The South Forsaken

Chapter One

Chapter OneThe world ended on Boxing Day, with blowflies providing a droning soundtrack to the summer heat. People nationwide were still recovering from gorging themselves the day before.

Sarah worked in aged care in Geelong and didn’t usually get a chance to work in the acute sector. The overload of patients, however, meant they needed all hands on deck and she found herself called in to work at the public hospital. As to be expected, major holidays meant busy emergency wards, and very little time to assimilate the goings on in one case before being called away to work on something completely different. Sarah had spent most of the afternoon tending to her four patients, and forcing down a coffee whenever she could tear herself away.

She nearly overlooked the memo on the desk in the nurse’s station; it might have been a normal warning for a potential viral infection that may be seen in newly-admitted patients, briefly reminding nurses of care instructions and advising use of full precautions. Sarah brushed her lank black hair out of her face and picked up the memo to read it properly. The last alert they had been given for a viral outbreak had been the influenza strain last winter, but something about the tone of the memo insisted she pay attention. She decided to play into her paranoia and ducked out into the fire escape to call Jen, a fellow student nurse she had worked with. They’d kept in contact after Jen was moved to the Royal Melbourne Hospital to complete her final year.

‘Jen, hey, how are you? How’s work?’

‘Nope, not doing it,’ Jen replied. Her tinny, brusque tone seemed rude to those who were unaccustomed to her personality.

‘Doing what?’ Sarah asked innocently.

‘Small talk? You don’t do small talk. What’s up?’

Sarah grinned and looked down at the memo in her hand. ‘Has your hospital received a memo on this new outbreak?’ she asked, purposefully keeping it vague and playing into the tight suspicion that curled down her spine.

‘Actually, yes, we got the alert that there was something happening in Geelong. I’m not sure how far it’s spread though. We had one of our regional patients come in this morning, hyper-aggressive, extremely violent behaviour. We had to call a code black on him. I think he came from down your way.’ She laughed but it sounded strained. ‘You know the weirdest thing, though.’ Jen paused. ‘I was in ED when he came in and I know they pronounced him brain dead. It must have been really close, especially with the ferocity with which he woke up; he damn near flew off the trolley.’

‘He came back to life?’ Sarah asked incredulously, her voice strangled. She coughed to try to cover it. Jen snorted.

‘No, that’s not what I said, he was only clinically dead. I know what you’re thinking, and you’re obsessed. I mean that in the nicest way of course.’

‘Of course. I know,’ Sarah replied, hoping her voice was projecting the reasoned maturity that she wasn’t feeling at the moment.

Sarah ended the call standing quietly in the stairwell, two thoughts warring for attention in her mind. It would be easy to walk back on to the floor and dismiss this as a paranoid geek-out moment, finish her shift and go home to her cats. She opened the door, picked the second option and walked back to the nurses’ station. Her shift didn’t end for another hour, but playing on the fact that she was called in on a public holiday and had cut her break short, she ducked out early and headed down to the emergency ward via the cafeteria to snag another coffee. It might not be the good stuff, but caffeine is caffeine.

Gulping half of the coffee down and logging into the ward computer, she checked the reports for the morning. It wasn’t strictly allowed, but who questions a person wearing scrubs in the hospital? She noted the usual cases that had been admitted: a couple of children brought in with nausea and vomiting; four people involved in a car accident, two of whom were released with minor injuries; and two brought in with suspected substance abuse—one currently sleeping it off, the other displaying very aggressive tendencies. That one had to be restrained after attacking a staff member. A note attached to this last patient’s history suggested that his father, who had his own history in the hospital’s mental health records, had come in with him. It stated that the father had been ranting about mutated viruses and government conspiracies. The doctor who had admitted the young man had called for security to escort his father away from the other patients, assuming the aggressive paranoia to be a result of his schizophrenia.

Sarah looked around to see if anyone she knew was working and smirked slightly when she spotted Nell, a flighty nurse with the unfortunate tendency to babble—something that Sarah now fully intended to exploit.

‘Nell! Are you off? I have coffee.’ Sarah waggled the half empty coffee cup in the air. Nell followed the movement eagerly; a nurse’s addiction was an easy thing to take advantage of. Sarah handed her the cup and they walked out. Nell removed the lid, looking sceptically at the low level of the coffee.

‘Evaporation, it’s the heat.’ Sarah waved off Nell’s disgruntled look at the half-empty cup and sat on the low bricks out the front of the hospital. ‘I hear you’ve been having fun this morning?’ Sarah started casually, throwing out the bait. As anticipated, Nell jumped at it eagerly.

‘It’s been shocking! Not so much in cases—it’s been surprisingly slow there—but that one guy … I’m sure it’s a full moon tonight! We had to put him in the isolation unit when he came in.’ Nell took a sip of the half-warm coffee. ‘We were waiting for whatever he was on to leave his system but it didn’t, no matter what we pumped in … or out! He was so violent! The doctors eventually said not to go near him, so we had to stick to suicide obs through the window. When he still wasn’t calming down after an hour, Sue went in with security to try to sedate him and take his obs, and he bit her! I don’t know what he’s on, but I haven’t seen anything that does this before! And his dad wasn’t much better; he was talking about killing him! Honestly! His own son! The paramedics that brought them in said their place looked like a slaughter house.’

‘Nell, slow down. What case?’ She acted ignorant, not wanting to admit to snooping through patient files.

‘The substance abuse!’ Nell paused, and lowered her voice. ‘He killed his mum. He was on such a high that he ripped her apart! They said he was eating her when they came in and another team had to be called in to help them. It took four of them to get him down!’ A disgusted look crept over Nell’s face.

‘Okay, you said he bit Sue. How is she?’

‘Not sure, I think they were working on her when you came in. It was pretty bad though. With the amount of blood she was losing, he must have severed an artery.’

Sarah stood up and walked back inside, driven by a need to see what was happening. Nell followed her closely. Sarah wasn’t sure what she was looking for—years of horror movies were beginning to play through her head. She needed to find something to either prove or disprove her suspicions.

She swiped the entrance card-reader and walked in just as a code blue sounded over the intercom. She hurried forward, following the crowd that rushed to a curtained off area. Sarah sucked in a breath, hoping to laugh at her over-blown paranoia. Stepping through the curtain, Sarah saw the resuscitation team working frantically to revive a body on the table. She heard the doctor call for the defibrillator and watched as they applied the shock. Someone thrust a notepad in her hand, yelling at her to take notes if she was planning on ‘just standing there’. On autopilot she started to write down everything: the meds given, the shock applied, the patient stats being yelled out … every action got recorded into the little book, including the doctor’s final statement.

‘Time of death … 1500, 26th December 2013.’

A suffocating silence seemed to fill the partitioned area and she felt her heart slow from its panicked pounding to a rate where she felt she could breathe again. Distantly she heard them discussing Sue’s family; someone had called up to the next ward to request nurses who didn’t personally know or work with Sue to clear the room and prepare her body for her family. The adrenaline leeched from Sarah’s system, leaving her feeling drained. She allowed the nurse in charge to guide her to a chair in the office as the rest of the team filed in after her and dropped similarly into the seats littered around the room for the routine debrief.

The team discussed their actions and the outcomes. Sarah read from the notes when asked, relaying everything leading up to the unfortunate death of the nurse involved. The cynical part of Sarah’s brain raised an eyebrow and asked How dead?

A chime sounded overhead, and a faceless voice called over the loudspeaker. ‘Code black, resuscitation bay two, code black!’

Sarah felt a wave of heat rush through her body, followed by an icy chill. She stared at the curtain she had stood behind moments before.

With adrenaline still coursing through her body, Sarah could almost forgive herself for not noticing the scream that echoed down the hall. As she registered the new chaos that piled itself into her harried brain, she found her feet leading her toward the curtain that separated the bay from the corridor. Her steps led her past the isolation unit where the steady thumps behind thick glass commanded her attention. Her head turned, almost on its own, to look through the thick observation glass. Her hand drifted up absently, hovering in front of the glass that separated her from a young man, his milky eyes seeming to look past her, not following anything in particular. His mouth hung slightly open, a viscous trail of saliva smearing the glass where he was pressed against it. A vicious snarl rattled through her ears and she snatched her hand back, her survival instinct driving her out the door.

The sudden shock of sunlight and overwhelming heat woke her from her wandering thoughts, and she looked up to find that she had left the hospital and was standing on Bellarine Street, facing the staff car park.

‘Where are we going? What do we do?’ Nell’s small voice startled her out of her reverie.

‘We?’ Sarah frowned in confusion as Nell stared at her with wide, wretched eyes. Sarah hid a grimace at the added responsibility. ‘Just keep quiet,’ she huffed, walking brusquely to her car. Her nursing training pleaded with her to return and help, but she ignored it, reasoning that her family needed her more. She pulled out her phone and dialled James, newly married and a recent father to daughter Charlie. Her dark-haired, sarcastic geek of a brother made a striking contrast to his tall, blonde, serious wife, Rebecca. Sarah knew that if anyone would be able to empathise with her fears at the moment, it would be James, with whom she had shared so many laughs during horror movie nights when they were growing up. And if this all turned out to be a stress-induced figment of her imagination, he would at least be able to see the funny side of it.

‘James?’ she said as the phone was picked up.

‘No, sorry, he’s with Charlie at the moment.’ It was Rebecca’s voice. ‘Sarah? Are you okay? You sound stressed.’

Sarah choked out a laugh. ‘I’m really not okay. Can you put me on speaker and go to James please?’ There was a muffled jostling and James’s voice came distantly through the phone.

‘Sarah? What’s up?’

Sarah sighed. Now that she had to voice her suspicions she wasn’t sure how to word them.

‘Sarah?’ James questioned; she’d apparently been quiet too long.

‘Can you come to Mum’s place?’ she asked. ‘It sounds stupid in my head … I’d rather say this in person.’ She could almost hear the look of bemusement that must have passed between James and Rebecca.

‘What’s wrong?’ he pressed, worry teasing into his voice. ‘Are Mum and Dad okay?’

‘They’re fine,’ she assured him. ‘But something’s going on.’ She took a deep breath. Knowing he would need something more than a feeling to go on, told him exactly what had happened so far, and explaining her outlandish suspicions as to the cause. To her relief, her brother and his wife didn’t laugh. There was another fumbling sound and James’s amused voice sounded clearly in her ear.

‘It could be nothing; you might be panicking over rubbish.’ He sounded like he would really like nothing more than to go back to his family and laugh off the story recounted by his paranoid sister.

‘Yes, it might, and by all means, if that’s the case, laugh away. But what if it’s not?’ Sarah heard James heave a sigh.

‘What do you want us to do?’

‘Your home is all glass, and your fence wouldn’t keep anything out. Grab what you need and go to Mum’s. She has that high fence and the extra space in the garage flat if we need it. We can work out what’s going on from there.’

Sarah hung up feeling drained. This was a situation she had never expected to find herself in. Gritting her teeth, she moved toward her car and walked straight into a pale, shaking Nell.

Ahh, right, she mentally corrected herself, family and miscellaneous others …

‘Nell, don’t you need to go home?’ Sarah struggled to keep the stressed edge from her voice, not needing the added frustration.

‘Mum’s overseas. I don’t want to be home on my own,’ Nell murmured, her voice low and uncertain. Sarah sucked in a deep breath.

‘Come on then.’ Sarah gestured impatiently toward the car, her eyes drifting to the small green car and onto the stunted boot that hid the bug-out bag she had worked on and carried around for years. She smiled as she slid into the driver’s seat, the beginnings of a plan starting to form in her mind.