Survival Instinct: A Zombie Novel (13 page)

“Okay, it should be safe to let go of the gurney!” Riley told the boys.

Mason and Cender quickly backed off, helping Guiles move Anderson.  The man tried to follow after them, arms reaching out, but the hose wrapped around his belly had no slack and held him tightly in place.

“Great thinking, Dr. Bishop.  Now get the hell out of there before he turns around,”  Anderson commanded.

Riley quickly ducked back into the lounge.  Just in case the injured giant decided to try and get in there, she hauled one of the couches over and placed it in front of the door.  It might not stop a man of his size, but it would at least slow him down and warn anyone who might be in the room.  Riley headed back out the first door to the others.  Mason and Masters were already getting all the patients to go back to the waiting room, or the exam rooms, or wherever it was they were supposed to be.  Guiles had helped Anderson up on a stool and was looking at his wound.  Cender continued to look at the giant, who kept trying to reach Cender despite being wrapped up.  His arms swiped furiously at the air and he roared in anger.

“You okay, Anderson?” Riley asked as Guiles started to clean the bite.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” Anderson grumped.  “That was quick thinking.  Now how do you suggest we treat this guy?”

“No idea,” Riley shrugged.

“Well we certainly can’t keep him where he is.  He’s in the way of the ambulance bay.”  Guiles pointed out the obvious.

“Hey
, Riley, come look at this.”  Cender waved her over.

“What is it, Joshua?”  Cender had used her first name, so she used his.  Neither of them liked their first names for their own personal reasons.  The two of them were similar in a handful of ways.  Outwardly
, they were the same height and had the same shade of brown hair.  Although Riley’s was long and in a tight, French braid, while Cender’s was short enough that he didn’t even need to comb it.  She also had more defined facial features, while his had a rounded look.  Both were physically fit with good muscle tone, and both had long eyelashes.  They were also both calm by nature, but Riley took things a lot more seriously than Cender.  Cender’s skin was also a few shades darker.

“Check out this blood.”  Cender crouched down near the floor.

Riley walked over and crouched down next to him.  Cender was inspecting a patch of the huge man’s blood that had managed to splatter a safe distance away from him.

“We’ll have to call housekeeping once we move him,” Riley sighed, looking at the mess.  Why the man wasn’t dead was amazing.  Some days, the ER was a fascinating place.

“Yeah, but look at it.  Like, really look at it,” Cender insisted.  He clearly wanted Riley to see something for herself as opposed to just outright telling her.  That was something she normally did to him.

Riley inspected the blood more thoroughly.  “It’s clotted.  Blood clots you know?”

“Yeah, but this is super clotted.  Like, way more coagulated than I think it should be.”  Cender nodded.

“So what?  Not only
should
this guy be dead, but he
is
dead?”  Riley shook her head.  It was absurd.  The man probably just had a large clot trying to form somewhere in that mess of a gut of his and during the struggle it fell out.  It was odd, but there was sure to be a rational explanation for it.

A pounding of feet sounded down the hallway as a team of security guards finally rushed over.

“You’re a little late, guys,” Riley told them.

“Whoa!”  One of them took an unconscious step back when he saw the man.

Masters walked back over then, looking a lot calmer than she did earlier.  “Dr. Bishop, you should probably get back to suturing that man.”

“Right.”  Riley stood up and turned to the security guards.  “I subdued him to the best of my abilities, now it’s your job to move him.”  She then turned to Cender.  “Don’t you have other patients to see?  I’m sure that Anderson and Guiles have got this one.”

“Yes, Chief!”  Cender saluted.  He’d been doing that ever since Riley got named as chief resident a couple of months ago.  He then dashed off to see another patient.  After making sure, one more time that Anderson was fine, and nearly getting her head bitten off because he said he was, Riley headed back to her original suture patient.

“What happened out there?” the patient asked while Riley put on a new pair of gloves.

“Nothing to worry about, just an unruly patient.”  Dr. Riley Bishop gave him her best reassuring smile, which probably wasn’t that reassuring.  “Now where were we?”

Riley sat back down on the stool
that she had vacated earlier and looked at the patient’s hand.  She cleaned the area again, and finished off her suturing.  Once done, she gave the patient instructions on caring for the area and told him when he should come back to have the stitches taken out.  He was then discharged, and Riley left the room to go check on the others and pick up another patient.  Instead, she found a group of nurses around the TV.

“Hey, what’s going on?  Someone die on one of your soaps?” Riley joked.  Sort of.  The nurses watched a lot of soap operas.  Riley thought it was rather cliché.

“No, something’s happening at the charity concert,” one of the nurses filled her in.

Riley frowned and looked at the TV.  On it, a reporter was talking about something while a crowd of people panicked in the background.  The reporter’s lips were moving, but nothing could be heard.

“Can we get some volume?” Riley asked the nurses.

“No one can find the remote,” one of them sighed.

The nurses didn’t want any patients screwing with the TV, so they had disabled all the buttons on it.  This meant though, that without the remote, no one could change the channel or the volume.  The remote was
supposed
to be kept at the admit desk, but was always being found someplace else.

“Okay, okay.”  Anderson broke up the crowd.  “We’re the closest hospital to that park
, so we’re going to be getting a lot of injured people in here soon.  We need to prepare, let’s go.”

All the nurses broke away and got busy.

“What about Mr.
Friendly
?”  Riley hiked a thumb over to where the giant had been.

“The security guards managed to move him elsewhere,” Anderson told her as he
led the way to the trauma rooms.

“How?”  Riley had always been curious about everything.  Maybe that’s why she chose emergency medicine.  Curious things always happened there.

“Not without a few bumps, bruises, and a second bite.”  Anderson absently scratched at the bandage covering his own.  “Apparently, when they got him loose, he ran after one of the guards.  The guard managed to lead him into an empty room, get out, and lock the door behind him.”

“I can’t believe that guy can even stay conscious, let alone keep attacking people so violently.  This seems like beyond what PCP can do,” Riley thought about it.  “Maybe there’s some new drug on the street.  Maybe those other patients who won’t go down took it as well.”

“I thought that too.  It is a possibility.”  Anderson handed Riley a gown.

“So what’s the plan?”  Riley put the gown on along with a pair of safety goggles and a fresh pair of gloves.

“We’re likely to be getting a lot of patients, so we’ll have to work fast and get them out as quickly as possible.”  Anderson broke down the game plan, “I’ll be taking trauma room 1, Ford is going to take trauma room 2, and I’d like you in trauma room 3.”

“All right.  Who’s doing triage?”

“I think Brown should be on it.”

“You sure he can handle it?”  Brown was only a med student.  Gifted, but still a student.

“There’ll be nurses, residents, and attendings all over the place, just in case.”

“If we’re expecting a lot
, we should put Cender and Guiles together in the suture room.  Turn it into a makeshift trauma room.”

“We’re likely to need them in here
, but it’s an option.”

Mason walked into the room.  “The first ambulance just called in.  Sounds like multiple crush injuries.  They think she was trampled.  ETA two minutes.”

“So close?”  Anderson and Riley quickly followed Mason out of the trauma room.

“Apparently they’re having some radio disturbance out there, so no one is co-ordinated.  They were just able to call in through the static now,” Mason shrugged.

“Okay.  Dr. Bishop, you take the crush injury.  I’m going to give everyone their jobs.”  Anderson once again scratched at his bandage.

“Sure thing
,”  Riley started toward the ambulance bay,  “and try to get the next shift to come in early.  The more the merrier, right?”

Anderson gave her a thumbs up as she disappeared down the halls.  All over the ER everybody was moving quickly to prepare for the coming patients.  Even the drunk, who often came in and caused a fuss, knew something was up and shut his mouth accordingly.

“Need some help with this one?”  Dr. Cender met up with Riley at the doors.

“Sure thing.”  Riley led Cender outside.  They stood in the bay waiting, both of them shifting feet due to an energy build for what was coming.  “If we get way too swamped with traumas, I told Anderson to put you and Guiles in the suture room as a make-shift trauma room.”

“Really?”  Cender smiled broadly.

“Guiles would be in charge though.”  Riley raised an eyebrow at him.  It did nothing against Cender’s smile.

The ambulance arrived in the bay, sirens screaming.  It backed up near the doors and the paramedics jumped out.  Cender and Riley ran over to meet them.

“This the trampled female?” Riley asked as the back doors of the ambulance burst open.

“What?”  The paramedic shook her head.  “No.  Male, hit by a bus.”

They wheeled the patient out of the back of the ambulance.

* * *

Riley didn’t know how much time had passed as she worked.  Once that first patient showed up, they just kept coming.  She saw patient after patient, face after face.  Tramplings, auto accidents, stabs, bites,
and gunshots.  One man had fallen off a building, another down an opened sewer grate.  One girl came in with her right arm completely ripped off.  She had fallen just as the subway train had arrived.  They started getting more walk-ins than paramedic rescues as people came in off the streets.  Blood, sweat, and broken bones.

And crazies.  More and more crazies just kept showing up.  Thankfully
, they weren’t as big as the giant was, and some were slow and dim-witted.  A lot of people got bitten by them before they could be restrained.  Riley thought she heard a nurse at one point saying that they were nearly out of bits and gags to jam into their mouths.  Supposedly, one of the patients in the waiting room stopped a crazy from biting another by using his sock.

One of the people who ended up under Dr. Riley Bishop’s care had a massive fever along with his life-threatening wounds.  It was off the charts; his brain should have boiled.  He flat-lined and Riley pronounced him dead.  As he was being wheeled out to make room though, he suddenly woke up and started thrashing.  He had become like one of the crazies.

They wheeled him back over for Riley to keep working on him.  He was still hooked up to the heart monitor though and he was still flat-lined.  He was one of the slower crazies and with Mason’s help, Riley was able to take a pulse.  She found none.  She used her stethoscope to listen for a heart beat or breath sounds.  She found none of those either.  Just an eerie, hollow silence.  By all accounts, the man was dead.  Riley backed away from him, breathing hard.  She had finally come to realize something.

“Dear God, he was right,” Riley muttered to herself.

“Dr. Bishop?”  Mason looked at her with concern.  “Riley, you okay?”

The man on the bed managed to sink his teeth into Mason’s hand while he was distracted.  Mason swore and shoved the man back down.  Riley ran from the room, her heart racing.  She stripped off her gloves, gown, and goggles and headed for the drug lockup.  There was chaos everywhere.  Crazies were everywhere.  Riley now knew they weren’t really crazy though.  She didn’t want to believe.  It was a hard thing to believe, but she couldn’t ignore what she saw.  What she knew.

No one noticed when Riley grabbed a box and started filling it with drugs and bandages.  Or if they did, they just thought she was restocking the trauma room.  The doctors, nurses, paramedics, and police officers were all busy handling the patients.  Some of the patients causing problems weren’t even… the others.  Riley wasn’t ready to use the word her dad had taught her.  After filling the box, she made her way toward the ambulance bay.  Outside the doors were a few ambulances, one just off-loading a patient, others waiting for the paramedics to return.  Riley climbed into the back of one of the empty ones and took stock of the supplies there.  She put down her box in the back and went to the rear doors.  She swung one of them closed and it made a hard smacking sound

“Bishop?”  Cender suddenly appeared around the side of the ambulance, in front of the remaining open rear door.

“Cender, were you bitten?”  Riley was a little frantic.  More than a little, actually.  Her body was running on a kind of autopilot while her mind played catch-up.