By the next morning, I'd convinced myself that the previous night's meeting had been a vivid hallucination, brought on by an overworked mind and a pronounced lack of sleep. When I awoke, I still felt like crap. I lifted my cat off my chest, and groggily headed for the shower. The morning passed uneventfully, though it might have been eventful and I was just too tired to give half a damn. As far as I knew, nothing important occurred, though the cat, Django, did cough up a peculiarly-shaped hairball. All I really remember is studiously ignoring the telephone, checking my pager far too many times in case the hospital decided to call me in, and cooking things I had no intention of actually eating.
Eventually, I wound up sitting on the couch, where Django jumped onto my lap and promptly fell asleep; he was an old bugger, so he wasn't liable to wake any time soon. That said, I decided I wouldn't be leaving the couch for a while. I turned the television on, but there was nothing new. The news reporter looked far too happy, so I switched to a different station. Apparently, there were some strange astrological phenomena, and the panel of experts (including the well-known but not very bright celebrity singer) was baffled as to why. People all across the country were suffering from mysterious ailments with no apparent sources - I knew this already, as I was treating some of these folks - and there were record numbers of traumatic accidents requiring hospital treatment ("Great," I said aloud). I decided that it was all mindless and stupid, considering that panics like these happened every couple of years. This one had been going for months already.
I was in the middle of changing the channel to something less stupid - something on MTV - when the phone rang again. Django bolted at the sound and hid beneath the couch. I stood, relieved of the feline burden, and grabbed for the phone on the table in front of me. The moment I pressed the 'Talk' button, I heard a woman screaming.
"Rufus, why the fuck haven't you been answering the phone?"
"Sorry, Nel," I sighed. "I was out of it. Long night." Nellie had been my girlfriend for a year, the two of us having agreed that we weren't going to take the next step forward until life was a bit less stressful. She might as well have been my wife, however, and I knew her well enough to know that she only called me 'Rufus' when she was royally pissed.
She scoffed. "I'm not calming down! Take it you're off work, right?" She knew I was, of course, and she seemed to be asking to make sure that I knew I was off work.
"Yeah, Nel, I'm home," I said, smirking as the cat poked its head out from beneath the couch.
"Don't 'Nel' me. I'm not in the mood," she warned. "Go look outside. Fucking now."
I put the telephone in the crook of my shoulder and leaned my head to the side to hold it in place, freeing my hands to open the window and peek outside. "All right, all right, I'm humoring you." My grin disappeared. Outside was panic. Chaos. Anarchy. Cars were backed up, honking at one another like geese in a dysfunctional flock. Some folk were tumbling out of their vehicles and racing down the sidewalk, one particularly fat man slamming headfirst into a telephone pole. A group of younger guys were attacking an ice-cream truck further down the street with crowbars, and I could see a couple of store fronts that had been bashed in. I stared.
"Yeah, you seeing that?" Nellie asked. I could see her sitting on her balcony, watching this mad parade of chaos, maybe with a bottle of Coke in her hands.
"God ... " I murmured, still in shock.
"I know," she said, all traces of fury gone from her voice. "I saw it and I ... you're okay?"
"I'm fine," I reassured her, "I mean, I'm exhausted, but I'm okay."
"Are you still coming over tomorrow?" she asked.
I nodded, and only then realized the stupidity inherent in that action. "One o' clock," I told her, "Provided they don't call me in."
"Okay," she said, sounding relieved. There was a crash in the background on her end, the sound of something shattering, and Nellie cursed. "The goddamn dog just knocked over a vase ... " I could hear her shouting at the dog, stumbling around what I assumed was the refuse of the vase, and I could hear the sound of the dog in the background, barking madly. "Listen, I gotta run. He's going berserk at something outside. Can you call me later?"
"Sure thing."
"Thanks. Love ya, hon."
"Love you - " I started, but she disconnected before I'd finished the sentence. I dropped the receiver and closed the window. After a moment of mindless chin-scratching, I threw myself back onto the couch. Django emerged not a second later, and settled himself once more upon my lap.
It was weird. I really wasn't very concerned with this ... fundamental oddness that was enveloping the country. Maybe I was just too tired. My patients had been taking up a lot of brain space, and I'd spent a couple of sleepless nights going through an infinity of medical books and clicking website after website in search of some seemingly nonexistent clue. I didn't figure there was any connection. This panic had begun mid-December, with a flurry of news reports; they'd started off with a tone of skeptical amusement, but these days, it was more cautious graveness.
tarted mid-December, with various weird reports on the news and people coming into the hospital with symptoms that didn’t make any sense. I attributed it to something like bird or swine flu, some apocalyptic fear of nothing at all. Whatever it was, I’d been ignoring it, mostly, and had been making vague plans with Nellie to go on vacation somewhere, once work had settled down a bit. The chief problem being, of course, that work had yet to settle down, and was in fact doing the opposite. It was worrisome, but I figured it was something along the lines of bird or swine flu, and that it'd pass in a few months. I'd told Nellie that we'd go out to the country for a while, once work settled down.
The pager went off. I cursed whatever god had lain such troubles on my weary soul, and managed to spook Django into my bedroom in the process. I put down some food and water for him, made myself look decent, and jogged to the hospital. Yet another patient with unexplainable symptoms had appeared, and I was forced to spend a grueling hour interviewing him and reassuring him that no, he wasn't going to die, and could he please stop shouting that to the entire hospital. I checked my other patients, who were all relatively convinced that their mortality was stable for now, and then headed home, so tired that I had achieved a state rather like drunkenness, without any alcohol. I'd have to go to bed early tonight if I wanted to be ready to meet with Nel tomorrow.
I knew something was ... off, the moment I got back to the apartment building. There was that neck-prickling feeling that something just wasn't quite right, and I high-tailed it to my door, fumbled with the key, and threw it open. It was quiet, and for perhaps a full minute, I stood there, just breathing, eyes flicking through the darkness for any sign of a maniacal killer. Some ounce of logic inched to the surface of my brain, and I turned on the lights.
Nothing. I nodded, content that everything was A-okay, and dropped my briefcase down next to the couch, where I called Nel again, telling her that I was doing just dandy, and that yes, I'd still be coming tomorrow, and then I watched the evening news. Or half of it, anyway, because I fell asleep halfway through the Weird Shit of the Night, and woke up five minutes later. From there, I made the arduous trek to my bedroom door, and groggily pushed it open.
It took a moment for the image to register, but once it did, I found I was paralyzed. In the center of the ruffled bedspread was a grey-brown lump, mewing pitifully in a spreading pool of red, so quietly that it was no wonder that I didn't hear anything from the living room.
It was Django.
I stared, afraid to touch it or do much of anything, knowing that he was going to die and that it was going to be painful and that I couldn't do a damn thing about it. It struck me as mildly ironic that I could watch a patient die under my own knife and and just shrug it off, but that this had me completely freaked. After a few more minutes, he stopped moving, and I took note of a small, folded-up piece of paper, slightly splattered with blood. I picked it up, trembling.
“You really should get moving, my friend,” it said, in excessively ornate handwriting that was, for some reason, ever-so slightly familiar.
I fainted.
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