Decisions, decisions.
2
“Amy, I need your help here!”
At the sound of her name, the nurse dashed out into the corridor, almost tripping over a motionless body at her feet. The man looked to be in his sixties, judging by his grey hair and aging skin. Amy glanced over at her colleague, Joyce Khaliq, who was tending to a second unconscious patient. The young woman, barely out of adolescence, was curled up in a foetal position as Joyce tried to aid her.
A coughing sound from the man caused Amy to tear her gaze away from her colleague. She looked down as he began to choke. His face adopted a purple hue before a geyser of blood erupted from his mouth. It sprayed the surrounding area, coating the white walls and floor of the hospital. Amy dropped to her knees and pulled him onto his side. She placed a comforting hand on his shoulder as spasms racked his body. His eyes rolled back in their sockets as bloody foam spilled from his lips.
“We need help over here!”
She looked up at the gathering crowd. Quickly scanning the alarmed faces, she could see they were only patients and visitors. She looked back at the man as his convulsions subsided. His swollen tongue lolled from his mouth. He wasn’t breathing. The crowd of onlookers whispered to one another as Amy checked for a pulse.
“I need help!”
She turned back to the man and started CPR compressions until she heard her colleagues arrive with a trolley.
“What have we got?” the doctor asked as they lifted the unconscious man onto the stretcher.
“He’s gone into arrest. I don’t have a pulse.”
“Okay, we’ll handle this. Go help Joyce, another set of wheels are on the way.”
With that, the medics pushed the man through the crowd of onlookers and down another corridor of Sunnymoor Hospital. Amy ran over to her colleague. The young patient shuddered violently, bucking and writhing.
“Hold her,” Joyce urged.
Amy pinned the woman’s arms to the ground. Joyce gripped her head firmly and studied the woman’s eyes, which had rolled back in their sockets.
“She’s crashing. Are they sending another trolley?”
“It’s on its way.”
Amy looked on as the patient’s convulsion subsided. The young woman lay still, her tongue lolling from her mouth. With raised eyebrows, Joyce leaned in to check for a pulse.
The patient suddenly heaved, covering the nurse in a nauseating cocktail of blood and vomit. Joyce recoiled as the young woman slumped back to the ground. She hurriedly wiped the crimson matter from her face, gagging from its putrid stench. Amy held a hand to her mouth, eyeing the fleshy tendrils clinging to Joyce’s hair, as the older nurse resumed her search for a pulse.
“She needs a defib right now,” Joyce said.
Amy nodded, trying to ignore the smell of the rotten meat. She stood up, looking over the anxious bystanders when she spotted two doctors rushing a stretcher through the crowd.
“She needs—” Amy began.
“We know, she needs a defib. Just like the rest of them,” one doctor muttered.
They stopped next to Joyce. Together, the quartet lifted the unconscious woman onto the trolley. Her arm swung loosely off the side, but the doctors didn’t seem to notice as they pushed her down the corridor.
The crowd of onlookers began to disperse as the two nurses left to get cleaned up.
“What the hell’s going on?” Amy asked when they were in the refuge of the staff washroom.
“I don’t know. It’s been happening all morning; people coming in complaining of headaches, nausea, and dizziness. Next thing we know, they end up on life support in ICU.”
Joyce splashed cold water on her face at the sink. Diluted droplets of blood trickled over her dark skin until she wiped them away. She cast an eye at her reflection in the mirror. The fleshy tendrils still clung to her black curls. Amy watched as she plucked them out and dropped them into the running water. They swirled around the basin, leaving behind a cherry-coloured trail before stopping abruptly in the plughole. With a groan of disgust, Joyce scooped up the bloody pieces and dropped them into a biohazard bin. She returned to the sink and scrubbed her hands.
“Some kind of food poisoning?” Amy suggested, turning to the mirror and examining her pallid features. Her long, brown hair, normally tied in a tight bun, had fallen loose and hung at her shoulders. Her skin looked pale and aged, no doubt an effect of the morning’s events; the usual tan and freshness no longer apparent.
She copied Joyce, washing her hands and splashing her face. The water was cool. She longed for more, splashing herself a few more times.
“Not like anything I’ve ever seen,” Joyce said. “That meat smelled rotten.” She cast a disgusted glance back to the biohazard bin. “I guess you wish you stayed at Brackton, huh?”
Amy nodded. The shift marked only her second at Sunnymoor Hospital. She had started her career at Brackton University Hospital. Although Sunnymoor was a lot smaller, she had looked forward to working within the close-knit community. After the events of that morning, she was starting to regret her decision to transfer.
“But then again, Brackton has all those riots going on.”
Joyce looked up in surprise. “Really? I didn’t know they were that close.”
Amy nodded. She recalled the news report she had watched that morning. Following a sweep of unexplained violence, the riots had spread. At first centralised to the major cities, the random acts of aggression were now occurring in smaller towns as
