Free TAGGED: THE APOCALYPSE by Joseph M Chiron Page B

over his wire -rimmed glasses, then nodded assent and continued walking. “I need your help triaging the patients.” He walked over to the woman with the toddler Eve had seen earlier. The child was sitting at her feet looking dazed, with very bloodshot eyes. The mother looked even worse up close. Her entire left side was covered with blood. “Miss, I’m a doctor. I’m going to take a look at your arm.” She gave no indication she had heard anything. The doctor gently lifted up her blood-soaked sleeve to reveal the arm ripped off below the elbow. The bone was visible, and the arm itself looked like it had been chewed off. He lifted her chin to look in her eyes and then checked both hands. He shook his head sadly, bending down to look into the young child’s eyes. Immediately he said, “Group A top priority. Have a nurse re-apply a tourniquet. She’s been seriously injured, and both appear to be in the advanced stages of infection. We need to remove them both from the general population, stat. Take them to that room there.” “Come with me Darlin,” Candy said to the woman who stared blankly ahead. She then got behind her and began gently moving her and the child toward the other room. Dixon let out a low growl and remained a discrete distance from the woman and her child. Eve stuck to Candy like a lost puppy.
    Eve waved her hand in front of her nose, clapp ing a hand over her mouth to prevent herself from chucking again. “The smell. It’s them,” she whispered to Candy. It was a combination of body odor, vomit and something much worse she couldn’t quite put her finger on but that if pressed would describe only as the smell of death itself. They put the woman and child into the room, just as three of the nurses showed up to help.
    The visibly ill were not hard to find. It seemed that around twenty five percent had a scratch or a bite, boils or fever. And the sicker they were, the worse they smelled. Dixon growled and his hackles went up whenever they got close to an obviously infected person. He also seemed to growl at a lot of people that didn’t appear to be sick. Maybe this giant dog was a little freaked out too, Eve thought.
    “What if the doctor’s right that all the sick ones turn into those things?” Eve whispered in Candy’s ear.
    Candy led them to the doctor who was examining a patient in the midst of the chaos. “We put all the sick ones we could find in the other room.”
    “Very good.”
    A muffled scream sounded to their left.
    “What’s happening in there?” Dennis pointed through the glass into the Group A top priority sick room , where they were separating the bitten, scratched, and visibly sick patients from the general population.
    Two nurses had been tending to the woman with the arm ripped off and the sick child. From the other side of the glass, they could see that a small animal had latched onto the neck of one of the two female nurses with its teeth. A closer look revealed that it was the young child of the injured mother. The other nurse and several by standers were frantically trying to get it off. The mother seemed to be unaware of anything around her. A well -intentioned male bystander yanked on the feet of the toddler, dislodging it from the nurse’s throat, suddenly releasing a torrent of blood from the neck of the nurse. The nurse collapsed in a puddle of her own blood. There were screams, and people inside began rushing to get out of the room back into the general population, but the door was locked.
    “This is bad,” Dennis said.
    “We have to help them. Get them out,” Candy said, raising her pistol and looking to Dennis and Eve for support. “We have to unlock that door or they’ll all die.” Candy pushed toward the door, gun in one hand, with the other hand pulling Eve, who held Dixon on the leash. As Candy reached for the handle to unlock it, blood spattered the door and glass in a wave. People were screaming inside.
    Dennis grabbed her wrist. “Don’t.