Work Text:
Burn
by LastScorpion
for fkficfest 2016
Prompt: from MelissaTreglia aka gnosticdiva
Character: Nick
Crossover Fandom: any
Literary Prompt:
My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends
It gives a lovely light!
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1920)
020.9-020.9-020.9-020.9
Nick didn't really notice the beginning of the end of the world.
He had made for himself a little world, full of art and music. ("Retreat," LaCroix had said, with scorn. But LaCroix, though Nick didn't know it at the time, had funded many of the gallery exhibitions, and had singlehandedly resurrected classical music station KFAC for his beloved but inapt son.)
Nick didn't watch TV, didn't listen to the news on the radio, didn't use the internet. (Failing to keep up with modern times is often the first sign of incipient death in vampires.)
He set and rose as the sun rose and set, dressed perfectly, had an anonymous (very discreet!) service deliver bottled animal blood, canvas, and paints. He could go months at a time never setting eyes on a living (or unliving) soul.
(Natalie had been gone for two decades and change. It was longer since he'd spoken with Janette, though he could feel her if he thought to try. Schanke had died in fire even earlier than that.
LaCroix had things to do.)
020.9-020.9-020.9-020.9
"We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming with an urgent request from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health."
020.9-020.9-020.9-020.9
Nick's experience in the medical field had been years (decades, centuries) ago, but he quickly put together some documentation showing that "Nick Ritter", investment banker & supporter of the fine arts, had spent three years as a paramedic in his early twenties, and hurried through the dark streets to his nearest County Hospital, answering the call for volunteers to help against the plague. He had to produce his papers and submit to a cursory flashlight-powered inspection from National Guardsmen three times along the way.
020.9-020.9-020.9-020.9
Nick found himself in a conference room with a double-handful of ex-nurses, two other former paramedics, and a retired Navy corpsman. Their orientation lecture was disturbing, and disturbingly short. In addition to standard hospital infection control protocols, they were to use restraints on any patient suspected of suffering from the new disease. They were to discontinue resuscitation efforts, including CPR, if any patient did not show clear signs of improvement within 60 seconds. They were to transport any such patients immediately to the secured area in the basement, which was Authorized Personnel Only. The volunteers were told that this information was only precautionary for them; they were expected to be taking some of the load of regular patients with less-serious health issues, freeing up the experts to deal with the crisis.
They were issued gowns, masks, and gloves, and sent out into the hospital to help. And that's when Nick began to realize that the world was ending.
020.9-020.9-020.9-020.9
Since he'd started volunteering at the hospital, Nick had only been home once. He was so swamped with work, that the sun kept rising before he was ready for it. He'd end up spending the day inside the hospital - slumped in a corner of the breakroom at first, but as the epidemic became more and more widespread, he spent more and more of his days working as well, just doing his best to stay away from the building's few windows.
The idea that the volunteers were not to deal directly with the victims of the outbreak fell by the wayside almost immediately. Nick's superhuman strength came into play more than once, to restrain the raving, snapping, unthinking creatures that the illness's victims soon became.
Nick noticed, uneasily, that healthcare personnel who were injured while struggling with the patients were hustled away by Security, and never seen again. He was pretty sure he wasn't the only one of the volunteers who noticed.
He also wasn't the only one of the volunteers who ended up basically living full-time at the hospital. The government's travel restrictions, even within the city, made it very difficult for people to go home and then return. They started to stick together, like a team, like a family, within and separate from the wider community of the regular hospital personnel, who also were, more and more, living on the premises.
020.9-020.9-020.9-020.9
Petty Officer Hickey was the leader of the volunteers. He made sure they all got food and a chance to wash and to sleep, since the County Hospital employees lacked the time (or the will) to really look after their volunteers. Nobody could blame them; the situation was horrible and becoming worse. Hickey had volunteered to help at the hospital as soon as they'd closed down the schools; he'd been a high school teacher for three years, ever since retiring from the Navy at the age of 37.
He'd probably been learning to drive the year that Natalie died.
Hickey and Nick were the two of the volunteers to manhandle the ill. Nick was able to keep the unnatural nature of his physical strength concealed, but only because everybody was so distracted, so busy, so overwhelmed. He managed to keep all the members of his little team free of potentially-infected bites or scratches.
(The first time a manic patient managed to break Nick's skin, he hid the bloodless wound from all the mortals. He hadn't fed in days, which probably explained how he'd been so graceless as to take a hit, but it also made the injury far easier to hide. He slipped away from the people who knew him, and went and lurked within arm's-reach of a sunny outer window on the little-used top floor of the hospital, braced and ready to immolate himself if he felt himself going mad, until the wound had completely healed. After that, Nick made sure to sneak into the blood bank at least once nightly, to steal the bags that the hospital's suspension of almost all resuscitation attempts had left to expire in their coolers.)
When the city's power went out, Hickey and Nick were the ones who actually got the hospital's generator working.
020.9-020.9-020.9-020.9
If Hickey was the brains of their little operation, and Nick (surreptitiously) the brawn, then the heart was Mrs. Garson, who had been a pediatric nurse for forty-five years, then traveled the world with her husband for five, and was dedicating her widowhood to volunteering to help wherever she could. She'd started out with her local elementary school and the animal shelter, before the epidemic had begun, but then, of course, she came to work at the hospital.
Where Hickey ran interference for the volunteers, making sure their supervisors couldn't dragoon them into working far too many hours at a stretch, Mrs. Garson gently tutted them out of driving themselves to exhaustion. Even Nick was subject to her cajoling.
And it was Nick who firmly coaxed Mrs. Garson herself into taking at least the minimum required amount of rest and food breaks. (Sometimes he had to use vampiric mind control, a little.)
020.9-020.9-020.9-020.9
Janey was far too young to die. She'd come in through the hospital's emergency room entrance; she had a compound fracture of the leg, earned while fleeing from "zombies." She was fifteen. She had been at a Walmart one afternoon, stocking up on bottled water and other staples for her family.
Apparently, at least one person in the large store had suddenly succumbed to the new disease, and run mad. The other shoppers had panicked, and Janey had been trampled. Good Samaritans had scooped her up and gotten her out of the stampede, and away from the infected, and safely to the hospital.
Since she had no bite wounds, she was left in the care of the volunteers. Nick mostly saw her at night, of course, but he gathered from the chitchat among the others that her brother and her mom came to visit her during the days.
Mrs. Garson was injecting the IV port with antibiotics (still readily available at this hospital, though they'd heard rumors that other places were having supply issues), and Nick was checking the traction on Janey's leg one evening. The girl was a little restless, feverish, and Mrs. Garson had been talking about sponging her down, since the Tylenol didn't seem to be doing quite enough. Suddenly Janey went into a fit or seizure; she stiffened and began to shake all over, and her eyes rolled back in her head. Mrs. Garson automatically moved to hold the girl's shoulders, but Nick held her back, well out of arm's reach.
Before their horrified eyes, Janey gradually went completely still. Nick could tell she'd stopped breathing. He stopped Mrs. Garson, again, from going to her.
And then, Janey began to move again. Her clouded eyes opened; her head swiveled to look at them, and she lunged towards them, tangled in the traction equipment and IV. She fell to the floor, where she struggled and writhed towards them, snapping her teeth and groaning.
Nick hauled Mrs. Garson out the door & slammed it.
"She hadn't been bitten!" Mrs. Garson gasped. "I swear she hadn't been bitten! Or even scratched!"
"The wound on her leg," Nick began.
"The infected people didn't touch it! Janey and the boys who brought her in all agreed on that." She breathed hard for a moment, as what remained of Janey began awkwardly pounding on the bottom of the door behind them. "Oh, God. Oh, my God. That means it's..."
"Airborne," Nick finished for her.
"With a really long latency period," Mrs. Garson added miserably
020.9-020.9-020.9-020.9
Of course they had to inform the hospital administrators.
The next night, the bombers came.
For five days and nights, the flame and smoke that devoured Los Angeles made it impossible to tell day from night.
Nick barely escaped with his unlife, and did not manage to save even one single living soul.
The volunteers and nurses that he'd taken charge of when he heard the bombs drop outside had not even survived to leave the hospital with him. Most were brutally torn apart by zombies inside the building. Many of those who managed to reach the roof with him were picked off by snipers in military helicopters. All the rest died of smoke inhalation or burns as they tried to get back to the ground floor of the building.
As he flew away over the burning city, it became clear that hundreds of thousands of zombies had somehow survived.
Beverly Hills was burned completely to the ground. Not one stone still sat upon another where LaCroix's mansion had stood. (But scattered, partially-burned zombies roamed the desolate landscape.)
He could no longer feel Janette or LaCroix in his mind. He tried to hope they had fled, and were far out of range.
For weeks he searched the remains of the city for surviving humans, but he found none.
Zombies attacked him one day, as he tried to sleep under a partially-collapsed freeway overpass. During the subsequent battle, he made the horrifying discovery that he could actually feed on and derive nourishment from their noisome fluids.
When their remains all lay still around him, filling his filthy, cramped, concrete lair with their stench, Nick came very close to walking out into the sunlight.
He couldn't do it, though. He had no right to escape the Hell that the world had become.
When the sun set he took to the air and headed out into the dry, brown hills, searching for somebody, anybody, that he might still be able to help.
The End
crossover fandoms: Walking Dead, Fear the Walking Dead
A million thanks to Conflagrationette for the beta!
Word Count = 1875