Iatrophobia

Prologue

The hallways were white. They were long, clean, and in the rooms the patients were sitting in bed being treated. Were. Now, the hallways are smeared with blood, entrails, and... things which I can't even identify, I don't even think are legal, and it seems as if they have grown in length. Most of the rooms are empty, the bed sheets ripped to shreds and no one knows where the mattresses are. The "no one" in the story is me, Medicina Iatro, and my sister, Althea Iatro, nurses at GCMH. We used to hate each other, now we're forced to fight together. You might be wondering, why are we fighting? The answer is simple. DDFXXN-112 virus, or as I'd like to call it, living hell. The damned parasite gets into the mind, sucks away all known life in the host and takes it as its own. And believe me, they are ferocious, life taking creatures. Their only instinct is to eat, destroy, and kill. They killed my parents before my eyes. I saw them suffer through the side effects. That happened about a week ago. Now, Althea and I are going to escape this place. The only thing though is that we don't know how. Imagine being locked inside a hospital, a large one, but inside there's a whole zombie apocalypse. That's our situation. We have almost been killed, Althea nearly had her arm bitten off an hour ago. Now it's broken, and we're hiding in a safe zone. Althea is quietly crying in pain, grabbing my wrist for comfort and nearly cutting off my circulation.

"You're gonna kill me," I say to her. She has tears running down her face, blood and dirt mixing with them and getting into cuts on her cheek, possibly causing infections. I put a warm, wet wash cloth on the cuts, and trying to numb the pain with anesthesia. She didn't seem to be knocking out, though. It must be old, I thought. We were in the old storage room in the basement, about three hundred years old worth of stuff. Heaven knows how old the material I'm giving her is. Her mouth starts to bleed, from biting down on her cheeks and possibly tongue. "If you're gonna bite on your tongue, you'll just give yourself more pain." I wash off her face and examine her arm. It's broken, alright. I grab an empty cardboard box and stabilize it. She starts to squeal, nearly squeezing my arm flat. I release myself from her grip and give her some bubble wrap. I have never wrapped a broken arm. I don't usually do this sort of stuff, I just gave regular family checkups to regular families. There are no books around which say how to deal with this. I start to have a panic attack, but I just feel her arm. It's a simple wrist snap, but Althea does NOT deal with pain well. Sensitive, you know? I move the two bones around. It feels weird, I can feel the veins and, I think it's muscle, move next to them. When they get into place, I snatch some bandages and tightly wrap the wrist. Althea has finally calmed down, and falls asleep. I grab some old, dusty, worn out pillows, and place them under her head. I cover her with a thin bed sheet, and before I know it, I fall asleep too.

Every time I fall asleep, I whisper to myself.

"God help us."

--End of Prologue