by Jolly, Kirk
Allen could see the two orderlies with their Thrashers waiting just outside the double doors for Sam to move. The ping sounded again.
“Gotta go, Allen,” he said turning. “I’ll be back though.”
“Be careful out there,” Alice said. He waved her off and pulled the doors open pushing passed the orderlies who wheeled their gurneys in.
“Are you my runners tonight?” he recognized one from earlier but not the other.
“Yes sir,” they replied in unison.
“Names,” he grunted wheeling the first Thrasher over to an open station.
“I’m Josh,” said the newcomer, “And this is Will,” he pointed to the quiet one from earlier.
“Okay Josh and Will. This is the process. You bring in a still one, you announce the clock then help us lift it onto an open station. If it is thrashing, don’t bother with the time, just help move the body. If all the stations are filled, you line them up along the wall. If the wall is full, you line them up in the hallway. Every time you bring me a body, you need to leave with an empty gurney to keep my morgue clear. We’ll also need you to help Xavier run bodies to the storage downstairs. You understand me?”
They both nodded.
“Well then what are you waiting for?”
They began lifting thrashing bodies from gurneys to tables. While they worked, Allen grabbed his stapler and closed up the first body. He’d prefer to stitch it up but there was no time for that now. Josh and Will grabbed their now-empty gurneys and pushed them away.
“Okay Alice, let’s take this one at a time. With the Thrashers, it’s easier and quicker if the three of us work together.”
She nodded in agreement and they started on the first body. As he worked, he vaguely heard the outside doors ping several more times. Josh and Will came and went about their business and soon all the tables in the morgue were full.
Allen cut the brain stem of the first Thrasher while it screamed. The thrashing increased, which made it very hard to get the brain out. Alice got her hands around it to help and it slid and slurped out of the skull. She ran it to the chamber and turned it on. While the brain burned, the body screamed even louder and bucked wildly, making it impossible to close up, so they turned and started on the second one.
After a while they fell into a rhythm. They’d open one up and get the brain out and burning, and then start on the next. Once the brain was burned, Alice would close up the skull while Allen started opening the next one with Xavier holding it down. Josh and Will would pull the finished bodies off the table and take them to the cold storage units. The number of Thrashers with bandages on their wrists far outnumbered the number of still bodies at first but it started to even out as the day went on.
“Do you want us to start bringing in the headless bodies now?” Will asked after they had caught up a little.
“How many are there?”
“Dozens,” he replied. “They said the Peacekeepers got overrun pretty bad and they couldn’t take the walkers quietly anymore so they started cutting off heads. Dr. Adams told us to leave those aside until you got caught up.”
Allen understood the logic but didn’t like the implications. The headless still thrashed but they were much weaker. With the head already removed, it could simply be tossed into the burning chamber or Allen could choose to take the time to remove the brain and try to preserve the body for burial.
“Yes, bring them,” he said.
“What are we going to do?” Alice asked.
“Well we still have a dozen or so bodies that are under the clock that we need to process. If we take the time to remove the brain of the headless, we are going to get into a time crunch.”
“So you just want to burn the heads?” she asked.
He thought on it for a moment. He knew his colleagues would understand and wouldn’t blame him, but he couldn’t help but think of the families who wouldn’t be able to bury their loved ones. Even though these people had chosen to end their lives, their families deserved the right to lay their bodies to rest.
“No, I think we can manage it.”
In the end it wouldn’t matter what Allen decided.
Chapter 10: Calm Before the Storm
“Where the hell is Wilson?” Allen barked as Josh and Will came in to drop off yet another pair of deceased.
“Oh yeah,” Josh said, “Dr. Adams told me that he ended up going to work one of the emergency cremation centers. Sorry I forgot to tell you.”
Allen knew that if they were running the back-ups, that things must be really bad out there, but he supposed at least Wilson and his team would divert some of the flood headed toward the hospital. He looked at his watch. If the outbreak had started about five hours ago, then the first victims would be rising soon and the number of Thrashers would begin to grow exponentially. It also meant that if the Peacekeepers didn’t get it under control soon, they would risk being overrun. If that started to happen, the city would descend into chaos. It would be like before, when everybody who had a weapon would flood the streets to squash the Rising. Bodies would be burned whole in the street. The city could be weeks, even months in recovering, if it was able to recover at all.
He hoped it wasn’t coming to that.
Alice and Xavier had been silent for a long time and Allen knew they could use a break. He wished they had more people to spare. He and Alice each were working on a detached head, an odd process, but not something that couldn’t be handled solo and Xavier was trying to clean up and make room for the next wave.
“Xavier,” he looked up. “Why don’t you go take a seat for a minute?”
He nodded and walked away to find a chair.
“Alice, when you’re done there, you do the same.”
She looked up at him, trying to blow a loose piece of hair back. She had blood smeared all over her face despite the plastic shield she wore over it. “I can’t do that. We’re at least a dozen deep here still and some of their clocks are going to run up soon.”
“I know, but if we don’t rest for a least a minute or two, we’ll start to get sloppy and make mistakes, which will cost us more time than a few minute break.”
“I suppose, but…”
“No arguments. If you want to do something useful, go clean yourself up a bit then go out and find Adams and see if he can spare anybody else. Somebody who can handle a scalpel would be preferable.”
Reluctantly she nodded. After putting the brain she’d just liberated into the firing chamber, she shed her splatter gear and went to the sink. After scrubbing her hands and face, she pulled her hair back into its normal, neat ponytail. If one ignored the dark circles under her eyes, she looked almost fresh.
“I’ll be back in five,” she announced as she walked through the swinging double doors.
Allen took the opportunity to clean himself up a bit too. He looked across the room and saw Xavier sitting in the chair in the corner, staring at his feet looking defeated.
“So Xavier, it looks like you’re stuck with us for the long haul. Sorry about that.”
The young man looked up at him. “That’s okay. I’m glad to help.”
“Tell me about yourself,” Allen demanded. He’d found over the years that one of the best ways to get somebody to take his mind off a bad situation was to get him talking about anything besides what was going on, and usually that meant himself.
“Not much to tell. I was sort of a screw-up in school, never made it to college. I was working at a Jiffy Lube when all of this happened. My mom was killed near the end of the initial outbreak. It was just me and her since my dad left us years ago and I was out trying to find some food when she saw one of our neighbors being attacked. She tried to help them but she was bitten on the neck. Bled out before anyone could help her.”
“I’m sorry.”
“When I got home she was already dead. The Peacekeepers were trying to tell me that they had to take the body and burn it. I fought them off her. Then one of the EMTs showed up and said he could take her to the hospita
l and they would take care of the body. They said there was a doctor there who would remove the brain and burn it, leaving her body intact for burial. When I saw what you did for my mom…,” he shook his head, “Thank you.”
“I was just doing my job.” Xavier stared intently at Allen waiting for more. “You’re welcome.”
They sat in silence for a moment. To Allen’s surprise, Xavier broke the silence.
“So how did you become a doctor?”
“Well,” he sighed, “The short answer is I went to medical school. The long answer is that my father was a doctor; a brain surgeon, ironically enough. Well respected in his field. I admired and feared him at the same time. He was a hard man in many ways. Cold, calculated, demanding, you name it, but the compassion he showed for his patients was unparalleled for a surgeon. They tend to keep themselves detached. Nature of the job I guess. I always thought that if I became a doctor and earned his respect, it would bring us closer, but things rarely go as planned.”
“What happened?”
“Well I got through the first years of med school easily enough. I chose surgery as my specialty, no big surprise there, and started my internship. Being a surgical intern, you do a lot of watching and assisting for a long time, to the point where you wonder if you’ll ever be the lead during an operation. My first time was man with a burst appendix. An appendectomy is fairly routine so my resident thought it would be a good one to cut my teeth on as it were. There were unforeseen complications and long story short, he died on the table. They tried to reassure me that I’d done everything right, but I couldn’t shake it. I tried to hang in there, mostly because of the pressure from my Father, but I couldn’t do it.”
Allen couldn’t believe how candid he was being with the kid but it seemed to be calming both of them down.
“So there I was, 25 with a quarter-million in student loans in a profession that I couldn’t bring myself to do any longer. So I switched my specialty to pathology. Dead people don’t die on you. Little did I know I would become the exterminator of the dead.”
The double doors swung open behind them, smacking the walls. Alice entered, breathing hard.
“I don’t think we’re going to get any help. The shit has hit the fan.”
Chapter 11: Shit-Covered Fan Blades
“What happened?” Allen asked his stomach dropping at the panicked look on Alice’s face.
“Sam came back while I was looking for Dr. Adams,” she said.
“Did he say anything? What’s going on out there?”
“He didn’t say anything. He’s dead.”
“Oh,” Allen said feeling like he’d been punched.
“And that’s not the worst. While I was up there, I counted at least ten dead or dying Peacekeepers in the ER. I don’t think they are going to be able to get things under control. I finally found Dr. Adams and he said he couldn’t spare anybody because people are starting to run away.”
Allen could feel the situation spinning out of control. Alice’s eyes were glassy with fear and Xavier stood at his side in shocked silence. He walked over and flipped the TV back on. It might cause them more panic but he had to know how bad it was. The on screen reporter’s voice blasted into the quiet of the morgue.
I repeat, Admin has advised all citizens to go into lock-down and stay in their homes. Peacekeepers will have this under control soon and we will update everybody when it is safe to go outside again.
Allen had heard this same message many times before. It remained the same no matter how big the outbreak was. The screen cut to some prerecorded footage of Peacekeepers fighting and subduing some of the Risen. The reporter’s voice continued to drone in the background.
It seems that in the late hours last night, sometime around 10:00 PM by best estimate, a large religious group known as The Children of the Rising Son were able to remove their tracking devices and implant them in dogs to prevent their beacons from going off, then committed mass suicide. What was at first thought only to be a couple dozen, we now know to be closer to three hundred, rose in the early morning hours and began to attack the residential district. By the time Peacekeepers arrived, there were already many casualties. The city’s infrastructure has been put the test handling the processing of all the dead and by all reports they have been successful.
Allen looked around the room. They still had a dozen or so bodies to process and by the sound of it, dozens more were probably coming. He looked at his watch. If the reporter was right about the time; the outbreak must’ve started around 4:00 AM. That meant that the initial waves of victims were set to rise in less than 30 minutes. Allen reached to turn the TV off and get back to work but froze when he saw the screen. In the background of one of the aerial shots, he saw the backup firing center, the one Wilson was working, surrounded by people milling around. Allen recognized the stiff way they were walking for what it was.
He flipped the TV off, hoping the others hadn’t seen. He felt acid rising in the back of his throat and suppressed the urge to vomit.
“We need to get back to work,” he announced, trying not to sound so shaken. “You heard the reporter. They almost have this thing under control. If we just keep working, things will be back to normal in no time.”
“Do you really believe that?” Alice asked, staring him down.
“I don’t…,” he paused to correct the slip, “I don’t know. But I do know that if we don’t keep processing bodies, that only increases the chances that the city will be overrun.”
They quietly nodded their heads. The three stood in a trance, thinking over their options, when the chime sounded overhead. Josh burst through the doors a moment later, doing his best to push two gurneys into the room by himself. Xavier ran to help him. One of the two bodies on the gurneys was already thrashing. Josh was sweating and looked exhausted but otherwise seemed okay.
“What happened to the other one…Will?” Allen fumbled.
“That chicken-shit ran off when they started bringing in the dead Peacekeepers,” he said, disgusted. “The religious nuts that started this booby-trapped the warehouse. When the Peacekeepers stormed it to clear out the rest of the dead, some kind of toxic gas was released that either killed them outright or knocked them out long enough for the Risen to get them.” His eyes betrayed the fear he was trying to hide as he told the story.
“Are you going to run off on me?” Allen questioned, snapping him back to the moment.
“Hell no. This is why I volunteered to work at the hospital. Besides, my family is dead already so I don’t really have anywhere to go.”
Allen nodded, “Good. You’ll have to work twice as hard now that there is only one of you. We’ll have Xavier help you out as much as we can spare him. We’ve got to get on top of this.”
They all got back to work. The bodies in the morgue remained still but their clocks were running out. Allen looked at each wrist monitor and prioritized them. With them immobile, he and Alice could each handle one alone, so they finished off six of the bodies, but for each one they did, Josh and Xavier pushed more in. The bites on the victims were getting more severe with each new body they brought in, showing Allen just how bad it was getting out there.
One by one, the bodies began to buck and thrash against their straps, making it so Allen had to call Xavier back from running with Josh to help them hold the heads still. They fell back into their rhythm.
Xavier’s trips with the finished bodies got longer now that he had to run them to the basement. They’d long since filled the storage they had up here. Allen estimated they’d processed nearly 250 bodies today. Allen and Alice were so deep into their groove that they didn’t notice that it had been awhile since Josh had brought a body. Xavier was the first to point it out.
Xavier came back from a basement trip with two empty gurneys and pushed them in line against the wall next to four others. He knew that he should hurry back and run some more so he ignored the urge to go look for Josh and headed back inside. Allen and Alice were each closing
up another body. There were only seven more thrashing noisily on the tables and gurneys that filled the room.
“How long has it been since Josh brought a body?” he asked his voice sounding worried.
“I’m not sure. Do you want to go look for him?” Allen asked distractedly. When he didn’t hear an answer he punched one last staple into the skull he was closing and looked up. He saw the panic-stricken look on Xavier’s face and realized that the kid was scared to go alone.
“Tell you what, let’s finish up the rest of the bodies we have here and if he still hasn’t come down, we’ll go looking for him together.”
“Okay,” he replied.
“I’m sure everything is fine. Maybe it just means we’re finally getting on top of this outbreak.”
With that, they set back to work. Two of the remaining Thrashers were dead Peacekeepers, which nagged at Allen’s mind but he pushed the bad thoughts down and just kept working. The morgue and the hospital were heavily guarded and should be safe no matter how bad things got outside. Except he would have thought the same thing about the back-up burn center he’d seen on the news being overrun. If that wasn’t secure, how long could they expect to stay safe with every emergency team in town bringing the dead or dying to their door? This line of thought prompted him to glance nervously at the doors, hoping the kid would come through; hoping that anyone alive would come through the door.
When Alice shut the last brain inside the firing chamber, the room fell silent. For the first time that day, they could hear themselves breathe. Allen looked at the gore around the room and on his two young colleagues. They looked as exhausted as he felt. Without a word, he began to shed his gear to clean up. The other two followed suit. Rinsing the blood and sweat from his hands and face felt great and he found himself delaying what they needed to do next to savor the moment. As he toweled himself dry, he looked up and realized the other two were staring at him, waiting.
Waiting for him to lead.
