Chapter Text
Day 1
"Patient was flown in from Linden County Hospital just now, in critical condition after a thoracic gunshot wound 4 hours ago. Bullet's fragmented so badly that they couldn't do the surgery on site."
Your teeth clench hard and pain shoots through the side of your head. Temporomandibular joint dysfunction, you note to yourself. I gotta stop grinding my teeth and get myself a nightguard. Of course,that's the least of your worries as a resident in Emory Hospital's Trauma Care Department, undergoing trial-by-fire even though you'd only gotten your MD a week ago. With the hospitals overwhelmed these days, you hardly have time to sleep, let alone commit to any self-care.
"Shit," you grit out, rounding the corner. "Pulmonary artery damage?" you guess.
Nurse Johnson nods beside you, her eyes scanning the clipboard. "It's pretty bad. Bad enough that Linden County couldn't do it themselves. I've seen Dr. Diaz handle worse, but—"
"But she's not available to supervise, huh?" Your fists clench, and you notice the moisture between your fingers. They'll dry out again after you wash your hands for the fourtieth time today, at least. "She still tied up with that freakish new disease?"
Johnson nods vigorously, and you frown. Emory, Piedmont, Northside: all of the hospitals in Atlanta and far beyond it are being burnt through by a novel infectious agent with an apparent mortality rate of 100%. Almost fucking unheard of, you think. Rabies is also 100%, you suppose, and your pet theory is that the new disease is a genetically related virus, except the prophylactic rabies vaccine is fucking useless. The rabies immunoglobulin shots—useless. Antibiotics, antifungals, antivirals—useless. Even symptom treatment, palliative care—useless. No one knows what the fuck is decimating the American people, and worse yet, the military is fucking around in the hospitals now. Your pathologists and hospital-affiliated scientists can't take a look; only the CDC and USAMRIID have access to samples now.
The one saving grace is that the new disease isn't that contagious. As long as patients are bound up and muzzled in the aggressive phase, they can't infect any of the hospital staff, though of course, no one likes to tie up their patients. Do no harm, the Hippocratic Oath echoes in your mind, that vow you'd made to yourself upon becoming a doctor.
But the American medical system has no choice right now.
As the two of you walk toward the surgery room, you can't help but notice the feverish bodies strapped down to gurneys, moaning through their surgical masks and sweating through their gowns. The hospital is so overwhelmed that patients are spilling out of rooms and almost covering every inch of wall in the hallways. Poor souls.
But none of that matters right now. When you enter the surgery room, the world around you disappears. You can't hear the moaning patients and thoughts of Dr. Diaz leaves your mind. There's only your patient from Linden County on the operating table, only his pallid face and the bullet fragments in his chest.
You glance down, the dressings on his leg not escaping you either.
"How'd he end up like this?"
Johnson glances down at her notes.
"He's a Sheriff's Deputy. Got shot in an altercation while on duty. Got a wife and son at home."
Your mouth thins, and you glance at the patient’s wristband, eyes sweeping over his name. Poor guy, you think. I'll get you home, Rick Grimes.
Day 5
You don't realize what the novel infectious agent really is until you see a patient die for the first time.
You've been up 48 hours, your mind at the edges of delirium. You've stayed up this long studying before and also on calls, but it's never been like this before: overtaxed every waking second, seeing doctors and nurses collapse from exhaustion around you, running out of masks and leaning right over your dying patients, bare-faced, letting them breathe right into your eyes and mouth. At least this new disease isn't too contagious, you think, or you'd be dying too.
The moans are the worst, you think, and the sound of belts jingling and heart monitors screaming as patients enter their death throes. A pandemic of unknown origin with a 100% mortality rate means a wartime situation for people like you. Soldiers don't get to sleep on the front line.
The current woman in front of you, sallow-faced and drenched in sweat, is an inch away from her own mortality. Your hands shake as you listen to her fading screams. A sleep-deprived voice echoes in your ear: azithromycin, tetracycline, zanamivir, inmunoglobulin. All didn't do shit. You sink to your knees, her whimpers layering into your thoughts. I'm so fucking useless.
In a hospital overwhelmed by patients, every nurse and doctor stretched to the breaking point, no one notices you sinking to your knees. No one sees the way your chest heaves, or the way liquid begins to the floor. No one thinks to ask about how your vision is blurring, how your head is pounding all the way up the sides and around the back. I'm so fucking tired. The spots go dark. The light dim. The heart monitor's screaming death in your ears: one long, fucking beep.
An eternity passes.
Then something strange: the endless scream stops.
Beep.
You're hallucinating, you think. They need to give you a break. You want to go home to your shitty little apartment, give your family a call and tell them to isolate so they don't catch this shit, get at least a couple of hours of sleep. You're useless like this.
Beep.
Maybe you need to medicate yourself. An antipsychotic. A seroquel? You're breaking down.
Beep.
Maybe this is the wrong career for you. Sure, you've saved a couple of people—that boy from that car crash, that Sheriff's Deputy from Linden—but your success rate is otherwise pitifully low. A mortality rate of 100% means that a fuckload of people have died under your care. At the very least, you think, none of your patients have entered the rabies-like aggression phase of the disease. Maybe something in your treatments has been working.
Beep.
"Come on, brain," you moan. "At least give me a realistic hallucination. Human hearts would never beat so slowly…"
Something jolts.
You look up, squinting. The patient's fingers twitches, and at first you think you need to be assessed for bona fide psychosis if you're having such a vivid hallucination. But then the whole hand moves, and there's an unmistakable hiss.
Beep.
You get off your knees, slowly looking over the bed. In the moments after death, a person's eyes eyes don't look remarkably different from their living state, but the patient's dark eyes seem to have lightened, somehow—and muddied up. Her sallow lips are moving too, something impossible for a dead person. Oh, fuck. Oh fuck, she's alive. You have no clue how, because she'd unmistakably died, but she's alive now.
Beep.
"Shit." You scramble, looking for a vial of epinephrine. You can kick up the heart rate, give her a fighting chance. Maybe you won't be such a fuckup today, maybe you'll save someone—
Beep.
The gurney trembles. She hisses more. Her throat must be parched, you think, you'll be sure to get her water after this—
"Move!"
The doors slam open, and heavy footsteps fill your ears. You jolt back, trying not to drop the little bottle in your hands as you watch several soldiers move in, looking down their guns. "What the fuck?!" you can't help but snap.
Beep.
One of them looks over at you, then lays eyes on the patient. She seems roused now, kicking at her bonds, growling incessantly. Well, you don't blame her: rabies or no, you're on the edge of growling at these soldiers yourself.
"I'm sorry, but what the actual fuck are you doing in here?" you ask. A little voice whispers that you shouldn't talk like this to a soldier, but you're pushing 49 hours with no sleep and you want to save this woman's life.
"Lieutenant!" the soldier barks. "I've got eyes on one!"
Eyes on what?
"You know what to do."
You will never forget these next twenty seconds: the soldier raises the rifle, aims straight for your fucking patient. Your hands loosen, and something shatters on the floor, maybe shatters inside you. You think you scream, but a bang drowns it out, and you must be hallucinating, because even after your patient's midsection is riddled with holes, you still hear—
Beep.
Day 7
The Atlanta Refugee Safe Zone is two days later, when the government finally admits that they've screwed the pooch and have been covering up the insidious reality that the dead are rising—even from their own healthcare practitioners! Fuck. You haven't heard from Diaz since forever ago, and you wonder if she'd seen what you witnessed already. Hopefully she's done what you're doing and has gotten the fuck away from Atlanta, "safe zone" be damned.
Hopefully the alternative hasn't happened instead. That sergeant had grilled you after you saw your patient reanimate, and you think you were an inch away from being detained. Maybe Diaz had actually been taken away by those soldiers, forever silenced for a truth they wanted to hide.
Christ, you hope not.
By some stroke of luck, the military had decided to let you go, maybe knowing they couldn't cover this up any longer. You'd worked a couple of days longer in the hospital, providing care in your repurposed surgery ward, until the feds decided to kick out all personnel besides military healthcare providers and USAMRIID scientists. It gave you a good excuse to leave the city. You couldn't find any toilet paper before leaving, but you've stocked up on all the other necessities and even got yourself a machete, though it's not like you even know how to use one. Probably would have done better with a surgical knife, really, you think dryly as you tap at the blade strapped to your thigh.
So now you're on your way out of Atlanta, hoping to make a break for good ol' Linden County. Some other city residents have apparently also figured that Atlanta's a lost cause, because there's a steady stream of outgoing traffic and crying families on your side of the interstate. Not all of them can be doctors, you think, so if they're on the way out, the general population must have already seen the damage that walkers can do.
Your jaw is aching. The state of the city is terrifying, but what scares you more is that on the other side of the highway, there's a steady stream of traffic flowing into it.
The rush to the Atlanta Safe Zone is so great that people apparently have stopped giving a fuck about lanes not too far out the city. It's nighttime when you see a snarl of traffic in front of you—some refugees driving into the city have crashed into some poor sod up ahead of you in their desperation. Your fingers tap the wheel impatiently as you wonder how much of your shit you can get into your rucksack and how long a walk to Linden would be. The answers are, respectively: probably not very much, and definitely way too fucking long.
No one's going anywhere anytime soon, so you decide to go out to assess the situation. Making sure to lock the door after your step out, you weave between the beeping cars on the highway, letting the headlights and highway lights guide your footsteps. You squint at the crowd gathered up on the other side of the road, and between the dark silhouettes, you can see the glow of the city.
Guess I'll say my last goodbye since I'm stuck here.
You aren't from Atlanta—you only came here for your residency—but this city had been good to you. Emory had been good to you. Dr. Diaz and Nurse Johnson and all the rest had been good to you. You want to go back to your family, but you'll miss Atlanta and all your friends and coworkers. So you walk through the cars and dodge the shadowy figures that are also making their way to the curb, and you push through the crowd. Atlanta twinkles in the distance, its skyline glorious and maybe doomed before you.
"Think we'll make it there?" someone asks next to you, words tangled up in a rural accent and gruff voice. You perk up, momentarily thinking that he's asking you, but then you see that he's turned to someone on his other side. "If we'd made it onto one of those helicopters…"
You should warn them, you think.
"Nah," his companion replies. "I told ya. That last one had infected people on it." He pauses, and the Atlanta city lights are momentarily distorted in cigarette smoke. "Fuck, Daryl, I don't even know if it's worth goin' there anymore."
Well, here's your chance.
"It's not," you cut in, making sure to turn your whole body toward them so they know you're talking to them. Oh, boy, you'd normally want to die interrupting strangers like this, but the world is ending and you would like to be a good samaritan one last time. Do no harm. "Don't bother with Atlanta. The city's already overrun I bet, and I don't even know how long the military can contain it. I give them two weeks, tops." You close your eyes. If every victim of this disease turns into a mindless predator, the R0 of this shit must be sky-high. Like, higher-than-measles kind of sky-high.
"Oh yeah?" The first speaker turns to you, and you see a pair of keen eyes narrowing and sizing you up. "How'd you figure that, if you're on the road with the rest of us? We ain't gettin' no news on the radio."
"I'm heading the other way," you explain, jerking a thumb back at the opposite lane. "I'm a doctor from Atlanta. Emory was starting to get overwhelmed with infected patients, and so was every other hospital. ICU, emergency, every single facility that was co-opted for this shit, even all the hallways: all filled to the brim with patients. Thousands of walkers in the making. No way they can keep it under control. Already saw firsthand the police, soldiers, even some federal agents losing their shit."
You probably should have softened up the news a bit. Any typical refugee would probably be in tears, you think. But against your expectations, the two men only pause, seeming to give it some thought. The guy nearest to you—Daryl, you recall—looks none too happy, but the one with the shaved head gives a bit of a chuckle, like this is all some funny joke.
"Shoulda expected the feds to fuck this up." He shakes his head. "So much for that safe zone. Shit."
Daryl grunts in response, and you discern this as a "yeah". He turns to you then, seeming to gesture beyond the city. "If you're headin' out there, I gotta tell you that it ain't no better. Whole damn world's gone to shit. Atlanta Safe Zone was our best bet, but now it looks like we're on our own."
"Ah, fuck." You resist the urge to drop your head into your hands. "Well… thanks."
"No worries. Thanks for warning us about Atlanta."
You shift uncomfortably. Suddenly, you're acutely aware of how alone you are, and how you can't fathom functioning outside some kind of society. You're used to operating in urban spaces with public transit, coffee shops, grocery stores, used to being a student and even a doctor. But if the whole world's gone to shit, then there might not be a society for you to function in anymore, no shops for you to buy food from, no fossil fuels for you to burn, no hospital for you to work at...
You study the two men keenly. They're obviously from the countryside, and they've seen more of the rural apocalyptic landscape than you have. No better people than to ask for advice. "Where do you think you'll go?" you blurt out.
One of them shrugs. "Driftin', most like. Might set up camp out here for a bit." He turns to you and you feel the full press of his gaze as it travels up and down your body. Oh, gross. "Y'know, Doc, you're welcome to join us… It's a real scary world out there and we'd be glad to protect you."
Being alone in the apocalypse or being stuck with this creep? Oh, god, you aren't sure which is worse. You eye the both of them, taking in their strong builds and weaponry. They probably know how to use a machete, would genuinely be an asset if any walkers came around. On the other hand, the guy who's leering at you might legitimately harm you more than the walkers.
"Um…"
The man smirks, misinterpreting your contemplative stare.
"Ya like what you see, baby?"
Hmm. Being alone might be the better option.
"No one wants your ugly ass, Merle," his brother interjects, rolling his eyes. Yes, Daryl! This guy doesn't seem so bad. "Listen, Doc, we owe ya one for the warning. You need to ride with someone for the next couple of weeks, we got you."
You hum, pretending to consider. In reality, you've got no other options at the moment—you will probably die outside by yourself, given your lack of survival and combat training—so the choice is fairly obvious. "There's strength in numbers, especially in case of walkers. You two look and sound like you've already seen and handled these things too, much like me. Might be good to stick together."
"Smart girl," Merle praises. "College education doin' ya good. I've got a cozy spot next to me in my tent tonight if you're scared of 'em walkers."
"College prob'ly made her smart enough to stay the fuck away from you, Merle."
"Don't listen to my little brother. He's just jealous of my good looks and charm."
"You're a doctor," Daryl continues, ignoring Merle. "Y'know what the clap does, right? You don't want it."
"Fuck you, Daryl."
"Don't blame me, Merle. Figured I owed her another warnin'."
Before Merle can retort, Daryl steps in front of you, blocking him out from your view. Oh, what a nice man. "We're gonna look for a place to set up camp tomorrow. I'm thinkin' not too far from here, somewhere in the mountains. Sound good?"
"Sounds perfect." Hah, not like you'd know where else to go. "I've got some supplies, which I'm happy to share, but not much for camping. Wasn't planning on it." Sure, you had the sense to pick up a tent and a sleeping bag, but besides your finite supply of protein bars and jerky, you don't know what you'll subsist on. Also, you've never done more than glamping.
Daryl shrugs. "We'll figure somethin' out. Hope you like squirrel."
Your brow furrows. "Um, squirrels are cute, I guess?"
Daryl squints at you. "...to eat," he adds.
"Oh." Oh, you're so fucking stupid. Thank fuck you ran into these guys—or, at the very least, Daryl. The jury's out on Merle. "Oh, yeah. I'll eat squirrels. I'll eat anything. Actually, I've got some snacks in my car. Anyone hungry?"
Daryl shakes his head. "Nah." Apparently not a man of many words, all he does is reach into his pocket and take out a pack of cigarettes, you guess as a kind of thank-you and reciprocation. "You feelin' a smoke?"
You shake your head. "No, thank you."
"Suit yourself."
The three of you fall quiet, listening only to the murmurs and whimpers of the crowd around you. You won't lie: the world is ending but you still can't deal with awkward silences between strangers. You wonder if you should bid them goodnight and settle into another night in the car, but before you can execute your plan, a whirring cuts through the air.
"What the fuck?"
You look up, eyes narrowing as wind hits your back and whips at your skin. Helicopters cut through the sky above you, flying so low that they're the only thing you can hear, the ground rumbling beneath your feet. You watch as the aircraft fly toward the city.
"Refugees?" you guess.
"Nah," Merle says, crossing his arms. "That's airforce."
"More reinforcements, then."
"Don't know 'bout that, sweetheart."
Merle ends up being right.
In the blink of an eye, Atlanta is burning. The helicopters hover over the skyline like angels of death as the streets and skies light up, a distant thunder crashing in your ears with each bomb. You can't help but wonder if some of those are intended for the hospitals, overrun by snarling walkers and abandoned, living patients. All those patients in the oncology ward: gone. All those infants in the NICU: gone. All your in-patients recovering from surgeries: gone. All those still-human souls awaiting reanimation in the ER: gone.
It would only make sense.
Red lightning splits the sky as another bomb hits Atlanta. Merle whistles as he watches. "Napalm," he observes.
"Son of a bitch," Daryl mutters.
I'm so fucking tired.
The world is overwhelmed, so you expect no one to notice when you sink to your knees and hold your face in your hands. Everyone is at their limits, so you don't think anyone will see how your chest is heaving with crackling air. Your vision blurs, and your jaw aches, and all you want to do is crawl back into your burning apartment and take a nice, long sleep. No one would notice.
But you feel a tap on your shoulder, and when you look up, you meet Daryl's eyes. He doesn't look to be on the same verge of tears that you are, but he's grim-faced all the same. You wonder if he'll comfort you, this kind-ish stranger. He'd be the first person to do within these past few, hellish weeks.
Still a man of few words, he shakes the cigarette box again.
"How 'bout now?"
You shake your head again, trying to even out your breathing so you can reply without embarrassing yourself.
"...no thank you. But I've got some drinks in my trunk. You boys like beer?"
"Hell, woman, you don't gotta ask. Crack 'em open."
Daryl brings a cigarette to his mouth, lights it up. For a brief moment, his lighter burns as bright as the city, and a trail of smoke distorts the red glow of the sky.