Holy shit, where do I start?
His insides were outside. His skin…I don’t know what happened to his skin. I was pretty sure we didn’t have enough blood in the camp to stabilize him. There probably wasn’t enough blood left in the entire Midlands Cluster.
“Shit,” I muttered.
“Medic, give him something, give him something…”
Where the hell was I even supposed to jam in the lidocaine? This is way above my pay grade!
“Doctor!” I called out. I found a patch of skin still attached to him and inserted the needle, depressing it as fast as I dared. “What happened to him?”
“Don’t know,” one of the soldiers said. “He was checking out a spot and he screamed and we heard this…sound…”
Iron-hard digits clamped down around my wrist, and the mass on the stretcher surged upward, staring at me with one good eye. “The squad,” he growled out, “the squad!”
I stared into his pupil, unable to pry my gaze away.
“We’re okay, man,” one of his companions said. “We’re okay!”
“Dinosaurs,” he coughed.
His chest heaved, and warm liquid splattered across my face.
The dude expired on the spot.
I stood there, staring at his remains, his blood running down my nose and chin. Holy shit. Holy shit, he had just died right in front of me.
Son of a bitch, how much blood was I going to get splattered on me in Hastings?
“Oh fucking shit,” the second soldier whispered. “I knew he shouldn’t have checked out that pit.
He fell into a pit full of zombies and got devoured. Christ on a pogostick, what a way to go.
“Are there dinosaurs here?” the first soldier squawked. “I can’t fucking take dinosaurs, man!”
I glanced at his partner, who seemed to be handling things in a marginally more mature fashion. “Was…was there a dinosaur?” I asked, if only because at this point in the apocalypse I wasn’t willing to write anything off.
He gaped at me. “What do you think, dumbass?”
Lattimore chose that moment to check in on me. She took in the massive amounts of blood, the dead man and his wounds, and the hyperventilating soldier…and then she saw the blood on my face. “What the fuck happened here?”
I dropped my kit on the table beside him. “They said he fell into a zombie pit.” I gestured to his buddies. “His last word was dinosaur.”
“Hmm.” She looked down at the dead man, and then gestured to one of his companions. “Well, better that than porridge. Plug him, Corporal. We don’t want him getting up and slopping his insides all over the floor.”
She walked away, once again the poster child for nonplussed endtimes medical care.
I was pretty sure a little bit of my soul evaporated that day.
Chapter Six
Other medical emergencies just don’t seem that exciting after you’ve tried to help an eviscerated man.
I had to wash my hands after the situation with the wounded private. Actually, I had to have Dax take me out back and hose me down in the Designated Bedpan Sanitation Area, which, let me tell you, smelled every bit as good as you think. Lattimore hadn’t even wanted to let me go until she realized even she could not argue with the fact that letting a blood-covered medic handle fragile patients was definitely not hygienic.
“Did you do this all the time in Elderwood?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “We once had a triage of six people in Elderwood. That was pretty big. I have never seen something like…this.”
So far, Hastings was proving more of a challenge. The old me might have been excited—viewed it as something to work toward, some way to improve myself and broaden my skills. Even back in Elderwood I’d been pleased that I was at least learning something, making myself useful.
Now…well, now it was just more bullshit.
We’re all going to die in the end anyway.
That was a dangerous way to think, and I knew it.
Dax handed me a new shirt. I pulled it on over my shivering form, then wiped my face and hands on a rough towel that had definitely seen better days. Then I went back inside.
This kept up for a couple of days. It was as close to monotony as we ever got.
“Someone asked for you,” Pete the orderly said some days later, his eyes possessing that familiar level of blank placidness I’d come to associate with him.
“For me?”
“Yeah. Over there.”
She was sitting on a bed, her fingers dancing across the top of a cell phone. I saw bright dots flying across the screen: Angry Birds, by the looks of it. I turned to thank Pete for the information, but he had already wandered off, his arms held out as if for balance.
I grabbed my kit and meandered over to the patient, sizing her up as I got closer. “You’re not obviously bitten and you don’t seem to be missing most of your skin, so you’re already my favorite patient of the morning.”
She set down her phone. “Well, I’m glad I did something right.”
“Name and affliction?”
“Alyssa Andrews. My throat hurts.”
I paused in my note-taking. “Any relation to Logan Andrews?”