ZOMBIE lost & found

13: It Followed Me Home

Fred crept back into the lost and found rooms. He was dropping the empty syringe into the burn bucket when a loud voice caught him completely by surprise.

"Fred, you idiot," Jenny said.

With a start, Fred jerked back and accidentally flung the five-gallon burn bucket off the table. The slotted top popped off, strewing mucous-soak gauze pads, used cotton buds, and hydration pump parts across the floor. All the things that were meant to be taken out to the incinerator daily, Fred noted. 

I should have realized someone was here, that's why the lights were on. "You should empty that thing more often," Fred snapped. "And I know we have a rather informal chain of command going on here, but I think addressing me by my first name is lax enough without bringing obsolete Binet classifications into it."

Jenny just shook her head. "Getting loquacious is your tell," she said.

So, which of my questionable activities is she on to? "Why don't you tell me what I'm doing that is so foolish?"

"I'll give you my top three, and you—you cagey bastard—can tell me which ones I missed. Okay?"

Fred grimaced and shrugged. He was still tired from a long trek across overgrown farmland and being half-baked in the sun.

Jenny held up three fingers. "Let's count upwards to the most egregious idiocy. At number three there is the paranoid teen conspiracy theorist with a baseball bat guarding the front door. Guarding you from... what, I do not know. But somehow you have said something to those addled fools that made them decide you are the mutie messiah."

"What?" Fred took one step towards the door, but Jenny held up a hand.

"Oh, that can wait. I'm only just getting started. Second... and it's not that I don't understand falling for strays. I've already got eleven dogs but if I see a little puppy cowering in the gutter, you know I have to stop and pick it up. And when I look into its big brown eyes... Well. Shit. I've got another dog. The last one was—"

"I hate to interrupt you mid-touching-anecdote, Jen, but what the fuck are you talking about?"

"The hu..."—Jenny dropped her strident voice suddenly to a whisper—"human in the storeroom, Dr. Dipshit."

"Oh." Shit. "Wait, you ranked that number two? Then what the hell is number one?"

"Oh, that." Jenny folder her armed and enjoyed stringing the moment out a bit longer. "Mrs. Bitcham. She took you up on her offer."

"Who?"

"The potato-nosed woman on the hospital benevolence board. She got you even worse than fired."

"Oh. Fuck. Wat's worse than fired?"

"You know the nurse who got mysteriously put through a wood-chipper on the edge of the reservation up north?"

"Didn't know; don't care."

Jenny rolled her eyes. "Well, congratulations. You're her replacement."

Fred's over-burdened brain—never very good at big picture issues—was not keeping up. "In the wood chipper?" he asked, sounding almost hopeful.

"As the reservation medic. Start studying up on your humie herd health and invest in an anti-stab vest. You're going to the west, young man."

"Oh, fuck." And now I'll really have to accelerate my schedule even further if that's something I ever plan to do again.

Jenny just shook her head and started to unpack the autoclave. The muted clanked of the instruments the only sound in the large room.

"North-east, technically. And you don't seem that upset about it," Fred said grumpily. He'd never got much of a handle on Jenny's character and its corresponding mercurial moods.

"Why should I be upset? I just got promoted." Jenny started to whistle as she prepared the trays for the day's scheduled appointments.

Fred sat down carefully on the old wooden chair next to the consultation table. His conscious mind floated like a dead goldfish in a toilet bowl. He couldn't come up with any kind of plan, not even a bad one. His thoughts barely moved at all for a few minutes. Only self-pity got them to stir back into sluggish activity.

I am uniquely unqualified to be a general practitioner for a herd of feral humans. Fred had gone straight into a surgery residency and never had to deal with the tiresome parade of routine snot and sciatica, even before the outbreak. And his purely theoretical knowledge of family practice was now almost sixty years old and as faded as his favorite lab rat, Mrs. MacAddams-Smith.

A muffled squabble broke out, from outside their door.

"If you're promoted, that's your problem," Fred said nodding towards the comotion.

"Not yet, it isn't." She didn't even look up.

"One of us has to clean up this crap on the floor. And one of us has to see what that is about," he countered.

Jenny went and got the mop and bucket.

"Well. Thanks so much for your support."

Jenny gave him a frank and appraising glare. "You created both messes. You should be thankful I am willing to help you at all."

"Ugh." Fred wrenched himself to his feet. At the receiving door, he found a large young lady with a nose-ring and a bat, confronting a squat gentleman who either had a very bad squint or was missing an eyelid.

"I has an appointment," the man spat. He waved a crumpled piece of typewritten paper.

The woman turned to him. She looked him up and down and gave a toothy smile. "You the doc?"

"That's me."

"He okay?"

"If they've got an appointment form they're okay." 

She rested the large bat cheerfully on her shoulder. "Okie-dokie. Well, you just holler if you have any kinda grief an' I'll sort the heck out of it."

"Right." Fred reached out his hand for the form. I guess there has been a change of guard.

The man holding the form had yellowing-white flyaway hair and the face of a bullfrog. He was dressed in layers of mismatched tweedy-plaidy fabrics. "Ah'm looking for my finger," the man said. He made a gesture that would have been 'the finger' if he had one.

"Well, you wouldn't want to be without that these days," Fred said.

The man heartily agreed.