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prologue: the end of the anthropocene

tw(s) this chapter relies on me using my covid experience to describe the disease that causes the zombie outbreak. also, blood, drug use, & minor character death.

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Melody Dixon was months shy of fifteen when she realized just what an addiction could do to the person who suffered from it.

Her father's eldest son, Merle, who left a while before she was born and hadn't come back since, called home for the first time in fifteen years to beg for cash. He'd picked up walking pneumonia while sleeping on a friend's floor two towns over from their quaint little Sedalia and didn't have enough money left for the prescription he was given. Will had demanded that Melody not touch the receiver, the two of them standing in tense silence as the brother she'd only ever heard of in stories rambled on after the tone, and insisted that, since he had thought that Merle was nothing more than a stain upon his lineage ever since Merle ran from the nest and right into the arms of a skinhead gang, Merle could take care of himself. When Daryl, whom had been raised (for lack of a better word) by their brother, came home a day later, though, and heard about it from Melody, he jumped on the opportunity to save his beloved brother and dragged Melody with him.

She missed three days of school for the ensuing manhunt. When they finally found him, he was curled up on the floor of a drug den, purple in the face and wheezing as he pissed his pants from the effort it took to not pass out. He'd spent his last twenty bucks on a bag of meth, and would have died there, surrounded by unfriendly faces and in a puddle of his own waste, if they hadn't dragged him to the nearest hospital.

That memory was the only thing in her head as she washed lather from the dry, aching skin of her hands and watched it circle the drain.

Four hours into her third double of the week, Melody had been dragged out of a nap that was fifteen minutes too short by the loud, incessant buzzing of her pager. Quarantining had made people bored, and bored people did stupid things, and, thus, a meth lab explosion just outside of town had placed half a dozen injured, terrified, drug addicted young adults amidst the flu patients that had taken over their emergency room. And, because Sedalia General hadn't had a big enough staff before a third of their doctors and nurses got sent home, that meant that there was no rest for anyone, not even a nurse who had been on her feet for thirteen hours straight.

The door opened with a bang and startled her enough for her to resume washing her hands.

"What the hell happened?" Pamela, one of the only other scrub nurses on call (and one of Melody's only friends in the hospital), asked as she, with the bump of her hip, turned on the faucet beside Melody's.

"Meth lab went up in flames." Melody sighed. She turned off her own water and grabbed one of the towel packs. "Two DOAs, three abdominal injuries, one blast lung, a few broken bones, and every last one of them have burns that'll need debridement."

Pam sucked air between her teeth, the sound muffled behind her mask. "Shit."

Melody nodded tiredly.

Shit, indeed.

The past weeks had passed her by in a nauseating blur. What had once been just a few reports of a new (and particularly dangerous) strain of the flu on the news became something that spiraled so far out of their control; she'd gone from assisting during a few surgeries a week to, after a CDC sponsored crash course in critical care support, doing the job of four nurses at once. There were officially more sick people in the building than there were not—— they were in rooms, and halls, and any empty space that the staff had converted into wards, hooked up to machines that were keeping them alive or staring into space as they struggled to breathe. Every time she closed her eyes, now, she saw the faces of every person that she'd watched die. Faces that she knew, faces that she didn't. Faces on bodies that got whisked away, disposed of per CDC guidelines. Faces that were replaced by new ones just as fast as they were gone.

(Melody thought that she'd given up on hope a long time ago. But, now, she was sure that however much of it still dwindled within her was going, too, and it terrified her.)

"——When was the last time you actually slept?"

Melody snapped back to attention. Despite missing most of what Pamela was saying, she shrugged in response.

"I don't know." She said as she put her gown and gloves on. "I was taking a nap when I got paged to the ER, but I don't remember if I was asleep or not. Is that possible? To remember?"

Pamela was looking at her strangely when she turned to her, blue eyes narrowed and eyebrows pinched together behind the goggles they wore to surgery. Melody tried a smile, even if it wasn't visible because of her mask, and stepped backwards until she was through the door that led into the operating room.

The surgery itself was, in theory, simple. Melody, who had never had the drive nor the money to attend medical school, was sure that she'd seen it so many times she could do it in her sleep. (It, the repair of an abdominal injury, was one of the things they saw most of all. More serious cases got sent away, flown out via helicopter to neighboring hospitals more equipped to handle them, but bullet wounds and penetrating wounds and various farm-related injuries were practically their specialty.)

But that surgery, the oh-so simple surgery that should've—— could've, in a better world—— gone off without a hitch, was ended abruptly when, just as the trauma surgeon on staff found the source of the bleeding, the patient had a stroke and could not be resuscitated.

It was eerily silent after they unplugged the monitor, but Melody could still hear the flatline ring in her ears as the surgeon, after calling time of death, stormed out and into the scrub room. No words were exchanged in his absence. Relying on the kind of silent communication that could only come from seeing each other more than they saw their families, Pamela started to detach the machines from the body as Melody gathered all the various instruments that were used.

She turned to dump the tools into a bowl of water so they could be taken away, cleaned, and sterilized. Her back was turned for only a moment, for less than a minute, when Pamela screamed.

The sound cut through the silence like a hot knife. Melody whipped back around to see what was wrong and her heart jumped to her throat as she saw something that she wasn't sure she'd ever thought she'd see. Something out of nightmares.

Something improbable. Impossible.

She'd heard of extreme cases of cadaveric spasm. Of bodies that sat up in crematory ovens and rolled off beds.

And she was intimately aware of what the human teeth could do. She'd seen it firsthand, had once bitten her brother so hard during a fight that her mouth filled with blood.

But never had she heard of a body sitting up to grab a person and bite them.

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NOTES:

word count — 1231

this was also partly inspired by z nation. their portrayal of the world falling apart was more fun than what fear the walking dead had, so...

comments and votes are appreciated!