as the woman was trundled through.

  Stupid. You’re going to have to breathe sometime.

  Andy followed the stretcher in, rushing immediately to his workstation.

  “Want some Vick’s?” he asked Brian, grabbing a small, glass jar off the counter.

  “God, yes!”

  With the smelly menthol rub under their noses, Brian and Andy went to help move the large woman from the stretcher to a larger bed. Their two on-duty nurses rushed in from the front half of sickbay, ready to assist.

  Twenty minutes later, they had her strapped down and sedated, with a wide-open IV line delivering normal saline. The only hitch was a mild scratch on Andy’s forearm, which he thought was caused by one of the hooks on her bra.

  Trust the gay guy to not know how to handle the upper half of a woman, Brian thought with a smile.

  It was too bad he didn’t know what else to do with her. If they were in a regular emergency department, there were a dozen or more tests he could order, easy work for a fully stocked lab. An abdominal CT might be in order. As it was, he had to make a decision. Did he wake up the presiding physician and try to get the woman transferred off the ship? Or did he wait things out, see if she continued as she was? The worst stomach bugs also had the shortest duration. It was entirely possible that, with a liter of fluid and a few meds, she’d wake up hungry as a hostage and rarin’ to go.

  Don’t kid yourself, Brian. You saw the blood. Make the call.

  Sighing, Brian reached for the phone.

  Cha
pter 33

  When Austin left Spartanburg, it was at the head of a force swollen far beyond anything he imagined.

  Overnight his forty had roamed the streets of the Hub City, biting, clawing, converting. Their victims in turn sought others with which to share. The city boasted a population of almost forty thousand souls, far too many to make become in any single night. But the population also swelled at night, especially in the summer, when spotlights shattered the darkness, blazing from country music concerts and mall parking lot fairs. The meager security at these venues, with their metal detector wands and drug-sniffing dogs, offered no resistance as his people moved among the crowds. The screams of their victims were confused with thrill-ride induced glee, which was then drowned out by amplified music beating from dozens of speakers. Fear and panic spread like a wave through the throngs. People turned and fought, struggling to escape, crashing outward from a dozen different epicenters like ripples on a still pond generated by a handful of rocks, colliding, rolling over one another.

  But the attack had begun on the outskirts, so the rolling tide met the implacable shore and was rebuffed.

  Forty became four hundred and became four thousand before midnight. By daybreak, when Austin again found his way to the Interstate, more than ten thousand become filled the road around him. Several thousand others spread along the side streets, following his orders, sweeping humanity away in a great swathe as though Death walked the land with his scythe, harvesting souls as fast as he could swing.

  This time they didn’t travel along the sides, but rather filled all lanes of travel, bringing traffic to a grinding, crashing, blazing halt.

  Doors were flung open and, when some impertinent driver thought to preserve himself by thumbing a lock button, windows were smashed.