Status: A work in progress!!
Clockwork
Chapter 2
10 Years Later
I sat up as my alarm went off and I got up from the sterilized room that I shared with most of the other doctors at the hospital.
It wasn’t always this way, but this was our first winter that I was spending in a quarantined room with the only chance of leaving being in a big bubble suit that filtered all of the germs out of the air before we breathed it. Of course, we couldn’t quarantine the entire world from this plague. No, there were too many deaths that happened because of this plague already.
It all started in August when suddenly entire towns were being massacred. It started with one single man, who walked around as if he were zombified. Unfortunately, it was nothing as apocalyptic as a zombie revolution; no, it was simply a plague disease that made the body seem like the undead. To make matters worse, it spread like a wildfire. Whole towns of thousands and thousands of people were gone in a matter of minutes. Skin peeled off to bone in big flakes, and the body physically ate itself from the inside out. It was definitely not a pretty sight – and even worse the pain of knowing that there was nothing we could do.
A cure? It didn’t exist. It probably never would exist. Everything that our vaccine engineers had tried didn’t work – in fact, it mostly made everything just plain worse. The best we could do was make those who were infected as comfortable as possible and save as many of the survivors as possible. The only problem with the second option was that the authority in the hospital didn’t want to add anyone into the quarantined area that might be carrying the infection.
I was spending my December birthday in the depths of the hospital, put to work on patients that we knew were never going to last. I hadn’t been outside in so long; I heard there was quite the layer of snow on the ground, but I hadn’t been out to see it. Winter had always been my favorite time of year, but it seemed to be making the plague worse. Thousands of people were rushing into the hospital each day.
~~~
The worst part about all of it was Danny. As far as I knew, he was just fine. No, it was his young son that I saw in my rounds around the hospital every day. Little Mikey O’Brien was just nine years old; the youngest of my patients, because I honestly refused to stand by and watch while a kid was eaten away by the plague.
Mikey was probably the one that affected me the most when I made my rounds. He looked so much like Danny: the same dark hair and light blue eyes. The same expression invaded his eyes. He didn’t know how well I once knew his father – nor did his blonde mother (the same blonde who worked at the coffee shop) but I certainly remembered. I had yet to see his father visit, but I couldn’t exactly say that I was minding that.
As I made my rounds, I wished there was something better I could do. I wanted nothing more than to be able to cure people from this horrid disease; that is why I had chosen to become a doctor anyway, right?
If only there was some way to stop this plague, but it would take magic to do that…
I sat up as my alarm went off and I got up from the sterilized room that I shared with most of the other doctors at the hospital.
It wasn’t always this way, but this was our first winter that I was spending in a quarantined room with the only chance of leaving being in a big bubble suit that filtered all of the germs out of the air before we breathed it. Of course, we couldn’t quarantine the entire world from this plague. No, there were too many deaths that happened because of this plague already.
It all started in August when suddenly entire towns were being massacred. It started with one single man, who walked around as if he were zombified. Unfortunately, it was nothing as apocalyptic as a zombie revolution; no, it was simply a plague disease that made the body seem like the undead. To make matters worse, it spread like a wildfire. Whole towns of thousands and thousands of people were gone in a matter of minutes. Skin peeled off to bone in big flakes, and the body physically ate itself from the inside out. It was definitely not a pretty sight – and even worse the pain of knowing that there was nothing we could do.
A cure? It didn’t exist. It probably never would exist. Everything that our vaccine engineers had tried didn’t work – in fact, it mostly made everything just plain worse. The best we could do was make those who were infected as comfortable as possible and save as many of the survivors as possible. The only problem with the second option was that the authority in the hospital didn’t want to add anyone into the quarantined area that might be carrying the infection.
I was spending my December birthday in the depths of the hospital, put to work on patients that we knew were never going to last. I hadn’t been outside in so long; I heard there was quite the layer of snow on the ground, but I hadn’t been out to see it. Winter had always been my favorite time of year, but it seemed to be making the plague worse. Thousands of people were rushing into the hospital each day.
~~~
The worst part about all of it was Danny. As far as I knew, he was just fine. No, it was his young son that I saw in my rounds around the hospital every day. Little Mikey O’Brien was just nine years old; the youngest of my patients, because I honestly refused to stand by and watch while a kid was eaten away by the plague.
Mikey was probably the one that affected me the most when I made my rounds. He looked so much like Danny: the same dark hair and light blue eyes. The same expression invaded his eyes. He didn’t know how well I once knew his father – nor did his blonde mother (the same blonde who worked at the coffee shop) but I certainly remembered. I had yet to see his father visit, but I couldn’t exactly say that I was minding that.
As I made my rounds, I wished there was something better I could do. I wanted nothing more than to be able to cure people from this horrid disease; that is why I had chosen to become a doctor anyway, right?
If only there was some way to stop this plague, but it would take magic to do that…
♠ ♠ ♠
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