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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/HeadOfSpectre on 2023-08-10 09:42:24.
Sasha and I watched with a heavy heart as Samara was laid out on the blackened metal slab of the cremation chamber.
It wasn’t much of a goodbye, but it was something. Samara and I had never been all that close… but I had still considered her to be something of a friend, and I thought she deserved better than an impersonal funeral in the crematorium of 0-5. As the slab rolled into the cremation chamber, Sasha and I quietly took a step back, watching as she disappeared inside. We heard the burners activate and then we could feel the heat and smell the burning flesh.
We’d become intimately familiar with the smell over the past few days.
A few other dead or dying patients sat scattered in the room, quietly waiting their turn. The few grim, dead eyed nurses who tended to them weren’t able to do much for them aside from give them a quiet overdose of some kind of sedative, and let them drift away so they could at least die peacefully before their bodies were burned. Sasha turned to look at them, but didn’t dare approach them. Her eyes settled on a nearby Karah, who hadn’t quite died yet and I could almost feel her heart sinking at the sight of him. I wondered if she knew him.
The door to the crematorium opened and Dr. Meehan stepped inside. It hadn’t even been half an hour since we’d seen her last but she looked even more exhausted than she had before, with heavy dark circles under her eyes.
“I’ve spoken with the Administrator. A full quarantine of the clinic has been enacted,” She said quietly. “Although hopefully it won’t last long and won’t need to be spread to the rest of the hospital.”
“You heard something?” Sasha asked.
“I have. Apperantly the Imperium has sent someone to investigate the situation. They traced it back to a werewolf bar in town. A number of our patients had mentioned it. They found Gutworm eggs in the kitchen. They’d been mixed in with the food.”
My brow furrowed.
“Mixed in how?” I asked, “Some kind of freak accident or…?”
“I don’t know, and right now I really don’t care. The Imperium will probably be carrying out a full investigation into the why of it. But what this means for us, is that they should be able to track down anyone who’s at risk of infection and bring them to us. We can quarantine the ones without symptoms, and deal with the ones who are. Once they do that there might just be a light at the end of the tunnel.”
Those words only offered a hollow comfort.
“So… are we going back to work, or are we staying in here to wait our turn?” Sasha asked, still a little bitter.
“You can drop the attitude, Peters. I understand that you may not agree with what I’m doing right now, but I’m not going to start throwing people into the crematorium without a damn good reason. You and Currie are currently displaying no symptoms. Currie… I don’t believe that you were exposed. Although you, Peters I’m less sure of. You were asleep in the next room while Samara was symptomatic for some time. There’s a possibility… albiet a slim one that you might be infected. So for now you can quarantine in room 503. I have a few other low risk members of the staff in there. If you remain asymptomatic after 24 hours, then we’ll talk about sending you back to work.”
“The rules of 0-5 say 48 though,” Sasha said.
“I know what the rules say. The rules don’t account for the sheer volume of patients we have right now. We don’t have the luxury of 48 hour quarantines anymore. So I’m making a judgement call. If you’re infected, we’d be seeing the symptoms before the 24 hour mark. So it’s 24 hours now.”
Her tone said not to argue, so we didn’t.
“Currie, I need someone keeping an eye on the patients in 510 to 520. So put your PPE back on.”
“I thought I was still on break?” I asked.
“That was before I had people lying to me about their exposure. This is after. Get your PPE on.”
She left without another word.
***
The final influx of patients came around 6 hours later. I’d mostly lost track of time. By my guess, it was around 58 hours after Artie had died by that point.
Everything just felt as if it had descended deeper and deeper into chaos. I tried to keep my head down. Tried to keep working, although it was hard. My eyes were heavy. I was struggling to focus. I needed to sleep, but I couldn’t. There wasn’t enough time to sleep.
The rooms were uneven. Some of them had ten to fifteen patients in them. Some only had two or three. Dried blood was smeared across the floors. At one point, I watched security drag a crying vampire back into her room when she tried to run for the door. She kept pleading with them, saying that she didn’t want to die like this. But they still handcuffed her to the bed.
Two hours later she was slumped over on the floor, her entrails spilling out of her as two nurses in hazmat suits sprayed her body with hot steam to kill the worms. I’d always heard that vampires were tough to kill… but seeing one slumped on the floor like that was… the memory of it seared itself into my mind.
People were sleeping in the designated safe zones and all of the vending machines in there had been broken into. A few kind souls had brought some food from the outside, and the containers were scattered on the floor. I always thought that the rules of each section were meant to maintain some kind of order. This was anything but order.
And through it all, Dr. Meehan tried to keep things running.
I hadn’t seen her sleep a wink since I’d first come back on shift, several hours… or I suppose by this point it was days, ago, and though she tried to put on a strong face I knew that it was catching up to her. She slurred her words more, and when she was’t talking to anyone I noticed her space out a few times, standing mindlessly in the middle of the hall, her eyes faraway and unfocused before something else demanded her attention and pulled her back into the madness. The nightmare just carried on, only now most of us were too tired to be afraid anymore. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that if I started puking up blood, I’d probably just regard it with a resigned frustration than actual terror and looking back, the very idea of that disturbs me.
Like a mindless tin soldier I just marched on, going through the motions as one by one our patients died… and I’m almost ashamed to admit that there came a point where their deaths simply stopped mattering to me.
There had just been so many…
So, so many.
I just couldn’t morn for them anymore.
***
I was in 512 when the nurse beside me started vomiting up blood. The name tag on his scrubs said Julian, and I’d seen him around before but we’d never really spoken much before then. We’d been bringing some water to one of our patients, a new arrival who probably only had a few hours left when he started retching.
I looked over at him, watching as he stumbled to the side to try and get to the nearest garbage can in time before spilling his guts into it.
I could see the red around his mouth, and gave him a cold, weary look. Slowly he wiped his mouth.
“How long?” I asked.
“T… three hours…” He panted, “I’m alright.”
“You’re dying.” I replied plainly. He took a step toward me and I took a step back.
“And?” He asked, “I’m not the only one. If I say anything, Meehan’s gonna put me in a bed and let me die with the rest of them. She’ll send me off to the crematorium. I can still help here, and they can’t infect me a second time.”
“But you can still infect the rest of us!” I snapped, “What about those of us who aren’t infected!”
“Yet,” He said. “Make your peace with it. Cuz we’re all going into the crematorium when this is done.”
I gave him a wide berth as he pushed past me, before tending to one of the patients, and I left him in that room, giving him a disgusted look as I walked back into the hall.
I briefly considered going and telling Dr. Meehan, although I knew what she’d do… and a part of me did agree with Julian. Not about us all ending up in the crematorium, but about still doing what you can. I decided to just keep avoiding him, and let the worms deal with him, and moved on to 513.
That was when I heard the screaming down the hall.
“We’ve been going for over 60 fucking hours, Sylvia! You can’t do this!”
“The rules in this case are clear, Croft.” Dr. Meehan replied. Unlike the other speaker, she didn’t yell. “The quarantine remains in place until 48 hours after symptoms have stopped. We need to remain here until 48 hours after the last patient has died to ensure that we aren’t going to bring these worms right back out of this clinic!”
“Oh, so now it’s what the ‘rules’ say, is it?” Croft snarled. “You don’t get to cite the rules when it suits you and abandon them when it doesn’t! They either apply or they don’t!”
I left 513 to go down the hall a little bit. I could see a small throng of staff members standing around Dr. Meehan and one of the other nurses, a guy who was a little younger than me.
“0-5 is not designed to handle an outbreak of this size,” Dr. Meehan said. “I have had to make some judgement calls, but I have made them to try and manage this situation as best I can! As the most senior member of the staff on site right now, it is necessary for me to make these calls. If you do not like the way things are being run, take it up with the Administrator but until then, sit down. Shut up. Do your job.”
“I’ve bee…
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