by Bobby Adair
Not concerned with small talk, I thought about racing my motorcycle several years ago out on FM 2222, blazing over the hills and around the sharp turns, trying to shake the carnivorous banshees that lived in my soul. No matter how fast I flew down the road, I couldn’t slip them. When I hit a guardrail and my body crashed through the upper branches of some trees on a downward slope, I ended up a summertime resident of the hospital.
The main building, the oldest, was laid out in something of a T-shape with the top bar of the T being too long for a properly formed letter. The upper floors each had a central hall down each branch of the T with patient rooms on both sides. An expansive nurses’ station stood at the intersection of the three branches on each floor. At least that was the layout of the upper floors. The lower two or three had grown maze-like with additions through the years. On the fourth floor, a breezeway connected at an angle from the shortest leg of the T to a roughly circular and relatively new children’s hospital.
Knowing the layout as well as I knew the house I grew up in, I started to plan how I was going to find Steph if I had to force my way in. Of course, I should rather have been considering what an all-around stupid idea that was, but that thought never really bubbled to the surface.
The other soldier came hurrying back into view with a guy in a soiled white lab coat. The three of them conferred quietly for a few minutes and then the guy in the lab coat came over to the glass.
I asked, “Are you the doctor in charge?”
“I might be.”
“Christ,” I said, letting my frustration show. “I’m not a Chinese spy. Are you in charge?”
The guy in the lab coat peered through the window, trying to see as much as he could see. After he was satisfied with whatever he was looking for he said, “Yes, I am in charge. I’m Dr. Paul Evans.”
“Zed Zane. Will you please open the door and let me in?”
Dr. Evans looked blankly at me, but said nothing.
Quietly, but sternly, I said, “Look, the infected downstairs are going to…”
Dr. Evans held up a hand to silence me and said, “I know, I know.”
He stepped back over near the others. More whispered conversations among the three and a few too many suspicious glances at my white face through the glass left me uneasy.
But they came to a decision. Dr. Evans raised a hand to the door and the lock clicked. He pushed the door open. I had one fist gripped around my fragmentation grenade and the other held my Glock with my finger on the trigger. I walked through.
The soldiers held their weapons pointed at the floor, but enhanced my distrust by surrounding me, one behind and one beside me. Dr. Evans stood in front.
“You’re in.” Dr. Evans’ tone was condescending and angry when he pointed to my hand grenade. “Do you intend to kill us with that?”
“No.” I glanced over my shoulder at the guy behind me. “I just don’t trust any of you.”
“Then why come here?” he asked.
“Like I told the guys.” I nodded at each of the soldiers. “I’m here for Steph.”
“Steph?” he asked.
The soldier to my left, the one I’d been talking to, said, “Nurse Leonard.”
So that was Steph’s last name. It had never occurred to me to ask.
Dr. Evans asked, “Are you a relative?”
Without an ounce of respect for authority left anywhere in me, I spouted, “Really? After all that’s happened, you’re going to stonewall me with a protocol that nobody gives a shit about anymore?”
That pissed him off. Dr. Evans’ face flashed anger, but returned quickly to an icy cold nothing expression, except for his lips, which remained pinched closed.
I stood half a head shorter than him, but having separated so many souls from so many different sized bodies over the past week, I was no longer intimidated by physical stature.
Dr. Evans forced his voice to sound calm. “I was curious, Mr. Zane, that’s all. No, no, I’m not curious. I need to know. For better or worse, I’m in charge here. I’m trying to keep as many of these people alive as I can. They’re my responsibility. So, unless you want to detonate that hand grenade right here and kill us all, then you’ll have to answer my questions, because you’re not taking one step further until I get some answers.”
I cocked my head at the soldier behind me. “Why is he back there?”
Dr. Evans looked at the soldier behind me and motioned to his right. “Corporal.”
The guy behind me walked around me to stand a few paces behind the doctor.
“Let me ask you something, Dr. Evans. How long have you been in charge here—since the beginning?”
“Why do you want to know?” He was cautious.
“Who set up all the triage tents outside?” I asked, not sure why I chose to go down that rat hole. “Who decided on the protocols that put all of the infected in that gym and then left them there to die? Was that you?”
“Is that what this is, then?” Dr. Evans motioned at the two soldiers. “You men go up the hall to a safe distance.” He looked down his long, narrow nose and said, “I did that. I was in charge here when those decisions were made. If you’re here to kill me over some grudge about that, then shoot me. Don’t detonate that grenade in here and compromise the safety of the others.”
“No.” I shook my head emphatically. “That’s not why I’m here. I’m not here to kill you, though now that you mention it, it sounds like an appealing idea. I was in that gym. I almost died there. I’m a person, you fucker. I’m not a piece of medical waste. But that’s how you saw me, right?”
Dr. Evans shook his head. His face softened. He was troubled. “Mr. Zane, don’t pretend to be naïve. You wouldn’t be alive if you were. I made hard decisions to try to contain the infection and save as many people as I could. I’m not going to ask you to understand. I’m not going to ask you to care how difficult it was. I’m a doctor, Mr. Zane. I’ve dedicated my life to saving other people’s lives. Maybe my decisions that night were wrong. Maybe they were the worst decisions. But maybe there weren’t any good choices. Mr. Zane, I did what I thought was the best, given what I knew at the time. If that caused you harm, then I apologize for that harm, but I can’t change what’s passed.”
“Look,” I said, “I’ll be honest. I’m kind of pissed about all of that, but I’m not an idiot. I understand that choices were made for the greater good. I’m pissed because in any kind of greater-good choice, somebody always gets fucked. I was the guy who got fucked this time. But to get back to the point, I’m not here to kill you or anybody else.” Then, as sincerely as I could, given the tension, I added, “But I do respect you for taking responsibility, even though you thought I might be here to kill you for it.”
Dr. Evans exhaled a long breath and said, “That’s a relief. Can I ask you to put the pin back in that grenade?”
“Perhaps, in a minute,” I said. “Right now, let’s just say that I have trust issues.”
“Why are you here?” he asked.
At the root of it, that was a question I didn’t really have an answer to.
“Mr. Zane?”
“Like I said,” I nearly blurted, “I need to see Steph. She told me last night she was going to volunteer for the infection.” I took a deep breath. “She’s my friend. I need to know if she’s dead. Is she?”
Dr. Evans slowly shook his head, sloughing off his anger and exposing his sadness. “I don’t know.”
I relaxed a little. “Where is she?”
“She’s two floors down. What do you intend to do when you see her?”
“I don’t know.” I softened. “I…I’ve seen so many people…too many friends die. I guess I just have to know, one way or the other.”
Dr. Evans’ eyes examined my face for an uncomfortably long time after that. “I’m sorry I had you put in that infected ward. I really am.”
With some reluctance, I gave Dr. Evans a nod of acceptance.
“One thing you might want to know is tha
t if I’d let you into the hospital that night, you’d probably be dead now.” Dr. Evans looked around as though trying to see something that wasn’t there. “I’m not trying to find some ex-post justification for my decisions that night, but if you’ve been talking to Nurse Leonard, you know how bad things have been here.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I know.”
Dr. Evans turned to the two soldiers. “You men keep this door secure.” To me, he said, “C’mon, Mr. Zane. I’ll take you down to see Steph.”
“Thank you.” Before following, I took a gamble. I holstered my Glock and fished the grenade pin out of my pocket and pushed it back into place in the grenade. I turned and handed it to one of the soldiers, noticing as I opened my palm that the grenade was red and sticky with my blood. “I’ve got two more clean ones if you don’t want that one.”
The soldier accepted the bloody grenade with a nod of thanks.
Then I doubled down and gave a grenade to the other guard. I said, “I can probably find some more outside eventually.”
The second guard thanked me, as did Dr. Evans.
Chapter 7
We walked together up the hall. “Was that you outside on the parking garage?” Dr. Evans asked.
“Yeah,” I answered.
“That was a real Tarzan stunt you pulled getting off of that roof.”
“Thanks,” I shrugged.
“Some of us were watching out the window,” he said. “None of us thought you’d make it.”
I half smiled. “Me neither.”
“Sliding down that banner, is that how you injured your hands?” he asked.
I looked down at one of my still-bleeding hands and nodded.
“How do you even make the decision, to go over the edge of a garage?” he asked. “Are you one of those adrenaline junkies that bungee jumps and does skateboard tricks?”
“Desperation,” I told him.
“Oh.” Dr. Evans looked me up and down. “Is it true that you don’t feel pain, Mr. Zane?”
“Call me Zed. That’s what everybody calls me. But yes, it’s true. I get some monster headaches and I feel tired when I should, but mostly things don’t hurt. My hands, I can tell they’re messed up. I can feel that, but they don’t hurt. And I’ve been bitten twice by Whites.” I showed Dr. Evans my arm. “Neither one hurts.”
Dr. Evans’ face grew pensive. “That is interesting. I read something about it on the internet, but there are so many people making guesses out there right now, it’s hard to know what to believe. Listen, do you want me to fix up those hands before we head down?”
That was a unexpected offer. I nodded enthusiastically. “I’d like that very much.”
“Do you have your insurance card?” Dr. Evans smiled for the first time.
I smiled back, acknowledging his attempt to lighten the situation with a little humor. “Could you look at the bites on my arm, too, if you don’t mind?”
“Sure.”
We sat at the nurse’s station while he patched up my hands and he said, “The volunteers are two floors down. When we’re finished, we’ll have to go to the other stairwell to get down there. We have that one blocked about five floors down. It’s secure for the moment.”
“Don’t bandage my hands too heavily,” I said as he worked. “I need to be able to handle my rifle and stuff.”
Dr. Evans nodded as he gingerly cleaned one of my hands with a gauze pad and disinfectant. “They look worse than they are. Your injuries are all superficial. If you could feel the pain, I’m sure they’d hurt a lot. I’d probably prescribe a pain killer and tell you not to use your hands for a week or so.”
“Superficial is good,” I said.
“But they can get infected,” he said. “You need to keep them clean.”
“I will,” I said, knowing that keeping a wound clean was an easy task in yesterday’s world. Now, with no running water, no corner drugstore, and not even a certain roof over my head every night, that was a much more difficult thing to do.
“I heard that things went bad at the gym.” Dr. Evans voice took on a distant air. “At first I didn’t believe it, but now, well, we’ve all learned something about how violent the infected can be. How did you get out?”
As Dr. Evans treated my wounds, I told him the story of my escape from the gym and everything since. Afterwards, he worked and I stared at the sparklingly waxed vinyl floor tiles, the faux cloth texture of the wallpaper wainscot, the black rubber-wheeled stainless steel medical devices, and I thought a lot about my yesterdays. All such things were commonplace in those days.
“Do you have any idea what’s going on in the rest of the world?” I asked, absently.
“Academically, it’s interesting to see the whole world in a panic,” Dr. Evans replied, without looking up from what he was doing. “If our species makes it through this, I wonder what kind of history from this period will survive.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Dr. Evans said, “In the beginning there’ll be news footage and a trove of personal accounts on the webservers if any of those survive. I wonder if anybody will record any of this on their cell phones, or if it’ll all be handwritten diaries and archeological records eventually.”
“At first,” I agreed, “I’m sure it’ll be cell phones. You know, pictures and video. The virus was probably documented on Facebook better than anywhere before things started to get really bad. You know how people are about posting anything unusual, anything special.”
“I don’t use it,” Dr. Evans said. “But my kids do, so I know what you mean.”
“Your kids?” I asked.
Dr. Evans ignored the question and kept working. “We’ve heard of islands that quarantined early and are infection free. Little places in the Pacific. Grand Cayman in the Caribbean.”
“I’ve always wanted to dive there,” I mused.
“The water is so blue and clear.” Dr. Evans looked up and stared, but not at anything in particular. “We were there a few years back, diving near a wreck. You could see for a hundred feet, maybe two hundred. The water was spectacular that day. A school of tarpon swam by us, five or six feet long at least, close enough to reach out and touch. Their scales were glittering in the sunlight. It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.”
“I wish I could have gone diving,” I said.
“Who knows?” Dr. Evans finished with my hands and went to work cleaning the wounds on my arm. “Most of Europe isn’t any better than here. There’s sporadic internet traffic, but it’s dying away.”
“I heard it started in Africa,” I added.
“As far as anybody knows, there’s not a single functioning human brain on that continent. Yes, that’s where it started.”
“And the Middle East?” I asked, the next region that came to mind.
Dr. Evans said, “Israel nuked Iran.”
That was a surprising change. “What?”
“Who knows why?” said Dr. Evans. “I don’t imagine it makes any difference anyway.”
“I guess not. What about South America, Australia, New Zealand, places like that?”
He said, “High population densities present favorable conditions for the virus to spread. South America went quickly. Australia, I don’t know. The infection is there, but it’s not bad yet. New Zealand quarantined itself and seems to be successful so far.”
“Good for them.” I wished I was in New Zealand. “How about here?”
“Here?” he asked.
“America,” I clarified.
“What’s not like Austin soon will be,” he said. “I can’t think of any major city in which the virus hasn’t been found.”
I asked, “Are any of them handling it?”
“None yet.” Dr. Evans shook his head slowly as he said it. “It’s so contagious, it’s nearly impossible to contain. Well, not nearly. It’s proven impossible to contain.”
“So this really is the end.” I looked at him, hoping to discern whether the forthcoming an
swer was honest, no exaggerated.
“The end?” he asked.
“Of us. Of humans.”
Dr. Evans shook his head and looked up at me. “No, I don’t think so. Some will survive. You’ll survive if you can make it out of this hospital.”
I certainly planned to make it out.
“It’ll be the beginning of another dark age,” he said. “Eventually, we’ll come out if it. Different, I hope. Better.” Dr. Evans taped a last bandage across my arm. He dropped his hands to his knees and exhaled to indicate he was finished.
“Am I in any mortal danger?” I asked. “Am I going to die of an infection?”
“Probably not.” Dr. Evans got up off of his stool and motioned for me to follow. But he looked like he was walking to his own hanging. “Lets go see the volunteers. They’ve got the whole floor down there.”
“So it wasn’t just Steph who volunteered?” I asked as I followed him.
“Did Steph tell you what the mood was like here?”
I nodded. “Hopeless.”
“Yes,” he said. “That word was all I heard last night. After the first few trials with no survivors, everybody was hopeless. You know, I’ve used that word all my life. I’ve read it in books. I saw it in movies, but I never really knew what it meant until last night. Maybe I learned slowly as the week went along, but now I know in the same way I know what love is.”
“Love?” What an odd analogy.
“Not just in my head, Zed. I felt it down to the marrow of my bones, with every beat of my heart, and with every blink of my eye. I felt it with the same all-inclusive intensity that I’ve felt love. You’re a young man; have you ever been in love?”
I shook my head. Lust, certainly. Infatuation, of course. Love, no. “I know the hopelessness you’re talking about.”
“Yet here you are?” he said.
“Here we both are,” I countered. “Dr. Evans, how many are down there?”
“Call me Paul. Formalities are for the past, I think.”
“Okay, Paul.”
Paul came to a stop and turned to face me. “When Steph volunteered last night, it was like she was the catalyst for everyone’s courage. Maybe she’s a natural leader. Or maybe she was everyone’s hope. When she gave up, everybody else did, too.”
