Lattimore cleared her throat. “If you’re quite done flirting, I need you triaging. More are coming in.”
Saying no, I don’t want to deal with sick people probably wouldn’t go over all that well, so I patted Logan on the shoulder. “Nice meeting you, Specialist,” I said. Then I turned to Lattimore. “I’m all set.”
Triage sucked even when the world still worked.
It made someone like me—someone you wouldn’t really want in charge of anything—decide who lived and who died, who needed treatment and who was probably beyond hope.
It was not a good career match. Hell, I used temporary hair dye before the endtimes because I couldn’t commit to a single color. I made bad choices every day. Who in their right mind would put me in charge of anything, much less a life?
Apparently the end of the world put everyone in unenviable positions.
Lattimore, either terribly overworked or wanting to see me sweat a little, shoved me through another tent partition and left me treading water in a sea of injured and sick people. I gaped around the giant tent, not entirely willing to immerse myself into the swarm. There was no way I could get to all of these people. No fucking way.
“Um,” I said, hoping she’d change her mind and send me to help Dax with the bedpans, “can you…I mean…I don’t even know…”
“I need you to separate out the bites and injuries from people who are sick. Don’t want them trading germs back and forth. Go to it.”
Off she went, presumably to deal with more pressing medical matters.
I liked you a lot better on television. That cool, somewhat dispassionate persona she’d projected on the screen had been great when we first learned about the dead rising, but actually working for her was proving to be something of a challenge.
Besides, from what I’d seen so far, her bedside manner left a bit to be desired.
Maybe bedside manners didn’t matter anymore.
I had learned the triage method on my third day of work, but hadn’t yet been called upon to do it. Now I started at the front of the room with three sets of tags: red, blue, and black. Red was for physical injuries that needed attending; the bites, the scratches, and broken limbs. Blue was for flu, cold, and other illnesses that were probably not directly related to falling off a roof or getting attacked by a hungry beast.
Black was for those we couldn’t help.
Maybe I wouldn’t need to use them.
And maybe the skies will part and the zombies will fly and this will all be some really fucked up dream you had because you did too much LSD with the Blood Nuts. At this point, I probably would have welcomed that scenario.
Alas, I had to tag and bag.
“What’s wrong with you?” I asked a young woman with a slightly reddened nose.
“I have a cough,” she said, then coughed to punctuate her statement.
I frowned, leaning closer to her chest. It rattled slightly when she breathed in. Fluid in the lungs. Shit. I slapped a blue tag on her wrist and wrote down her symptoms on the chart tied to her bed. Lattimore hadn’t told me to do that, but I figured it couldn’t hurt whoever wound up attending to her. “How long have you been feeling bad?”
“I wasn’t feeling great this week, but I didn’t start feeling bad until a couple days ago.”
“Take any medications? Did you stop any recently?”
“No. My boyfriend gave me some cold medication last night, but it didn’t seem to work.”
Pneumonia, maybe? Recalling my earlier gaffe with Logan, I gave her what I felt was a reasonably reassuring smile. “A couple rounds of antibiotics and you’ll be fine. Take it easy, okay?”
“Thanks.”
I moved on to the next patient. He was so doped up he couldn’t speak, but the splinted wrist and missing fingers were enough of a description. “Sorry, man,” I said, putting a red tag on him. “I hope you can’t feel anything.”
He gazed up at something on the ceiling.
Down the lines of cots I went, tagging people left and right. I fell into a rhythm after a while, slapping on the tags and managing to coldly assess every injury, as opposed to chatting people up and figuring out what was bothering them. I considered their injuries, their breathing, and made the assessments that I could. My time with Samuels in Elderwood had taught me more than the average EMT would know, but it was no substitution for a real nurse or a doctor, or even a proper combat medic.
I put a black tag around one woman’s ankle. She was barely breathing, and her eyes had sunken deep into her sockets. I couldn’t find any evidence of bite marks on her, though she had festering sores along her arms and legs. Skin condition of some kind, I thought. Maybe some sort of cancer gone wrong, or a reaction to the acid rain that occasionally dribbled out of the sky.
We’d need to get her out of here pronto in case she reanimated. A zombie slaughter in triage would be too much for one day.
“Hey! Medic!”
I turned around.
Two soldiers carted in a mass of scarlet and slime. I retched on the spot. I couldn’t believe the thing on the stretcher had once been a person, much less might still be alive.