Read Me: Hi everyone! Thanks for checking out this story. I'm a long-time lurker here but this is the first story I've posted so I'm super stoked for feedback! Anyway this is sort of an AU story that takes place right AFTER "Migration" in season 8 but BEFORE [Spoilers!] the plane crash in the finale. Everything else is the same as the series canon. Anyway this is a zombie fic (which is not everyone's cup of tea) BUT I want to keep it as loyal to the flow of the show as possible so I think anybody could like it. Hope you ENJOY!
May 23 5:34am - Seattle-Tacoma International Airport
Meredith Grey pushed her suitcase onto the cart next to Mark's blue and white duffle bag and zipped up a loose outside pouch. "Did you remember to leave Zola's Tylenol with the hospital daycare?" she asked Derek as an airport attendant wheeled away the cart containing the doctors' luggage. "She has still been fussing with her ear infection and I want to make sure they have it if she needs it."
"I didn't forget," Derek said with a grin as he took Meredith's hand. "And she will be fine. We are only going to Boise for the day. We will be back in time for dinner."
It was the first time they had left their adoptive daughter for more than a few hours without either of her parents and Meredith was more than a little nervous. It didn't help that Zola had woken up just a few days before their trip with an ear infection that had kept her in tears for days. Alex Karev had assured them that she would be fine with just some antibiotics but Meredith couldn't help but want to stay home.
"I just want to make sure she has everything she needs…" she said, awkward that he had caught her once again in her somewhat irrational motherly concern.
Derek laughed and kissed his wife on the cheek, walking hand-in-hand toward the security check.
"Are you sure you want to go?" Callie said as she walked with Arizona toward the rows of metal detectors. "I'm just saying that I think Alex feels bad enough."
She stopped and pulled on Arizona's wrist until the blonde was facing her. "Besides," she said with an exaggerated pout, "I hope you realize that you're not just punishing him by leaving but you're punishing me too."
She maintained her comical expression until Arizona's look of tension broke into a reluctant laugh and she sighed and relaxed slightly. "I know. It's too late now anyway," the blonde surgeon said glancing toward the rest of the doctors as they placed their few remaining belongings into plastic bins at the x-ray machines. "I have to go. But I will be back tonight," she promised.
Callie handed her the carry-on bag and nodded toward the rest of the group. "You'd better catch up then," she said. Placing her hand on the small of her wife's back and pulling her in for a sudden kiss. "And hurry back," she winked, "or I might not wait up."
Lexie Grey flushed bright pink as the metal detector went off for a second time as she walked through. She backed through again and dumped a handful of change out of her back pocket into the security guard's dish.
"Metal detectors seriously hate me," she joked to him but he only responded with a stoic grunt.
She stepped through for a third time and groaned as it let out another high-pitch screech. Looking up, she noticed Mark staring at her from the other side of the checkpoint. They both quickly broke eye contact and Lexie turned back to the guard.
"Look, I already took off my belt and I don't have anything else in my pockets," she exclaimed in frustration. "I don't have any metal joints and I'm not carrying any weapons. I don't know what this thing wants from me!"
He raised an eyebrow and pointed lazily to her head. "Hairclip," he muttered.
Lexie rolled her eyes and yanked out the clip. It would be just her luck that the tiniest piece of metal on her body would be the problem. She threw the item into the bin and stomped through the grey arch without a hitch.
"Earth to Sloan," Cristina Yang grumbled as she shoved passed the taller doctor to grab her shoes off the conveyor belt, "it's a security line not happy hour. Move it!"
Mark glared at Cristina as she laced up her tennis shoes and shrugged her jacket back on. "Are you and Grey having some sort of lover's spat, Yang?" he huffed, only half-teasing. "You seem even more vicious than usual. Which I didn't think was even possible."
Cristina leveled the plastic surgeon with a steely gaze before picking up her backpack and stalking toward the gate.
Once they had all checked in, the doctors crossed the tarmac and climbed the steps into their aircraft. They listened half-heartedly as one of the pilots explained the safety features of the small 12-seat plane and then prepared for take-off. Meredith turned to try to make eye contact with Cristina for the hundredth time that morning but her friend simply sat across the aisle with her eyes trained on the window.
The engines spun up and the plane taxied onto the runway. A heavy silence fell over the cabin as the plane took off into the rising sun.
May 23 5:56am - Seattle Grace Hospital – Emergency Room
"It's slow slow slow slow slow," April whined from her seat at the Emergency Room intake desk. She allowed her head to fall from its perch on her fist and smacked her forehead on the desk lightly. The ER was nearly vacant.
"Are you some kind of idiot?" Alex growled, coming up behind her and shoving her rolling chair away from the desk. "This is Seattle Grace Mercy Death. Unless you want some kind of freaking tragedy to come rolling through those doors, you'd better shut your mouth."
He rooted around in the desk drawer for a moment before pulling out a large chocolate bar from the back of the drawer. "Ha! Nurses can't get anything by me," he laughed. Looking over at April he jabbed the candy in her direction. "And why don't you keep it shut about this too," he said before wandering out of the ER.
April stuck out her legs and scooted back toward the desk with a huff. She leaned back in the chair and tried to mentally calculate exactly how many hours of being a doctor she had left at Seattle Grace before her firing took effect. A woman's voice interrupted her thoughts and April leaned forward again and fixed a lazy gaze on the speaker.
"We have been waiting here for over an hour," a grey-haired woman was saying in a tone of barely restrained frustration. "My husband is clearly sick and I want a doctor to see him!"
April sighed and glanced over the woman's shoulder toward the bed where her husband was perched over a large plastic bin. He gagged intermittently into the bin and was looking very green. "Mrs. MacAllister," she said turning back to the woman who had been badgering the staff all morning, "As the nurse told you, he probably just has a stomach virus or food poisoning. We are still waiting for the results on that blood test but I really think you might just want to take him home for some rest."
"No!" the woman's voice rose an octave. "I know my husband and I know when something is wrong. I want to speak to a doctor immediately!"
"I am a doctor," April insisted angrily and the woman turned away in a huff. "For now…"
The desk phone lit up and April snatched it up before it could even finish its first ring. "Emergency Room," she said without a hint of her usual friendliness.
Owen Hunt was hunched behind a stack of paperwork in the conference room when April found him. With six surgeons in Idaho, Owen had been saddled with much of their discharge documents and charts that had been left to the last minute. He was far from a generous mood.
"Chief?" April said as she opened the door to the conference room with a knock. "Seattle Presbyterian just called the ER. We've been quiet all day but apparently they are swamped with cases. They want to start sending their overflow to us…"
"Overflow?" Owen muttered as he looked up from his work. "What happened?"
In all of his time working at Seattle Grace-Mercy West Hospital, Hunt had never heard of Seattle Pres asking for help relieving a high volume of patients. The smaller hospital was situated further outside of the city, and they rarely dealt with serious disasters like ferry crashes, sink holes and major car accidents that seemed to be frequent at SGMW.
"Um, that's just it, sir," April said. "Nothing's happened…"
Owen sighed and ran his hand through his hair in frustration. "What do you mean 'nothing', Kepner," he grumbled as he pushed away from the table and pulled his jacket off the back of his seat. "Why would Seattle Pres need our help dealing with nothing? You did tell them that we are missing a large part of our surgical team today, right?"
He started off down the hallway with April trailing behind. "I told them, sir. They just said they have a really high volume of sick people right now and need to send some here," she responded. "That was all they said."
"Well sick people are our specialty," Owen said. "Let them know that our ER is open to receive any overflow patients."
"Okay, I will," April said glancing down at a chart in her hand, "Well the first one is on his way and the EMTs said his heart's already stopped in the van."
Owen stopped abruptly and spun to face the smaller doctor who was rushing behind him. "They're sending a critical patient? I thought you said it was just 'sick' people," he said, perhaps more loudly than he had intended because April bustled backwards awkwardly. "For god's sake Kepner you probably should have led with that one."
Owen pulled a new gown out of the box and pulled it over his shirt and tie. Truthfully, he was relishing the idea of a serious incoming trauma far more than shuffling through more paperwork. As he pushed through the doors into the ER, however, he reconsidered.
The previously silent room had spun up to a chaotic storm of screaming and yelling. "I thought you said it was quiet in here today, Kepner!" Owen shouted above the din to the shocked resident.
Alex Karev was bent over the bed of a thin, grey-haired man and was trying to perform CPR while the patient's wife wailed in the background. "Where the hell have you been, Kepner!" Alex growled between compressions.
"What happened?" April shouted above Mrs. MacAllister's screams, "He has the flu!"
"Well he just had a seizure and now his heart has stopped so apparently not, genius!" Alex said. He stepped away from the patient and pulled the crash cart to the side of the bed. "Push 6mg of adenosine and charge to 200," Alex ordered a nurse as the familiar whine of the charging defibrillator paddles filled the air.
April began to protest but Owen cut her off. "Kepner deal with the wife," he said, moving toward the ambulance bay doors. "I'm going to meet the patient coming in from Seattle Pres."
"I need more doctors," Owen said to the nurse as he passed the ER desk. "Page Dr. Bailey please."
April tugged the distraught wife toward the waiting area and attempted to calm her frantic yelling. "I told you!" she screamed belligerently, tears streaming down her face. "I knew there was something wrong with him and you didn't listen!"
"Yes, Mrs. MacAllister," April muttered in a tone she hoped would calm the woman. "Dr. Karev is doing everything he can to figure out what's wrong with your husband. And I-"
April's statement was cut short as the woman lunged forward and snaked her fingers around the brunette doctor's neck. They tumbled onto the waiting room floor and April skidded backwards on the tail of her lab jacket. Mrs. MacAllister clawed after her, howling wildly.
"Security!" April yelped. "Somebody call security!" The woman leapt forward and pinned April to the carpet again before clawing at her in a frenzy. April covered her head defensively and tried to avoid the flurry of long manicured nails.
April gasped as she felt the woman's weight lifted from her chest by two security guards. She crawled backwards away from the woman and clambered to her feet, checking herself for any serious injuries to anything other than her sanity.
Mrs. MacAllister was still screaming and struggling against the security guards despite their orders to calm down. "Jesus! Can you get her a sedative or something?" one of the officers asked the still-shocked April.
She nodded and began to back away from the group but froze again as Mrs. MacAllister's body went rigid. Her eyes rolled back and her hands balled up into tight fists.
"Oh my god, put her down," April said, rushing forward again. "How is she—I think she's having a seizure. Put her down!"
The security guards gingerly lowered her to the floor as the woman's body began to shake. "What the hell is going on?" April muttered before turning shouting into the ER behind her for a gurney.
Owen started toward the ambulance as it pulled into the ER bay. The rig doors popped open to reveal two EMTs and a patient strapped to a gurney. "Patient is Roger Swanson, 39, presenting with severe nausea and head pain," the paramedic began her explanation as she exited the back of the van.
"He bit me Sara!" the other paramedic muttered as he jumped out behind her. "I can't believe he fuckin' bit me!" Owen glanced down at his arm and noticed the distinctive marks of a bite wound that had torn right through the paramedic's sleeve and was slowly coloring the fabric with blood.
The EMT continued: "He flat-lined in the rig on the way here but we were able to resuscitate after less than 3 minutes. Once we got him back he became extremely aggressive and tried to take a bite out of my partner. That's why we restrained him."
Owen nodded as he helped push the gurney toward the ER. The patient bucked and strained against his restraints and had taken up a cycle of yelling and swearing at the medical personnel around him.
"Oh, good," Alex muttered as Owen wheeled the gurney up next to where he was seated beside his patient's bed. "Another screamer. I was beginning to miss the racket."
"How's your patient, Karev?" Owen demanded without looking up.
"We got him back but his pressure is running like a roller coaster. Up and down and up and down. What did this guy eat?"
Without warning both patient's monitors beeped an alarm. "He's tachycardic. 6 of Adenosine, please," Owen ordered.
"Crap mine is too!" Alex jumped up from beside the old man's bed and reached for the paddles again as the bed was surrounded again with staff.
May 23 6:22am – Yale Avenue, Downtown Seattle
"The rioting throughout east coast cities intensified yesterday when four police officers were killed in a Manhattan protest that turned violent. New York chief of police has called for intervention by the National Guard and is urging residents to-,"
Callie snapped the volume dial on her car stereo to silent as she pulled off of the freeway toward the hospital. She groaned and rolled her shoulders against the seatback trying to get out some exhausted tension. She had decided to drop Arizona off at the airport as a spur-of-the-moment decision to try and calm the still-fuming doctor before her flight, but she would have honestly preferred to have had a bit more rest before her shift.
Reaching across the seat for her coffee, Callie let out a huge yawn.
"Shit!" she swore and dropped her coffee as her front bumper crunched into the back of the beat up van in front of her. "Shit, shit, shit. Really, Callie?" she muttered to herself as she yanked her car into reverse and pulled back from the dented green metal of the van she had just rear-ended.
Rolling down her window, the dark-haired doctor leaned out and tried to signal to the driver ahead of her to pull over but to her surprise, the door of the van was already standing open. Her medical concern beginning to outweigh her embarrassment over the small car accident, Callie shifted her car into park and got out. She waved the honking drivers behind her to go around before rounding the van and peering into the open driver's side door.
"Hello?" Callie glanced into the backseat of the car before moving back around to the sidewalk. A blue sedan was parked in front of the van with its driver's door standing ajar as well. Suddenly an animalistic scream spun Callie around to face the alleyway behind her.
The two missing drivers, locked in a violent struggle, were drawing a small crowd of onlookers. "You hippie motherfucker!" howled a short man in a dark grey suit as he bashed the other savagely with his fists. "Who the fuck do you think you are?"
The other man was whipped into a matching rage and had one of his hands around the other's throat and was hurling his own string of expletives. His green and black T-shirt tore as he managed to shove the businessman off of him with a sudden kick. Reaching for a nearby hunk of brick he hurled it wildly toward the man in the suit with a guttural shout.
The brick spun awkwardly across the alley but met its mark with a resounding crack against the forehead of the man in the suit. He tipped backwards against the opposite building before sliding to a heap on the sidewalk.
Callie snapped out of her shock and realized that she had been watching the fight completely transfixed. She darted forward through the crowd. "Someone call the police," she ordered one of the stunned onlookers, "and get an ambulance!" The businessman's eyes fluttered open and closed as he drifted toward unconsciousness.
"Sir?" Callie tried to make eye contact with the man as his light blue eyes began to glaze over. A long gash from nearly the center of his head to his temple had covered nearly half of his face in blood already and was quickly changing the color of his white dress collar. Callie pulled out her keys and shone a beam of light from the attached flashlight into his eyes. "Sir, I'm a doctor. Can you focus on me?"
She heard harsh retching from behind her and she turned to look in time to see the other man double over and lose the contents of his stomach into a nearby trash bin before collapsing to the ground.
May 23 7:02am - Seattle Grace Hospital – Emergency Room
"Help me get her on the gurney!" April pushed the gurney toward where Mrs. MacAllister was still lying prone on the waiting room floor. "I need to get her back into the ER. And someone get me a chart on her!"
They lifted the now-silent women onto the bed and wheeled her back toward the brightly lit floor. April felt for a pulse but couldn't find anything. She and the security guards pushed the gurney up alongside the other patients in the ER as they were joined by more nurses.
"Clear!" Owen shouted as the body of the man from the ambulance went rigid beneath the defibrillator paddles.
"That's it," April heard Alex mutter from two beds away, "I'm calling it. He's not gonna come back."
He glanced at the clock. "Time of death, 7:03 a.m," he said and turned to a nurse, "Can you find his wife and -?"
"The wife is right here!" April interrupted. Owen and Alex both looked up in surprise and recognized the immobile form of Mrs. MacAllister.
"What, did you knock her out to shut her up?" Alex demanded, rounding the bed and glaring at the monitors above the woman's bed. "Did you even hook her up yet?"
April looked up at the flat-lining heart monitor line and nodded. "I just did! S-She had a seizure or something in the waiting room… and now she doesn't have a pulse."
April dragged the crash cart over and began to charge the paddles.
"Wait!" a nurse ran up with a chart in her hand. "She has a Do Not Resuscitate Order in her chart."
"What the hell?" Alex muttered and snatched the chart out of the nurse's hands. "Why would she have a DNR?"
April paused with the paddles in her hands, the high-pitched whine of a waiting charge adding to the silent tension of the room.
"She has late stage breast cancer…" Alex muttered. "She signed a DNR yesterday."
"No way…" April said, still leaning over the woman with the defibrillator.
"Kepner, step away from the patient," Owen called over from the other bed. "Step away from her, and call it."
"Time of death, 7:08 a.m," April said robotically. She discharged the paddles and looked up at the ceiling.
"Time of death, 7:08a.m," Owen seconded, pulling a sheet over the face of the man from the ambulance. He pulled off his gloves with a snap and threw them into a medical tray. "Call the morgue, Karev. We have more patients coming in."
"What happened to them, Chief?" April asked in frustration. "I - they just died for no reason! Chief?"
Owen crossed the room without a word and shut himself in one of the private rooms off of the ER. Running his hand through his hair, he pulled out his phone and pressed the speed dial for Cristina's name. The phone rang once before he could hang up.
A knock at the door jerked his attention away as his office assistant slipped into the room behind him. "Chief?" she asked as she glanced around the darkened room, "There's a call for you."
"I have a shortage of doctors right now and an ER that is about to fill up," Owen replied shortly. He pulled off his gown and yanked out another from a nearby box. "Tell them you'll take a message."
"Yes, sir," she replied awkwardly. She picked up the wall phone from its cradle and tapped in a series of numbers before handing the receiver to him. "I tried, but it's the Center for Disease Control, sir. And they say it's urgent."
"I mean it Alex," April whispered as she rinsed out the bite marks on the EMT's arm. "They just died! It doesn't make any sense."
"It makes perfect sense to anyone with half a brain, Kepner," he responded snarkily. "The old lady had a terminal disease. And the guy in the ambulance was practically already dead before he got here."
"What about her husband?" April countered hotly. "Since when does the flu cause heart failure?"
The EMT hissed in pain as April continued to irrigate the wound. "Sorry," April winced, turning her attention back her work.
"Step away from the patient immediately, Kepner!" Owen burst from the side room and back into the main emergency wing. The EMT leaned forward and tried to get up as April stepped back toward Alex.
"Stay where you are," Owen ordered and turned to Alex, "Call upstairs and get a quarantine kit down here."
Hope you enjoyed Chapter 1! The next chapter will be up soon.