Chapter Two

Chapter Two

         “Hey…kid?!”  My skin nearly leapt right off my bones at the sound of the whisper.  I whirled around and almost fell over when I caught sight of the familiar black and red scrubs before I was done turning. My heart hammered away in my chest making me dizzy and sick, and I couldn’t get a single coherent thought to form.

         “Ssssh.  It’s ok.  Not gonna hurt you.  You’re not black tagged. I was just checkin’ in on ya.”  The tall, hazy figure stepped forward and put a black gloved hand on the plastic, getting as close as he could without actually coming through the plastic.  The sight of a red bolt-gun handing from a nylon belt on his hip stole my voice so I nodded, electing to keep quiet.

         “Talkative kid huh?”  The man bowed his bald and coughed long and hard before continuing.  “That’s fine, that’s ok.  Ya’ll needs to just listen up right now anyways.”  His head came back up and when his eyes met mine I could see they were puffy and dark, swollen.

         “It’s like this.  You been out for a while.  You were triaged for research.”  He snorted at that and shook his head again.  “Research.  Damn sixteen year old kid. Research.  Buncha assholes.”   He sighed and I blinked, not used to language like that from the generally punctilious FEAD agents.

         When I didn’t respond he shrugged and continued “Well, the day we picked up was months ago. You had a bad head injury swelling of the brain…yada yada yada.  When you didn’t wake up the powers that be send you here.  M-flu resistants’ are pretty damn thin on the ground these days so research it was.  Anyways, I was transportin’ ya, cause god knows them damn Federal Emergency Aid Department agents weren’t gonna do it!   Anyways, so there I was on a damn FEAD Life Flight with ya when, Life Flight, what a freakin joke…”  He wavered a bit on his feet and coughed again.

         “No more time.  Right.  You’re here. Everyone’s dead. No fallout here.  But other places are bad.  Wars still on.  Don’t you trust no one in blue helmets or any kind of uniform understand?”  He stared at me and I still couldn’t speak so I just nodded. 

         He nodded back and continued with his story “Just after the bombs dropped people started getting sick again.  Mutagenic Influenza strain E of all things.”

         “Strain E?” I finally asked after he’d paused for several minutes.

         “Yeah. Some nutjob ran M-flu through a damned elephant.  Now we got strain E.  Anyways, they never got a chance to test it on ya, so’s I don’t know if you’re resistant to this one.  Best be careful.”  The tall man started coughing again, his whole body racked with the violence of it.  When he finally stopped and looked up me blood covered the mask over his mouth and his eyes leaked bloody tears.

         “You gotta find a way outta the city.  I can’t help you no more kid. Find some food.  Be careful where ya get your water.  Don’t talk to no one. You gotta be extra careful of…”   He started coughing again and fell to his knees, and then over to his side.  He kept coughing, harder and harder, I could hear the fluid building up in his lungs and shuddered as I backed away. I did not want to die like that.

         He coughed for so long that I lost track of time and finally crawled back up on the bed and wrapped the thin white blanket around my shoulders.  It seemed to take forever for him to stop. When the painful sounding spasms finally did cease he was still. I began to gather my courage and psych myself up for the leaving the safety of my little plastic bubble. 

         His hand twitched and jumped, staring at him, not sure if he was dead or not.  When his fingers feebly scrabbled at his belt for the bolt-gun I understood what he wanted and almost cried.  I knew I could do it, I had before…everyone in any kind of pre-med courses had to do it their first week of classes. ‘Death Orientation’ class was a pass/fail course. It was also a cheap way for the government to weed out people who couldn’t handle medical sciences and a cheap way to get rid of death row inmates.

         Taking a deep breath and squaring my shoulders I clutched the blanket a little tighter and stepped forward.  The plastic shivered when I touched it and finally moved aside, it was heavier than I remembered. He was right there at my feet, still trying to get the heavy duty velcro on his belt undone. I knelt and gently moved his hand away, knowing I was probably exposing myself, but I couldn’t just leave him to die.  M-flu was quick but excruciating, and no one knew that better than I did.

         When I tore the bolt-gun he smiled, the mask he wore was so soaked in blood that it leaked when his face moved and I shivered.  The device was heavy and felt too big for my hands.  But I pressed the barrel against is temple in just the right place and pulled the trigger, holding it for the required ten seconds.  The little wires inside the long bolt did their job and the bolt slid back into the gun, the small kick back letting me know that the six inch long bolt was back in the gun.  I stripped the harness off his body and stood, trying not whimper.  Fear gripped me harder than it had ever done, save for that day on the farm. 

         After taking a deep breath I looked around the rest of the tent.  Open, empty crates of medical supplies lay scattered haphazardly around the floor, tumbled onto long stainless steel tables, piled on empty beds.  Empty packages covered the ground so thickly I couldn’t tell if the ground was bare or carpeted in astro-turf.  No bodies.  Plenty of dried blood.  Just as much fresh blood, still running thick and sluggish down nearly every available surface.

         It took a few minutes to find what I was looking for.  Against the far side of the tent walls, next to the canvas flaps still tied shut were long metal tables with microscopes neatly lines up and ready for use.  It didn’t take me long to sit down and collect samples from both myself and the tiny built in ampoule on the bolt-gun.  Every model was required to capture and hold up to twenty five samples, and when it was full it couldn’t be used again until empty.

        

         Medical school had changed by the time I enrolled.  From the first day you were expected to absorb and use the knowledge that had been reserved for much more advanced classes before the First Wave.  The whole world had changed of course; twenty five percent of the population dying within forty-eight hours had made sure of that.  But very little had changed as much as the way medicine was taught and practiced.

         So I knew exactly how to test my own blood for resistance to the new strain of M-flu.  That was first week kinda stuff.  Collecting the samples and combining them on the slide was over with fast and then all I had to do was look.