" ER/Stand part 24 "
The dim room with medical posters warning him to bring his baby in for inoculations was not what he expected to wake up to.
Deep down, Dave Malucci hadn't expected to wake up at all. What do I remember, he asked himself as he slowly sat upright on the hospital bed. Those assholes found us and grabbed Jennifer and Lisa. They shot Craig and Jerry and that one came after me because he thought I was cute.
Dave shuddered despite himself. Homosexuality didn't offend him. He'd had gay friends before the superflu plague and he suspected that Jerry, the first male survivor he had run into had been a little less than straight, but he wasn't open minded enough to let some man rape him. The bikers were heading west, to the dark man's sick little empire. He had been tied up while they all took turns with the women. By the time he had worked his way out of the ropes, Jennifer was dead and Lisa was getting worked over. He didn't regret leaving them. They had all talked about what they would have to do if such a situation arose and there had been no way he could have saved either of them. As it was,
he'd been shot as he sped off. He touched his shoulder gently. It was neatly and professionally done. Another thing to ponder.
That woman, he thought suddenly, the one with the gun. She had killed the biker and helped him out of the store. A nurse, he decided, and wasn't that lucky? While he was a freshly minted doctor, he could hardly do his own stitches. He took a moment to check himself out. The wound on his shoulder was the worst,
though his ankle was tightly wrapped and as he stood and let weight settle on it, he suspected that he might have sprained it taking the spill at the store. Everything had been cleaned and taken care of, and she had even left a fresh t-shirt from his rucksack lying neatly folded by the doctor's examination bed. He put it on. Perhaps, he thought with a smile, I should go thank this woman. Sadly he wasn't even sure he recalled what she looked like. A red head, he decided, and shorter than me. The one nice thing about this plague, he thought as he stepped into the hallway, is that finding people with nothing but a vague idea of what they look is a lot easier. If there's more than one red headed woman in this city, I'll shoot myself.
He limped into the hallway and realized that he was in a very small doctor's office. In five steps he was at the receptionist's desk, looking into the waiting room. One exam room just screams old time general practitioner, he decided. And since all the diplomas belonged to a Jack Forester, he doubted that it was the red headed woman's place of work.
He spotted her lying on the waiting room couch. His gear was spread out on the floor and it was obvious that she had gone through it. As he watched, she stirred slightly but didn't awaken. Definitely a red head, and older than he was, though it was hard to judge how much older when someone was asleep. He pegged her at between thirty five and forty, older than him, and older than the women that had been in his group. They had been younger, sixteen and twenty and neither had liked him all that much. Young kids really, and he had a few too many scruples to want jail bait. He had liked the people that he had been traveling with, but it was hard to fit in with two young girls, a young man who's only job had been working at McDonald's and a middle aged farmer who could barely read. They all had been mightily impressed that he was a doctor, but aside from that, he had been something of a fifth wheel. Lisa the sixteen year old had already hooked up with Jerry, and Jennifer had grown quite attached to Craig the farmer.
He sighed heavily. He would miss them. They all had been good people even if they hadn't had a lot in common with him.
None of them deserved what had happened. Of course, he didn't think most of the human race had deserved to die that summer, but fate was fate. He watched as his unknown companion slept and wondered just where she had been going. Just because she had saved his life, that didn't mean she wasn't heading west. He had run across a number of people who seemed really nice but were heading to the wrong place.
It wasn't an easy thing to consider, that there was a line being drawn between good and evil. His dreams had been both terrible and wonderful, but he hadn't placed any significance to it until he had met Jerry and Lisa and they realized together that they had been having the same dreams. The details differed of course but it was basically the same. They had decided to head to Nebraska, to where Mother Abigail the old woman in their dreams was. Recently, as the dreams dictated, they had veered over towards Colorado and Boulder. Somehow, almost despite himself, he was genuinely shocked that he was on the side of decency and good. Sometimes, he thought that the plague had made him see that he was a good person. So maybe he had to go to Grenada to get his medical degree and maybe he did like to party more than study, but he was a good person. He was heading towards Boulder, where the decent people were going and there had never been any doubt in his mind that he was going there.
Hopefully, he thought with a smile, this woman is cool like me.
She certainly had felt free to paw his meager possessions,
he thought. His ruck sack had been essentially dumped onto the floor. His clothes had been separated into clean and dirty and the clean clothes were neatly folded. She had gone through his gear and she had found his medical degree. Not that he'd been hiding it, but it was important to him so he put it in his clear plastic map case. Probably she was interested in knowing where we were going, he thought. The route to Boulder was clearly marked,
so she knew where he was heading at least. The room had the look of a neat mess. I might as well pick up, he decided. He packed his gear, leaving out his food supplies and the small camp stove he had. Breakfast would be nice and he suspected his sleeping companion hadn't been taking good care of herself, if the dark circles under her eyes were any way to judge. He also suspected that she was sick. There was a bottle of cough syrup on the floor right by the couch she was lying on. She was wearing slacks, a t-
shirt, and a leather jacket and yet she still had wrapped his quilted poncho liner around herself. It was raining yes, but it was still summer. If she was that cold, he thought clinically,
there had to be something wrong.
She began to stir again so he sat himself down in one of the nearby chairs. He suspected, if she had been alone for sometime that hanging over her while she woke up was liable to earn him a slap. He had been that way for a while himself. He watched as she slowly sat up, seeming not to notice him as she coughed into her hand. Then their eyes met. Her eyes widened and he watched nervously as she put her hand into her jacket pocket. A woman,
alone, who knew there was a band of killers running around probably had a gun in her jacket pocket. It would suck to get shot at this point, he thought, so I better act friendly. " Hi.
I'm Dave. My friends call me Dr. Dave. Thanks for... you know,
stitching me up and all. Do you want some coffee?"
" Dr. Dave..." She put a hand to her head. " Christ...."
" I have some freeze dried breakfast stuff too." He held up the backpacking stove. He noted with some pleasure that her hand was no longer in her pocket.
" You shouldn't use that here, inside," she said after a moment. " Those things give off carbon monoxide." She said it with some snap, as if she was used to people doing what she said.
He decided that she had a point though, and he set the stove down.
" We can take it outside," he said amiably. " By the way, I haven't had a chance to rifle through all of your worldly possessions, so I don't know your name yet. Do I just call you that red headed woman, or will you tell me your name?" He smiled.
She blushed. " I'm sorry. I was just worried that you were... one of them. The bikers." She held out her hand. " I'm Dr. Kerry Weaver." She didn't smile, but he did see that she didn't seem quite so stressed out.
" A doctor?" A surprise, but a pleasant one. He was a doctor too, but he wasn't fool enough to think that his degree that had been given in May was worth as much as a few years experience.
Even a few years experience in one of the specialties he considered women specialties like gynecology was better than nothing. " I'm a doctor too. I was supposed to start my internship in July. At Mercy. I was up in Glacier National Park on an Outward Bound mountaineering trip. When everybody got sick,
I just thought it was some weird bug. I ended up hiking out on my own. That's where all the Outward Bound gear comes from in case you were wondering. What about you?" He hoped it wasn't too horrible. There just was no nice way to discuss life before.
" I was the acting chief of emergency medicine at Cook County General." She looked him over clinically. " Are you sure you're ok? You were shot."
" I'm fine. Well, ok, I'll be all right." He got the impression she wasn't terribly impressed with him. That or else she was distracted by something. Maybe she's been alone for too long. He had run into that a few times, and it was safe to assume she'd had some bad experiences. She was from Chicago, so she had to have been traveling. " Listen, why don't we go make some coffee and we can figure out what to do?"
She coughed. " No. I was traveling with some people. I need to check on them. They were probably attacked. I should have checked last night but I didn't want to leave you alone."
" We can go do that," he said easily. More people was definitely a plus. " I'm ok. I mean, yeah, I'm hurt but I think I can stand walking a little. Listen, can I call you Kerry or do you want me to call you Dr. Weaver? " She didn't really seem the first name sort. He was starting to think she just wasn't much of a conversationalist. " What sort of doctor are you any way?
OB/GYN? Pediatrician?"
She glared balefully at him. " Why is it that every male doctor on the face of the earth assumes a woman doctor is either a gynecologist or a pediatrician? Is it some sort of Y chromosome problem? If I was acting chief of emergency medicine, wouldn't it stand to reason I was an emergent medicine doctor?" She coughed again.
From calm to pissed in five seconds, he mused, one of those.
" Are you sure you don't want a cup of coffee? "
" I don't want any damn coffee," she snapped. After a moment, her expression softened. " I'm sorry, I'm just feeling a little irritable, what with killing some man yesterday. You can call me Kerry if you want. I am not calling you Dr. Dave. " She looked down at the floor. " Where did my crutch go? I left it here on the floor."
" You mean this?" He walked over to the reception desk,
where he had left the forearm crutch he'd found on the floor. He had assumed that it was just the equivalent of medical flotsam,
like the prescription pads littered all over the desk. He handed it to her. She stood up and took the crutch. With it, she walked over to the office door. She walked quite well too, but he could see where she would have problems without it. Some sort of long term thing, he could tell that much. " I didn't know it was yours."
" It's all right." She glanced at her watch, a fancy Rolex.
" It's eight in the morning. Why don't we load your stuff into my truck and find my friends? They'll have coffee, and it's possible they might have something for breakfast."
" If not, I have plenty of freeze dried sausage." He picked up his pack with his good arm. He certainly didn't have anywhere else to go and his own traveling companions were dead.
The motel was pretty well shot up. Dave could see that as they drove up. His new traveling companion had been surprisingly quiet, but he could tell she was worried. More worried as they looked at the bullet holes in the walls. " Looks like they took off," he said finally. At least there weren't any fresh bodies.
He didn't think that would go over well with Kerry. He could see that she was a little high strung. Probably is still having bad dreams, he thought, and that can make anyone a little flaky.
She took his statement with a distracted wave of her hand.
Clearly she didn't think they would take off, though with her stunning personality, he wondered. He found her rather amusing in that way that crotchety people were, but he was also long used to that sort of thing. All of the women in his family had behaved as though they were constantly PMSing. It felt strangely familiar to have some woman ordering him around. Plus, she was pretty competent. His own group had barely been able to fend for themselves. Kerry on the other hand, seemed to be handling an attack by psychotic biker rapists extremely well. She stepped up to the manager office door. " They left a note." She handed it to him, her face a mask of hidden emotion.
He read it, understanding at once why she was upset. " So who is Lucy and was this Doug guy supposed to be with you?"
She shrugged as she toed a broken bottle of scotch that was littered on the sidewalk. She looked at him, her expression guarded. " Lucy is about your age and Doug must have come looking for me." She pointed at the bottle remains. " I was.... I was drinking that in the drugstore. Doug must've picked up the bottle."
There was more to it than that, Dave knew it just by looking at her, but he figured it could wait. " So what are you thinking we should do, Chief?" She seemed like the type that liked titles and he needed something to call her. He sensed that deep down she wasn't cool with a near stranger using her given name.
" What am I thinking?" She laughed. " I'm thinking that a band of sociopaths drove in and grabbed someone to torture, and the only thing that saved me from that wonderful fate was that I was off trying to kill myself. Aren't I the lucky one?" She turned to face him. " What do you think we should do, Dr. Dave?"
" Well, you're pretty good with a gun. I'm not bad either.
Why don't we chase these bastards down and kill them?" He said it breezily, though he admitted to himself that he did indeed want to get them back. People like that didn't deserve to go west. He had a feeling that even Flagg didn't want scum like that. What worried him was that Kerry seemed to take him seriously.
" Ok, now we have a plan." She coughed. " Let's find a gun store."
" Where?"
" This is America. If we have to, we'll just go to the public school."
" What about this Doug guy?"
That seemed to set her back a moment. " He must have headed to the next town. Or maybe he's drunk. He's got a map regardless.
We'll just follow the trail of beer cans."
The dim room with medical posters warning him to bring his baby in for inoculations was not what he expected to wake up to.
Deep down, Dave Malucci hadn't expected to wake up at all. What do I remember, he asked himself as he slowly sat upright on the hospital bed. Those assholes found us and grabbed Jennifer and Lisa. They shot Craig and Jerry and that one came after me because he thought I was cute.
Dave shuddered despite himself. Homosexuality didn't offend him. He'd had gay friends before the superflu plague and he suspected that Jerry, the first male survivor he had run into had been a little less than straight, but he wasn't open minded enough to let some man rape him. The bikers were heading west, to the dark man's sick little empire. He had been tied up while they all took turns with the women. By the time he had worked his way out of the ropes, Jennifer was dead and Lisa was getting worked over. He didn't regret leaving them. They had all talked about what they would have to do if such a situation arose and there had been no way he could have saved either of them. As it was,
he'd been shot as he sped off. He touched his shoulder gently. It was neatly and professionally done. Another thing to ponder.
That woman, he thought suddenly, the one with the gun. She had killed the biker and helped him out of the store. A nurse, he decided, and wasn't that lucky? While he was a freshly minted doctor, he could hardly do his own stitches. He took a moment to check himself out. The wound on his shoulder was the worst,
though his ankle was tightly wrapped and as he stood and let weight settle on it, he suspected that he might have sprained it taking the spill at the store. Everything had been cleaned and taken care of, and she had even left a fresh t-shirt from his rucksack lying neatly folded by the doctor's examination bed. He put it on. Perhaps, he thought with a smile, I should go thank this woman. Sadly he wasn't even sure he recalled what she looked like. A red head, he decided, and shorter than me. The one nice thing about this plague, he thought as he stepped into the hallway, is that finding people with nothing but a vague idea of what they look is a lot easier. If there's more than one red headed woman in this city, I'll shoot myself.
He limped into the hallway and realized that he was in a very small doctor's office. In five steps he was at the receptionist's desk, looking into the waiting room. One exam room just screams old time general practitioner, he decided. And since all the diplomas belonged to a Jack Forester, he doubted that it was the red headed woman's place of work.
He spotted her lying on the waiting room couch. His gear was spread out on the floor and it was obvious that she had gone through it. As he watched, she stirred slightly but didn't awaken. Definitely a red head, and older than he was, though it was hard to judge how much older when someone was asleep. He pegged her at between thirty five and forty, older than him, and older than the women that had been in his group. They had been younger, sixteen and twenty and neither had liked him all that much. Young kids really, and he had a few too many scruples to want jail bait. He had liked the people that he had been traveling with, but it was hard to fit in with two young girls, a young man who's only job had been working at McDonald's and a middle aged farmer who could barely read. They all had been mightily impressed that he was a doctor, but aside from that, he had been something of a fifth wheel. Lisa the sixteen year old had already hooked up with Jerry, and Jennifer had grown quite attached to Craig the farmer.
He sighed heavily. He would miss them. They all had been good people even if they hadn't had a lot in common with him.
None of them deserved what had happened. Of course, he didn't think most of the human race had deserved to die that summer, but fate was fate. He watched as his unknown companion slept and wondered just where she had been going. Just because she had saved his life, that didn't mean she wasn't heading west. He had run across a number of people who seemed really nice but were heading to the wrong place.
It wasn't an easy thing to consider, that there was a line being drawn between good and evil. His dreams had been both terrible and wonderful, but he hadn't placed any significance to it until he had met Jerry and Lisa and they realized together that they had been having the same dreams. The details differed of course but it was basically the same. They had decided to head to Nebraska, to where Mother Abigail the old woman in their dreams was. Recently, as the dreams dictated, they had veered over towards Colorado and Boulder. Somehow, almost despite himself, he was genuinely shocked that he was on the side of decency and good. Sometimes, he thought that the plague had made him see that he was a good person. So maybe he had to go to Grenada to get his medical degree and maybe he did like to party more than study, but he was a good person. He was heading towards Boulder, where the decent people were going and there had never been any doubt in his mind that he was going there.
Hopefully, he thought with a smile, this woman is cool like me.
She certainly had felt free to paw his meager possessions,
he thought. His ruck sack had been essentially dumped onto the floor. His clothes had been separated into clean and dirty and the clean clothes were neatly folded. She had gone through his gear and she had found his medical degree. Not that he'd been hiding it, but it was important to him so he put it in his clear plastic map case. Probably she was interested in knowing where we were going, he thought. The route to Boulder was clearly marked,
so she knew where he was heading at least. The room had the look of a neat mess. I might as well pick up, he decided. He packed his gear, leaving out his food supplies and the small camp stove he had. Breakfast would be nice and he suspected his sleeping companion hadn't been taking good care of herself, if the dark circles under her eyes were any way to judge. He also suspected that she was sick. There was a bottle of cough syrup on the floor right by the couch she was lying on. She was wearing slacks, a t-
shirt, and a leather jacket and yet she still had wrapped his quilted poncho liner around herself. It was raining yes, but it was still summer. If she was that cold, he thought clinically,
there had to be something wrong.
She began to stir again so he sat himself down in one of the nearby chairs. He suspected, if she had been alone for sometime that hanging over her while she woke up was liable to earn him a slap. He had been that way for a while himself. He watched as she slowly sat up, seeming not to notice him as she coughed into her hand. Then their eyes met. Her eyes widened and he watched nervously as she put her hand into her jacket pocket. A woman,
alone, who knew there was a band of killers running around probably had a gun in her jacket pocket. It would suck to get shot at this point, he thought, so I better act friendly. " Hi.
I'm Dave. My friends call me Dr. Dave. Thanks for... you know,
stitching me up and all. Do you want some coffee?"
" Dr. Dave..." She put a hand to her head. " Christ...."
" I have some freeze dried breakfast stuff too." He held up the backpacking stove. He noted with some pleasure that her hand was no longer in her pocket.
" You shouldn't use that here, inside," she said after a moment. " Those things give off carbon monoxide." She said it with some snap, as if she was used to people doing what she said.
He decided that she had a point though, and he set the stove down.
" We can take it outside," he said amiably. " By the way, I haven't had a chance to rifle through all of your worldly possessions, so I don't know your name yet. Do I just call you that red headed woman, or will you tell me your name?" He smiled.
She blushed. " I'm sorry. I was just worried that you were... one of them. The bikers." She held out her hand. " I'm Dr. Kerry Weaver." She didn't smile, but he did see that she didn't seem quite so stressed out.
" A doctor?" A surprise, but a pleasant one. He was a doctor too, but he wasn't fool enough to think that his degree that had been given in May was worth as much as a few years experience.
Even a few years experience in one of the specialties he considered women specialties like gynecology was better than nothing. " I'm a doctor too. I was supposed to start my internship in July. At Mercy. I was up in Glacier National Park on an Outward Bound mountaineering trip. When everybody got sick,
I just thought it was some weird bug. I ended up hiking out on my own. That's where all the Outward Bound gear comes from in case you were wondering. What about you?" He hoped it wasn't too horrible. There just was no nice way to discuss life before.
" I was the acting chief of emergency medicine at Cook County General." She looked him over clinically. " Are you sure you're ok? You were shot."
" I'm fine. Well, ok, I'll be all right." He got the impression she wasn't terribly impressed with him. That or else she was distracted by something. Maybe she's been alone for too long. He had run into that a few times, and it was safe to assume she'd had some bad experiences. She was from Chicago, so she had to have been traveling. " Listen, why don't we go make some coffee and we can figure out what to do?"
She coughed. " No. I was traveling with some people. I need to check on them. They were probably attacked. I should have checked last night but I didn't want to leave you alone."
" We can go do that," he said easily. More people was definitely a plus. " I'm ok. I mean, yeah, I'm hurt but I think I can stand walking a little. Listen, can I call you Kerry or do you want me to call you Dr. Weaver? " She didn't really seem the first name sort. He was starting to think she just wasn't much of a conversationalist. " What sort of doctor are you any way?
OB/GYN? Pediatrician?"
She glared balefully at him. " Why is it that every male doctor on the face of the earth assumes a woman doctor is either a gynecologist or a pediatrician? Is it some sort of Y chromosome problem? If I was acting chief of emergency medicine, wouldn't it stand to reason I was an emergent medicine doctor?" She coughed again.
From calm to pissed in five seconds, he mused, one of those.
" Are you sure you don't want a cup of coffee? "
" I don't want any damn coffee," she snapped. After a moment, her expression softened. " I'm sorry, I'm just feeling a little irritable, what with killing some man yesterday. You can call me Kerry if you want. I am not calling you Dr. Dave. " She looked down at the floor. " Where did my crutch go? I left it here on the floor."
" You mean this?" He walked over to the reception desk,
where he had left the forearm crutch he'd found on the floor. He had assumed that it was just the equivalent of medical flotsam,
like the prescription pads littered all over the desk. He handed it to her. She stood up and took the crutch. With it, she walked over to the office door. She walked quite well too, but he could see where she would have problems without it. Some sort of long term thing, he could tell that much. " I didn't know it was yours."
" It's all right." She glanced at her watch, a fancy Rolex.
" It's eight in the morning. Why don't we load your stuff into my truck and find my friends? They'll have coffee, and it's possible they might have something for breakfast."
" If not, I have plenty of freeze dried sausage." He picked up his pack with his good arm. He certainly didn't have anywhere else to go and his own traveling companions were dead.
The motel was pretty well shot up. Dave could see that as they drove up. His new traveling companion had been surprisingly quiet, but he could tell she was worried. More worried as they looked at the bullet holes in the walls. " Looks like they took off," he said finally. At least there weren't any fresh bodies.
He didn't think that would go over well with Kerry. He could see that she was a little high strung. Probably is still having bad dreams, he thought, and that can make anyone a little flaky.
She took his statement with a distracted wave of her hand.
Clearly she didn't think they would take off, though with her stunning personality, he wondered. He found her rather amusing in that way that crotchety people were, but he was also long used to that sort of thing. All of the women in his family had behaved as though they were constantly PMSing. It felt strangely familiar to have some woman ordering him around. Plus, she was pretty competent. His own group had barely been able to fend for themselves. Kerry on the other hand, seemed to be handling an attack by psychotic biker rapists extremely well. She stepped up to the manager office door. " They left a note." She handed it to him, her face a mask of hidden emotion.
He read it, understanding at once why she was upset. " So who is Lucy and was this Doug guy supposed to be with you?"
She shrugged as she toed a broken bottle of scotch that was littered on the sidewalk. She looked at him, her expression guarded. " Lucy is about your age and Doug must have come looking for me." She pointed at the bottle remains. " I was.... I was drinking that in the drugstore. Doug must've picked up the bottle."
There was more to it than that, Dave knew it just by looking at her, but he figured it could wait. " So what are you thinking we should do, Chief?" She seemed like the type that liked titles and he needed something to call her. He sensed that deep down she wasn't cool with a near stranger using her given name.
" What am I thinking?" She laughed. " I'm thinking that a band of sociopaths drove in and grabbed someone to torture, and the only thing that saved me from that wonderful fate was that I was off trying to kill myself. Aren't I the lucky one?" She turned to face him. " What do you think we should do, Dr. Dave?"
" Well, you're pretty good with a gun. I'm not bad either.
Why don't we chase these bastards down and kill them?" He said it breezily, though he admitted to himself that he did indeed want to get them back. People like that didn't deserve to go west. He had a feeling that even Flagg didn't want scum like that. What worried him was that Kerry seemed to take him seriously.
" Ok, now we have a plan." She coughed. " Let's find a gun store."
" Where?"
" This is America. If we have to, we'll just go to the public school."
" What about this Doug guy?"
That seemed to set her back a moment. " He must have headed to the next town. Or maybe he's drunk. He's got a map regardless.
We'll just follow the trail of beer cans."