like Nathan.
As I went to wipe the blood from her other cheek, Ms. Sawyer jerked in her sleep, lunging toward my hand without opening her eyes. A short hiss came from her open mouth, and I yanked my hand back, heart pounding, as she sank down, still unconscious.
She didn’t move again, and about an hour after midnight I woke Jenna, helped her move the body onto a gurney, and took it down to storage. Then, because the freezers in the basement were full, we woke Maggie and began the painstaking task of moving all the bodies to the back lot, freeing up space for future victims. We didn’t know then how soon we would need it.
The epidemic began several hours later.
It started with Ms. Sawyer’s bed neighbor, a middle-aged man who had been clinging stubbornly to life and who I’d hoped had a good chance of pulling through. An hour or so before dawn, he started bleeding from the eyes and rapidly went downhill. He was dead two hours later. Then, one by one, all the patients began weeping the bloody red tears and coughing violently, causing Jenna, Maggie and me to scurry from bed to bed, trying desperately to slow the flood. By the time the late-afternoon sun began setting over the tops of the empty buildings, half our patients were gone, with the other half barely holding on to life. We didn’t even have time to move the corpses from their beds and resorted to covering them with sheets when they died. As evening wore on, the number of bodies under sheets outnumbered the living. With every death, my anger grew, until I was swearing under my breath and snapping at my poor interns.
At last, the flood slowed. The patients still bled from the eyes, and the smell of decay had permeated the room, but there was a lull in the storm of coughing and gasping and death. As the sun set and the light began fading rapidly, I called Jenna and Maggie into the hall. Jenna looked on edge, and Maggie had succumbed to exhausted tears as I drew them aside, fighting my own frustration and the urge to lash out at everything around me.
“Where is Mr. Archer?” I asked in a low voice. I’d never seen a roomful of patients decline so rapidly, and I had a sneaking, terrible suspicion. I hoped I was wrong, but I needed answers, and there was only one person who could give them to me.
“I think he’s still in the room with his friend,” Maggie sniffled. “We haven’t seen him all day.”
I spun on a heel and marched down the hall. Blood from the eyes, the strange bite marks, the rotten smell without the infection. Nathan’s symptoms had spread to my patients, and Ben knew what it was. He knew, and I was fed up with this hiding, keeping secrets. Less than a day after Ben Archer had stepped into my sick ward with his friend, I had a roomful of corpses. He was going to tell me what he knew if I had to beat it out of him.
I swept into his room, bristling for a fight, and stopped.
Ben sat slumped in the corner chair, eyes closed, snoring softly. Exhaustion had finally caught up to him, too. Despite my anger, I hesitated, reluctant to wake him. Sleep was a precious commodity here; you snatched it where and when you could. Still, I would have woken him right then if I hadn’t seen what had happened to the body in the room with us.
Nathan lay on the bed, unmoving. Unnaturally still. The faint smell of rot still lingered around him, and in the shadows, his skin was the color of chalk. I moved to his bedside, and a chill ran up my spine. His eyes were open, gazing sightlessly at the ceiling, but his pupils had turned a blank, solid white.
The chair scraped in the corner as Ben rose. I held my breath as his footsteps clicked softly over the linoleum to stand beside me. I heard his ragged intake of breath and glanced up at him.
He had gone pale, so white I thought he might pass out. The look on his face was awful; grief and rage and guilt and horror, all at once. He gripped the edge of the railing in both hands, swaying on his feet, and I put a hand out to steady him, my anger forgotten.
“Ben.”
He glanced at me, a terrifyingly feverish look in his eyes, and his voice was a hoarse rasp as he grabbed my arm. “We have to destroy the body.”
“What?”
“Right now.” He looked at the corpse of his friend and shuddered. “Please, don’t ask questions. We need to burn it, quickly. Does this place have an incinerator?”
“Ben, what are you talking about?” I wrenched my arm from his grasp and glared up at him. “All right, this has gone far enough. What are you hiding? Where did you and Nathan come from? He was sick, wasn’t he?” Ben flinched, and my fury rose up again. “He was sick, and now I have a roomful of dead patients because you’re hiding something! I want answers, and you’re going to tell me everything, right now!”
“Oh, God.” If possible, Ben paled even more. He glanced down the hall, running his fingers through his hair. “Oh, shit. This has all gone crazy. I’m sorry, Kylie. I’ll tell you everything. After we destroy the body, I’ll tell you everything I know, I swear. Just...we have to take care of this now. Please.” He grabbed my arm. “Help me, and then I’ll tell you anything you want.”
I clenched my fists, actually tempted to hit him, to strike him across that ruggedly handsome face. Taking a deep breath to calm my rage, I spoke in a low, controlled tone. “Fine. I don’t know what this is about, or why you want to deface your friend, but I will help you this one last time. And then, Ben Archer, you are going to tell me what the hell is going on before you leave my clinic forever.”
He might have nodded, but I was already marching back into the hall, fighting a sudden, unexplainable terror. The unknown loomed around me, hovering over Nathan’s corpse, the sick ward full of the newly dead. The body on the table looked...unnatural, with its pale shrunken skin and blank, dead eyes. It didn’t even look human anymore.
The sick ward was eerily silent as I walked in, searching for the gurney I’d left at the edge of the room. In the shadows, bodies lay under sheets in their beds, mingled with the few still living. Jenna glanced up over a patient’s cot, her cheeks wasted, her eyes sunken. Lightning flickered through the plastic over the front door, illuminating the room for a split second, and thunder growled a distant answer.
Something touched my arm, and I jumped nearly three feet. Bristling, I spun around to come face-to-face with Ben.
“Sorry.” His gaze flickered to the darkened sick ward, then slid to me again. “I just... How are we going to do this? Do you need help with anything?”
I yanked a gurney from the wall. “What I needed is for you to have told me why you were here the first time I asked, not when all my patients started bleeding from the eyes and dying around me.” He didn’t respond, too preoccupied with the current tragedy to take note of my anger, and I sighed. “We’ll transport the body to the empty lot,” I explained, pushing the cot back down the hall, Ben trailing after. “Once we’re there, you can do whatever you want.”
“Outside?”
“Yes, outside! Preferably before the storm hits. I’m not starting a fire indoors so my clinic can burn down around me.”
He seemed about to say something, then changed his mind and followed me silently down the hall, our footsteps and the squeaking of the gurney wheels the only sounds in the darkness.
I sneaked a glance at him. His face was blank, his eyes expressionless, though I’d seen that look before. It was a mask, a stoic front, the disguise of someone whose world had been shattered and who was holding himself together by a thread. My anger melted a little more. In my line of work, death was so common, but I had to remind myself that
