Our Wrong Choice

Riley

It is May 17, 2018. It is a bright sunny and cheerful summer day. Riley Nichole Johnson's life is just about as perfect as she could ever hope it will be. She just had her twenty-fifth birthday on the eighteenth of May. She is already two and a half years into her residency at Mercy Children's Hospital in her home town of Westport, Indiana. Despite a few shortcomings, she is well on her way to accomplishing her childhood dreams of being a pediatrics oncology nurse. But, for the time being, she is working in the trauma bay in the emergency department of Mercy Children's as a trauma nurse. She was told that she would have to start out in the trauma bay and work her way up if her heart was set on being a pediatrics oncology nurse. After being in the trauma bay for a little over a year, she had seen a lot of blood and gore. But Riley is a strong young woman. Since she was eight years old, she knew that she was cut out for some type of job in the nursing field.

A week after her eighth birthday, Riley was with her two younger brothers and her parents on the way to see her paternal grandparents who lived in Montgomery, Alabama. On the way there, they all witnessed a four car pile up on the interstate. When her dad pulled up on the scene of the crash, she saw her dad jump into action immediately. She saw him checking to make sure that everyone was okay. He came across a woman who was obviously pregnant and very close to her due date. As soon as he checked her vital signs, he did his best to try to calm her down because he knew that what she was going through wasn't good for her unborn baby. Luckily, everyone who was involved in the accident only suffered minor injuries. After leaving the accident, it was safe to say that Riley had made the decision to become a nurse. She was amazed at how quickly her dad, Richard Johnson, jumped into action. At that time, he was a medic in U.S. Army so he had quite a bit of extensive combat medical training. But Riley had never seen her dad move as quickly as he did that day when they came upon that multi-vehicle accident. Seeing how he helped all those people is what compelled Riley to go into the medical field during her junior year high school. Right after graduating from high school, she moved to Westport, Indiana, where she started her college education at the Westport College of Nursing and Medicine.

Riley loves children and when she thinks about where she wants to go in her life, her thoughts always turn to her work at the hospital and the children. But there are also many times a year that she thinks about marriage and, one day, having children of her own. Right now, she has just about everything in her life figured out. One day, she hopes to get married and she dreams of having children of her own one day. But she has not always been lucky enough to have a good relationship. She always thinks about marriage and having children of her own one day. But she always has to ask herself if she has what it will take to put her heart, and even worse, her own sanity out on a limb again if she's lucky enough to find a good man. The last time that she tried to find love, she got her heart broken into a million and one pieces. After the mess that had been made of her life with Brayden Schmearson, Riley swore off men for the rest of her life. The mess that Brayden had made of her life happened over a year and a half ago. But even though he hurt her terribly, that hasn't kept her from wanting a family of her own one day. Riley stopped seriously thinking about finding real after her heart was finally healed from the mess that Brayden made of it. Despite what Riley went through because of Brayden, she eventually started dating once again. Shortly after starting her residency, she met Jonathan Smithford. At first, she and Jonathan were just friends. Then, after a short three months, a romance between them started blossoming. Then, before she knew it, Jonathan asked her to move in with him. Riley told him to let her think about it. Then, after week later, she showed up on his doorstep with bags in hand.

Everything in Riley's life was going as planned. She had a firm grip on reality and she would have had the perfect life. But then, one day right out of the blue, all of that changed.That was the day that the dead started rising and walking the earth as if it was a normal everyday occurrence. When Cecilia Heightz, the female news anchor for channel eight came on the living room television and announced that there had been a seventeen car pile up on I-17 and there had been a mass of casualties, Riley knew that things were bad. She thought that they couldn't get any worse. But they did. Just as she thought things were about as bad as they could get, another news anchor for channel eight who was on-scene came on the television and announced that one of the victims in the crash, who was previously thought to have been deceased, had been seen walking around by several onlookers shortly after the accident. As soon as the words were out of the anchorman's and the words hit her, Riley thought to herself, This is surely just a sick prank that someone is playing. There's no way in hell that someone can just get up and walk around after being pronounced dead. Shit like this just doesn't happen. Come on people, get your heads out of the clouds here. This just can't really be happening. Is it!?! Seriously, this cannot be fucking happening right now!!! The whole thought of this is completely ridiculous.

Just then, her cellphone started vibrating in her jacket pocket, making her jump as if someone had poured ice cold water down the back of her shirt. She quickly extracted the phone from her pocket and answered it. But as soon as the person on the other end of the line started talking, she wished she hadn't. It was the head nurse at Mercy Children's Hospital asking if she could come back in. Just then, she knew beyond a shadow of doubt that the car pile up was a lot worse than she first thought, especially with the head nurse calling her at home only an hour after her residency shift had ended. Even though Riley knew things were going to be very hectic and stressful, she said she'd be right in.While Riley prepared to go back to the hospital, she couldn't stop herself from thinking about the terrible things she'd seen on her television just moments before and what that could mean for herself and everyone she knew and cared about.

Little did Riley know that things in her life were about to change very drastically. She had no idea what in the world was going on outside her living room door. After seeing the terrible things on her television and hearing what the news people were saying, she was very fearful of leaving the safety of the home she shares with Jonathan. But she knows whatever this thing is, it's really bad. She also knows that her medical training is going to come in handy, especially now, a hundred times over. She has now idea what she will encounter once she leaves the safety of her home. All that she knows is that she has to get to the hospital so that she can try and help as many people as she can.

As she drives to Mercy Children's, Riley has horrible of the things that she knows that she is going to witness once she enters the emergency department of the hospital. She has no way of knowing what she is going to encounter as she thinks about the things she saw and heard on her television from the news reporters. She has no idea what she is walking into or how bad the situation will be in the hospital. She wonders to herself, Will the mess on the interstate affect the other patients who are already in the hospital?