I guess we all have our "day one" stories, our own personal accounts of how and when we realized that the world had just gone to hell. One day we woke up and went about our mundane routines, cleaned our ears and popped that pesky zit, not realizing that the world we woke up in was so horribly different than the one we bid goodnight. So picture, if you will…
An ambulance wails at drivers who act temporarily frozen by the sudden approach of flashing red lights. The driver is a young EMT, and a bit of a cowboy behind the wheel. I suppose I'll dispense with the name since in a few minutes you'll see it doesn't matter anyway, but boy he could drive. When both lanes of traffic clog tight, he jumps a median. My white-knuckled admonishments are lost under the high-pitched siren and heavy metal on the stereo. He says it pumped him up during convoy ops in Iraq. The way he drives, I wonder if the road is littered with anti-tank mines.
We were responding to a delightfully ambiguous report of "sick person", which has so far included everything from cardiac arrest to "gramma can't poop". At the scene we found three police cars lined up outside one of the newer residential complexes. The first car in line was rocking severely, and three policemen huddled around the rear passenger window. A young officer approached us, eyes wide.
"Man, I don't know what's going on. I just got off duty, I just washed all the puke outta the back seat from that crackhead-"
My partner bristled.
"The one that bit our girl?"
We had just transported a pretty blonde teenager who had a chunk of her cheek and lower lip ripped off. Nasty, nasty stuff.
"Yeah," the cop says, "I was on my way home and this crazy bitch runs into the road and jumps into my backseat!"
"Looks like she wants out" I said. She was thrashing around violently and spitting blood exorcist-style across the windows.
"Aw come on!" moaned the cop.
A potbellied sergeant thoughtfully twirled a sucker in his mouth. "Ever had a bird fly into your house and freak out, and you're like 'well if you'd just hold still I'd let you out?"
The woman pressed her face to the glass and stared at me. She had the wild expression of a rabid animal in a trap, she snarled and spit and pounded the glass.
"Y'all are gonna have a hella time loading her up"
I put my hands up. "Hang on, hold the phone. We're gonna do what-what?"
"Well y'all are taking her to the hospital, ain't ya?"
"Well right now she's kind of in a…enclosed environment. I don't think we should let her out, do you?"
"Y'all are an ambulance. Get her out of the car."
"She's not even going to notice those lousy Velcro restraints we have. You have cuffs, you get her out."
The woman started to slam her head against the glass until it spidered. The pot-bellied cop threw his sucker down.
Ever have one of those moments that feels like it's happening in slow motion but it all happens in a heartbeat?
I saw his fat, sticky paw on the door handle. By the time the rest of us could protest she had already busted out of the car with enough force to barrel his fat ass over and made a clean leap to the young cop. He screamed when she tore into his neck with teeth and nails. A loud crack sent bloody, spongy bits bursting through her hair. I slid over to the injured cop and pulled her body off him while my partner ran back to the ambulance for the stretcher. I grabbed a trauma dressing out of our pack and pressed it hard against the wound. Severe hemorrhage is a game of beat-the-clock. When a major vein or artery is severed, they go into shock almost immediately. Their body tries to compensate for the sudden loss in volume by increasing the pulse and blood pressure, unfortunately that means that they bleed out faster and shock soon becomes irreversible. It only takes three minutes to die from blood loss.
Soon he is on the stretcher and we are in the back of the ambulance. I stick electrodes to his chest and abdomen, and his rapid heartbeat is translated into a neat row of digital blips on a cardiac monitor. While my partner sets up a bag of IV fluids I put a tourniquet on his arm and grab a needle. I don't see any obvious veins, a side effect of the blood loss. I can feel them though, round and springy under the skin in the crook of his elbow. Starting IVs is sometimes like spear fishing in the dark. I throw the harpoon.
I miss.
The dressing on his neck is nearly soaked through, and blood is starting to drip onto the floor. His moans and pleas are muffled by an oxygen mask. I fish the needle around under the skin, just a bit until I feel the "pop" of puncturing the vein wall. Soon IV fluid is running in a steady stream to replace lost blood, but it might be too little too late.
My partner wipes sweat out of his eyes. "You need anything else?"
"Just diesel fuel," I say, "get us out of here."
I manage to get a second IV placed in his other arm on the way. He is ashen pale, his skin should be cool and clammy with shock, but it is hot and glistening with sweat. Suddenly the steady series of beeps from my cardiac monitor is cut off and an alarm sounds. It shows me that his heart is no longer beating in an organized manner; it is just trembling in his chest and about to give out. His whole body jolts when I apply electricity to shock it back into a rhythm. Instead I get a flatline. As I place my hands on his chest to begin CPR, I hear my partner swear and the world turns upside down.
I woke up on the wall, which was now where the floor should have been. The interior lights are off, but by the alternating red and white flashes streaming through the window, I see we were overturned. The cab reeked of the metallic stink of blood. I always hated that smell, but at the time I didn't realize how used to it I would become. I call out to my partner, but he doesn't answer. My patient dangled lifeless from the stretcher, secured by the belts across his legs and torso. I crawled past him for the doors. My gloved hand slipped against the handles, slick with blood. Suddenly my leg was snatched from under me, and I look up and see the dead cop has hold of my foot. Lucky I'm partial to castoff combat boots. They lace up past the ankle, which stopped him from biting off a chunk of my tendon. I kicked him in the face and scrambled out.
The truck was totaled, and a dark puddle formed around the crushed drivers' side of the cab. I rushed to the cab but froze in my tracks when I saw my partner's neck bent at that grotesque angle. My radio was somewhere in the patient compartment, but so was crazy cop dude. I tried to flag down a state patrol vehicle but he just sped by. It was astounding how quickly the system collapsed under the weight of demand, how quickly the façade of civilization falls away when the proverbial spit hits the fan.
The situation went from bad, to worse, to completely psychotic. The National Guard set up a blockade around the city; no civilians in or out. Internet, radio and cell communication was reserved for military and emergency personnel, whatever first responders survived the initial outbreak were drafted into service and federalized. Fire, EMS and law enforcement were already decimated by that point, because who do you call when grandma's fever won't go down, or some stranger is ripping flesh off your child's arm?
It had one distinct advantage in that I was able to briefly contact my family. They live in a rural area outside Macon, way out in the sticks. It was the kind of place that you wouldn't find unless you already knew where you were going. I told them to hunker down and I would find a way out of the city and get there as soon as I could. I left out the part about the shoot-on-sight- policy for "deserters". I thought they would be safe as long as they were out of populated areas, but last I heard FEMA had set up relocation camps and the military was moving people from the outlying rural areas to the designated "safe zones". I think that's why the camps were overrun so quickly. There is no such thing as a safe zone, and you are a fool if you let yourself believe that anywhere is safe as long as the dead walk. That kind of thinking makes you complacent enough to deal with a highly contagious, rapid-kill disease by concentrating large populations in close proximity. And people went! Because the damn TV told them to! It was like lining up cattle for the cull