Tragic Coincidence | Daryl Dixon

Chapter one

My eyelids drooped heavily as I had just finished my third shift in a row at the hospital. My dark blue scrubs were lightly tinted a mixture of blood from patients and my own sweat. I hung up my white lab coat in my locker before sinking down onto a bench in the hospital break room. Something odd has been going on the past couple of days and we were getting more and more patients by the hour. People were coming in crying hysterically covered in blood, but we could never find any trauma or abrasions on most of them...others were admitted to the psych ward for observation after we felt we could not help them.

Today though I felt in my gut that something was wrong...policemen and fire fighters were stationed outside of the emergency room electric doors, and this morning most entrances were closed off except for one. Seven of my co-workers had called out with some form of sickness going around, leaving me even more exhausted than normal. I was running on minimum sleep, mostly random hours I got in the on call room. But performing five surgery's and losing six patients in the ER today has really took its toll on me.

But just as I felt my body start to drift away into slumber, a high pitched scream in the hallway caused me to fall to the ground. Jumping up quickly I ran out to the hallway on instinct to help with whatever was happening. I was shoved the second I stepped foot out of the door, and slammed hard into the wall. People were running around in hysterics, and i saw several bodies lying down the hallway. 

Sarah a nurse that had been working with me for the past twenty-four hours was jogging down the hallway in my direction, but she looked sickly.... 

"Sarah! What is going on?!?" I shouted to her over the chaos of the hospital. She turned her attention to me when she was a few feet away, and that's when I knew that something awful was going on...Her normally bright blue eyes that were similar to the color of my own were glazed over and tinted with grey, and I could see that her scrubs were torn in places, with blood smeared on her hands and lining her mouth.

She was growling at me...like an actual animalistic growl that was simply inhuman...the fact that she was charging at me like a rhino was what frightened me the most. When she reached me I could smell death on her...and being a doctor I sadly knew exactly what that smelled like. She wrapped her hands around my shoulders and began snapping her teeth at me as if trying to feed. 

I didn't know what to do, but something deep in my gut was telling me what I needed to....I reached into my pants pocket and grabbed the extra scalpel I had kept in there for trauma situations and stabbed her in the stomach. But nothing fazed her...I had punctured her intestines along with her lungs...this should have had her on the ground, but still she kept at it trying to tear the flesh of my bones. Her hands were digging even farther into my shoulders, causing me to wince in pain. I pulled my scalpel back out and found enough room to dig it right into her eye socket...and that was when she quit snapping and clawing at me, and fell to the floor. 

I shivered as tears ran down my face,realizing I had just killed one of my dear friends and co-workers...I felt myself sinking to my knees and holding her tiny frame in my arms, rocking her gently wondering what went wrong. I never saw this coming...I was extremely dedicated to my work, did ground breaking work in the labs for diseases, and still I never saw this coming...I looked up and saw horrible things....A patient of mine was on the ground eating the insides of another nurse...family members were freaking out trying to reach stairways and elevators.....and i was just lost and alone.

"Doc you gotta get out of here!" A southern voice called out. I looked up to see one of my patients friends, a deputy at the sheriffs stations yelling at me from a ways down the hall. I saw he was pointing to some soldiers up ahead who were putting bullets into sickly people...and the healthy. My body shook as I thought for sure today was my day to die...but as the soldiers began to make there way in my direction, I layed Sarah's cold lifeless body on top of my own...hiding myself behind her.

I held my breath and remained completely still as a man in a mask began prodding at Sarah's body, and when they saw she was completely dead they ran in the other direction. I gasped for air and shoved her off of me when I knew they were farther away from me. Looking behind me I saw one of the infected walking around looking for food, when he spotted the people that were previously shot down, and he headed in my direction. Quickly and quietly I made my way back into the empty break room....

I shot up gasping for air as the recurring nightmare I had night after night came back to me.... The nightmare of when the world went to hell and i lost everything I knew...Seven months ago was when the virus broke out at Macon General Hospital and i knew nothing would ever be the same... And it wasn't just Macon as I had originally thought...I was now in Atlanta, huddled up in a tree and the place was just as shitty...

I made the mistake of believing that a refuge center really was in Atlanta...boy was I wrong. The second I smelled the dying flesh I knew to turn around, unfortunately for me that was where my car ran out of gas, and i started huffing it on foot. My supplies were dwindling, but living on your own in the woods for this long has taught you to use any means to survive. I had a recurve bow I had gotten from a sports store a few towns back, and bunch of hunting knives...I have even become a pretty good shot, but squirrels and rabbits was the most I have gotten lately, and my stomach was growling for something more.

In a weird way, it was better to know I had no one I loved being torn apart by the infected...My parents died in a car crash when I was just a baby, leaving me to be raised by my uncle, who coincidentally was a doctor as well....but he died unfortunately the night of my med school graduation almost ten years ago...cars and my family don't mix, and I was happy in some strange way that death by car wasn't in the cards for me. Being so engrossed by my work never even left me time for much of a social life, and i was no thankful for that...I was close to no one...So I had to watch no one I loved die..

I untied the ropes that held me in place, I was a bit of a roller in my sleep...But since the world went to shit I seemed to rarely sleep at all. I grabbed my bag that was hanging on a branch in the tree next to me and slid the ropes inside. I took a few nibbles of the beef jerky I had leftover from my run into a gas station last week and a gulp of water. Throwing my hair back up into a messy bun and adjusting the three knives I had hidden in my boots and one strapped to my belt I hopped up gently, crouching down gently to check out my surroundings.

I saw one lone infected man standing a few feet next to my sleeping tree, looking around aimlessly. I pulled an arrow back in my bow, lined up my sights and let it go...piercing it through its skull with a soft crunch. I shook my head, as killing these things still hasn't gotten any easier, but its kill of be killed these days.

I leaped from my tree and remained crouched on the ground, in fear of any unsuspecting lurkers that might pop out at me. When I saw I was alone I stood up and started walking in the direction of the south. I had no main goal of where I was going these days, other then trying to get as south as possible...the more water the better in my opinion.

It felt like I had been walking for hours when some loud sounds caught my attention. it sounded so similar to a horse. A horse? why would a horse be wandering around in the woods, and how it hadn't been eaten yet was a different question. I started jogging in that general direction before hearing the thumping sounds of an animal running and the grunts of a human.

At this point I was desperate for normal human interaction, and i wished I would have valued people more before the world ended. I quickened my pace and smiled when I ran across some fresh water. I bent down and generously gulped down hand fulls of water and refilled my water bottle. I ran some through my dirty hair and down my face.

But my joy was short lived as groaning from across the water had pulled me to attention. My bow was ready to shoot at any second, but as i walked closer to the person in the water i released the tension and dropped it to my side. This man was alive...and he was badly hurt...and i couldn't let the first non cannibal person I see in months die...