Lawyers: Our client does not own Scrubs or Dead Like Me nor is she gaining any profit by writing this story. Don't sue her.
Chapter 6
Dan's gaze traveled from the shoe in my hand back down to me and said in an amused tone, "I'd hate to see what the rest of your plan was."
I closed the door behind me and put down my shoe while asking, "Dan, what are you doing here? How did you get in here? I locked the door."
"Oh please, your home isn't exactly the most secure place in the world," he said with a roll of his eyes. "I could pick that lock in my sleep."
He has a point there. Dan's pretty good at getting past almost any security feature and I have yet to find a lock he couldn't pick. Of course, there was that one time with secret service a couple decades back, but I'm getting off course.
"You still do this?" Dan asked, looking over the obituary I cut out this morning.
"Yeah, so?" I said a bit defensively.
He smiled and shook his head, "Whatever keeps you sane, Joey."
He began shuffling through the cabinets, pulling random things out, looking at them, and then putting them back. I don't believe this, he breaks in, mocks my hobby (he didn't directly insult it, but the tone was there), and now he's raiding the cabinet for food.
"It's 'John', and you never answered my question," I said.
"What question?" he mumbled, not really paying attention.
I huffed, annoyed, and repeated myself, "What are you doing here?"
"I can't believe you have this stuff," he laughed, dodging the question, and pulled out can of anti-bacterial spray that went by the name of Azrael.
"You're stalling," I stated.
"Oh, come on Johnny!" he said, then continued on in a deep voice that sounded very similar to the voice that always narrates movie trailers, "Azrael's back, and this time he's after germs. Now available in several different fresh scents!"
It was a pretty ridiculous commercial, but then again, so were half of the commercials out there.
"Kinda making a mockery of us, huh?" Dan said in his normal voice, waving the spray can in my face.
Irritated by his antics, I snatched the can out of his hand, ignoring his protests of, "Hey, don't grab." and chucked the stupid thing in the trash.
"There, it's gone, now tell me why you came here and broke into my apartment," I demanded, "It couldn't have just been to annoy me."
"You never know. You are really fun to annoy," Dan pointed out.
"Dan!"
"Mom wanted me to come!" he blurted out.
"Why would Mom want you to come here?" I asked, bewildered.
Mom was actually Barbara. She wasn't really our mother, just like how we aren't really brothers. She's just the motherly figure of our happy little group, but not in a Carol Brady sort-of-way. It's more like Roseanne meets Lois from Malcolm in the Middle. She makes sure we follow through on our reaping responsibilities and makes sure we don't break any important rules or get into any trouble (she doesn't know about the whole Castello thing, and she never will know if I have anything to say about it). When it's really important, I know I can usually go to her for help. That's why we call her Mom. It had started out as a funny nickname, but it ended up sticking.
However, besides being the mom of our group, she's also the leader. She had taken over as head reaper when Sam (Dad) finished his quota and was promoted a couple years back. So if she wanted Dan to come see me, it was for a good reason.
"Well, you weren't the only one in the plague division getting reaps," he began and I felt a sort of ominous feeling overcome the whole apartment; like the calm before a storm. "I got one, Mom got one, even Nana Hobbs got one."
"Oh," I said, not knowing what else to really say.
"It doesn't stop there. Across the country, other reapers in the plague division have reported getting cases. Mom had suspected something, so she got me a plane ticket to come out here and meet up with you," he explained.
So that's what the noise I heard over the phone was. He was calling me from on the plane and the beep followed by the weird voice was probably a flight attendant or the captain sending a message over the intercom to the passengers.
"Suspected... What?" I asked quietly, afraid to know the answer.
"We weren't really sure at first, but Mom wanted me to come here anyway. You know, as a precaution in case it was something you'd need help with, and" he paused for a moment to take a seat on the couch. I stared at him, waiting, when finally he said, "She was right. As usual."
As he fished through his pockets, he said, "She called me this morning with a message."
I sat down across from him on the coffee table and watched as he pulled out a small stack of post-its. Yes, that's right, a stack. Not just one or two, but a stack.
He gazed down at the yellow pieces of paper for a moment before hesitantly saying, "Umm... these are all for you."
I took the stack from him and nervously read over the information of the first post-it.
T. R. Grennal
Sacred Heart Hospital
Room 302
E.T.D. 1:17PM
'W-what? ...Someone at Sacred Heart?'
I flipped to the next one.
A. L. Sven
Sacred Heart Hospital
Room 114
E.T.D. 1:42PM
"No," I mumbled, "Mrs. Sven."
I flipped to the one after that.
J. F. Smith
Sacred Heart Hospital
Room 120
E.T.D. 2:04PM
And the one after that.
V. D. McGarth
Sacred Heart Hospital
And then the next.
P. M. Goodwin
Sacred Heart Hospital
Oh god. Are they all like this?
Sacred Heart Hospital
Sacred Heart Hospital
The post-it notes just went on like that. Every single one of them took place at Sacred Heart. I was so stunned by it all, I didn't really know what to say.
"What does this all mean?" I asked fearfully, and though I already had a pretty good idea on what was occurring, I needed Dan to confirm it. I wanted so badly for this to not be real; a part of me hoped that he would tell me it meant nothing.
However, the serious look he gave me said it all, "You know what it means, Joey. They're all at your hospital, you've been around these people, why don't you tell me what it means."
Dr. Diagnosis immediately took over as I ran through my head everything I had seen the past few days. Out of the two people I had already reaped, neither of them had any visible buboes, so it most likely wasn't the bubonic plague with them. However, now that there's all these other people to compare symptoms with, one thing stood out in my mind. The distinctive symptom that they all had in common: signs of pneumonia. The coughing, the difficulty breathing, the bloody sputum, it could only mean one thing...
"Pneumonic plague," I breathed, then buried my face in my hands with a groan, "It's the most contagious type, no wonder so many people are getting it. People can catch it simply by coughing on each other. Not only that, but it's the most deadly type too."
There's just one thing that didn't make sense in all of this. Just how did this actually all happen? While pneumonic plague may be the most deadly and contagious type, it's also the least common form of the plague. It would be understandable if just a few people got it, but we're talking about over dozens of people here, and if what Dan said is true, than it's not just here, it's happening all over the country.
Dan took in my grim expression and nodded, "Yup, looks like we're facing an epidemic."
"...Damn."
"We sure haven't done this in a while," I mused as I sat next to Dan in his rental car with Sasha in the trunk.
"Nope," he agreed, "Not since that last epidemic that you died in."
"Yeah, good times," I mumbled sarcastically.
Dan grinned and shook his head with a chuckle.
"So what's our game plan?" I asked him.
As I had said before, it'd been a while since we've had so many reaps in a single day, and when you're dealing with this many confused souls, it's possible that there could be a panic among them. The last thing we need is a bunch of spirits freaking out and running around the hospital.
"There will be a lot of your co-workers swarming around, trying to revive these people, so we need to be quick about it. We'll pop the souls in advance so we'll have enough time to get them out of the room before all the commotion starts," Dan explained.
In case you're wondering, 'popping a soul' is basically reaper slang for releasing a person's soul from their body, but you probably already guessed that.
Dan continued nonchalantly, "After that, we should take them somewhere that's sort of away from the living."
"The roof should work," I said, then added, "It's nice enough up there that it might encourage them to pass on."
"The roof is good," he said as we pulled into the hospital parking lot, "Well, let's get started."
He threw me a reassuring smile before we entered the hospital and split up. One of the good things (good for me) about reaping in a hospital is that everyone's always easy to locate. They're listed in the computer, their name is next to the door of their room, and their name is written on their chart attached to their bed. So there's never any complications when it comes to finding each person.
I was able to slip in and out of each room completely unnoticed by everyone around me. It's one of the perks of being a reaper. I'm not saying I can turn invisible or anything, it's just that when you're on the job, you become just another face in the crowd. Even Dr. Cox walked by me without noticing that I was there. As for the patients, they were all too out of it to notice my presence, but I think that's for the best. Terminally ill patients have been known to recognize a reaper.
Just as I had finished popping the last soul on my list, that's when all the alarms started going off. It started in one room and doctors and nurses nearby went running to help. As they struggled to revive the doomed Mr. Grennal, that's when his soul appeared next to me.
He looked from his body back to me and as I took him by the arm and led him away, he stuttered, "W-wait! Is that me?"
I kept on a calm and neutral expression as I headed to the roof and said, "Everything will be okay, Mr. Grennal. We'll explain things in just a moment."
When we reached the roof, Dan was already up there with a the soul of a women in her mid-twenties. I left Mr. Grennal in his hands before heading back, and by the time I got back down, two more monitors were going off. It was like some sort of twisted chorus that everyone was running around to. I grabbed the two souls as soon as they appeared and herded them up to the roof. That made four people so far, and since I had some time before the next person died, Dan went down to collect all of his wayward souls while I watched the ones on the roof
It was all going good so far, nobody had started panicking yet. Actually, everyone seemed to be pretty okay with their current situation. I guess the fact that they were all in the same boat gave them all something to talk about and bond over. It was sort of therapeutic for them.
Dan soon returned with two more people which gave me the chance to go and collect the next batch. We switched back and forth like that until everyone had been taken care of for the day. In the end, we had nineteen confused people milling about on the roof.
Dan moved to the center of the crowd and shouted, "Attention! Attention everyone! I know you're all tired and confused; you've all had a long day. Now, if you all cooperate, we can get you to where you need to go."
Dan may appear to always be the laid-back, devil-may-care, screw-up of our group, but shockingly enough, he gets right down to business and can be serious when it really counts.
"Are there any questions?" he inquired loudly.
"Yeah, what happened to us all?" one man asked, and everyone nodded and voiced their agreement with the question.
Dan seemed to consider his answer for a moment before finally saying, "I'm gonna give it to you all straight: You've all died. There's been an outbreak of the pneumonic plague and unfortunately, you were all the first to be infected by it."
"So there's actually an afterlife?" one women asked, shocked.
"Hey, if there wasn't, would you all be here?" Dan pointed out with a charming smile.
"Does that mean there's a God?" another woman asked.
"You're not God, are you?" a man to her left asked sceptically.
Dan laughed in good nature and said, "Nope, I'm just your friendly neighborhood grim reaper, not God. I try though. As for whether of not there is a God, well, that's for you to figure out because believe it or not, you haven't actually reached the afterlife yet."
Suddenly a rainbow of lights rained down from the sky and formed an ocean spreading as far as the eye can see, the hospital roof a miniscule piece of driftwood in comparison to it. Surrounding the roof, off in the distance, were several different islands, each looking like some form of paradise depending upon personal preference. Everyone stepped away from Dan and cautiously approached the edge of the roof.
As they all gazed apprehensively at each island like unsure, little children, Dan and I walked up behind them and Dan said with a smile, "Your light is here to take you away."
"It's time for you to move on," I said, nodding.
"Which one do we go to?" one of them asked nervously.
"Go to the one that looks right to you," I said confidently.
After a moments hesitation, they all stepped off the roof and into the ankle-deep ocean water. None of them looked back as they waded through the water, each heading toward a different island. Once they were all a good distance away from the roof, the lights disappeared, taking the people with it.
After all the lights had faded, Dan and I stared out at the usual surroundings of the hospital in silence.
"Pretty," Dan commented after a moment, breaking the silence.
"Yeah," I agreed, "It always is."
Dan turned to me and said with an amused glint in his eye, "Don't you have something doctor-ish to do?"
Oh crap, he's right!
I ran off without giving him a response.
Dr. Cox was the first one I went to with the news on the illness that was still currently infecting many of the patients in the hospital. He was slouched down on the couch of the lounge, watching a news report on the TV.
"Across America, hundreds are falling ill, but doctors have yet to find out why and with what," a hot newswomen reported.
"Dr. Cox!" I shouted urgently, drawing his attention away from the TV.
"You better have a damn good reason for bothering me, Newbie, and on your day off, because I have had a hell of a day and I am so not in the mood to hear about your girl problems no matter how painful the cramps are or how it ruined your date with that geeky guy who was in chess club during high school," Dr. Cox snapped, "Do you know how many patients we lost today, Mary Jane? Do you?"
'Nineteen.'
"Nineteen!" he snarled, "Nineteen patients keeled over and the reason why just, it just baffles us all. So tell me Ginger, just what is your reason for bothering me today?"
"I know why they're sick!" I cried, "It's the plague! The pneumonic plague!"
He jumped up from his seat and clapped a hand over my mouth. It wasn't the reaction I was expecting. I was expecting his face to light up with realization, hell, I was expecting him to not believe me, tell me it's a stupid diagnosis, and call me a girl's name, but I definitely wasn't expecting this.
"What have I told you about zebras, Newbie?" he hissed at me, but didn't remove his hand to let me respond. "Do you know what a diagnosis like that would do? Please tell me, Dory, that you haven't told anyone else about this ridiculous theory of yours!"
Okay, so I was half right in my expectations.
"No, you're the first person I've told," I assured him once he removed his hand.
"Attention all staff, visitors, and patients alike," Dr. Kelso's voice suddenly sounded off over the intercom. "In light of recent events and due to some news I have just received, the hospital is in quarantine effective immediately. No one is aloud to leave the building until further notice. Have a nice day."
"Then again, someone could have overheard me," I laughed sheepishly.
Dr. Cox, of course, was not amused.
Yay! Done with chapter six. The story's slowly moving along. Thank you everyone for your awesome reviews! I'm glad you like it so far. :) Now, to answer a question: there will be revelations bit by bit, and if I decide to continue down the path I'm plotting, there will be a hell of a revelation in the last fic of the series.
Anyway, you've read it, so review it please!