Triage
There are only two things in the world that are certain. One of them is death.
My grandfather used to say that, when he was a boy, the other was taxes, but that ain't the case now. Taxes require centralized government, and centralized governments require urban centers, and urban centers require that concentrated numbers of people are a benefit, not a hazard. Time was that cities brought all sorts of security to populations, but not anymore. Not for half a century, at this point. The only way we've managed to survive is through diffusion, spreading humanity out as widely and thinly as possible, in small ad hoc cells linked by highly resilient communication. Self-sufficiency, compartmentalization, and most of all: localized containment response.
-
We roll the ambulance to a halt fifty meters from the crash, per standard practice. Alert says one alive, one critical… and two dead. We won't have long to identify which is which. The crash was almost half an hour ago; the two corpses will be a problem very soon, if not already. We power down the cruiser, prep the hatches for a rapid return if we need it, and exit with full gear. The alert sensors are reasonably accurate, to within a few meters, but once the body's electrical field fades they don't retain charge long. Plus, the demortifiers go to work on them pretty fast, so by the time they're animate again, we can't get a clean read on where they are or how fast they're moving.
Which is why there ain't no job more dangerous than being a paramedic.
-
To this day, nobody knows how it got started or where it came from originally.
My grandparents' generation were too busy fighting the war and reasserting survivable balance to really care exactly how demortification had happened. I'm sure they wondered, but they had to be more pragmatic than that. They needed to know what it was, how to combat it - both in the body and on the street. It was my parents' generation that really felt outrage about the lack of answers. Lots of speculation. Lotta folks think it came from space, off a comet or brought by one of the probes. My own dad thought it was a military project to extend soldiers' survival on the battlefield. Make them shrug off mortal injury. Preternatural rejuvenation. Keep on fighting long past the point of normal death. And then… it would have gotten out, I guess. Into the biosphere, into everyone and everything. Doing its best to make us immortal. Only, the living body's own anti-pathogens and bioelectric field were sufficient to keep it in check, when fully healthy. It was only when seriously injured, deeply ill, or actually dead that the demortifiers were no longer held back, and were free to take over the body as much as they wanted, to drive it forward for their purpose… which was to kill.
-
We fan out. The first body is visible pretty much immediately, lying in the road about three meters from the twisted wreck of the car. Thrown from the vehicle as it tumbled, I guess. I'm on lead triage today, while the rest make sure the area is the least bit secure. There's a lot of foliage along the side of the road and it's late enough that the light is starting to dim. Night calls are the worst - the demortified quickly reach ambient temperature, making infrared mostly pointless - but fortunately we're not quite that bad yet. We have twenty minutes of light. Should be enough to determine which, if any, are already remobilized, and respond appropriately. We're well-equipped, which means everything from several liters of blood supply to a full white-phosphorus flamethrower.
While the rest of the squad surrounds the crash site, I approach the first body. It twitches, and I know what comes next.
-
Horribly enough, we do know a lot about demortification… just not how to end it.
The demortifiers are an infection, but not a bacterium, not a virus. More like a prion, I guess, but far more mobile than even germs. There's been some research to suggest that they possess something of a collective intelligence, able to assemble a kind of reptilian awareness in their rejuvenated bodies. Whatever they are, they got into everything very quickly, and we'll never be rid of them now. They insert into mammalian eggs within minutes of fertilization; nothing of any size gets born on this planet without being infected. They get into other lifeforms, too, but aren't nearly as effective there as they are in warm-blooded creatures. They're in you your whole life, held at bay by your living aura or something, only a problem when your flesh is too weak to fend them off. Then they take over, starting in your brain, but rapidly asserting their control in the rest as well. Within minutes of death, the new… awareness… starts to take hold in the corpse. Within an hour, the limbs work again (as well as they can, depending on what their condition is) and the body starts looking for raw material to use for rejuvenation. They really can subsist on almost anything organic, even leaves and dust, but they thrive best on meat. Especially ours.
-
The key to first responder triage is to quickly categorize the injured into four groups. In order of response priority, from least to most: Those who will be fine for a while without help; those who are going to die soon no matter what you do; those who will only live if they receive medical aid immediately; and those who are already dead. The ones who are already dead are the first concern because they're the most likely to try to get you to join them. The ones who will probably die without help are the second concern because every death is not just a tragedy, but an actual problem for everyone around it. But someone who's certainly going to die, but hasn't yet…? Piece of cake. The moment the immediate concerns are handled, you'll just explode their head with a point-blank HE round. Every paramedic carries a spare pistol loaded for exactly that.
I point mine on the body lying in the road. Just as I take aim, it rolls over - its first full exertion since it made the return - and takes a swipe at me. The HE hits it in the face.
-
Humanity fell completely apart there for a while, but we got through it, okay?
Sure, billions died. And turned into more of the same problem. It was close, absolutely. But we applied technological solutions and eventually had the upper hand more often than not. It took a generation, but we got it under control. The threat is always there, and will always be there. Your own bloodstream is a time bomb, as is everyone else's. There are millions of the things roaming loose in the wilderness, in the unreclaimed old city ruins, all over the place. If they get near a community, they are pretty easily dispatched. We can spot them and track them and defend against them pretty readily. But we don't congregate in the thousands anymore (much less millions) because someone's always dying unexpectedly somewhere, and in a dense urban center that's the end of everyone. You need to spread thin, to survive under these conditions. But survive we do, and will, and must. It ain't like we're going to stop having babies.
-
Inside the car, there are two figures in the front seat. Both seatbelted. Both alive, one bleeding very badly. Bleedout death is bad, because it leaves the body especially hungry when it reanimates. But I think I can save her. The other, her brother or boyfriend or whatever, is unconscious but it looks like he's going to be okay. No sign of concussion, at least. Best I can do at the moment. I sling the shotgun and break out the transfusion box. Then I notice how much blood there is all over the back seat. It's not from the body out on the road, it wasn't covered in blood. No, the blood goes out the passenger side door and into the brush by the car. Oh, shit, the other dead is already mobile. "Team!" I shout into my collar mic - no sense in being quiet, it surely knows we're here - "One dead on the move somewhere! Started on the north side."
But the sudden rustle of branches, a shout, and a spray of gunfire across the clearing tells me that it didn't stay there.
-
Ironically, the demortifiers have the same problem we do.
For the first couple of days after revival, everything is controlled from that initial cerebral flash point. There's a strong hierarchy of communication from the lizard stem out to the extremities and such. During that time, catastrophic head trauma is usually enough to disrupt their command and control, and the whole animation fails, the body falls down and eventually natural decay does its job. But once they start getting new organic material into their system? Then they can build new construction throughout the body, replicating their command centers, improving bandwidth, decentralizing authority. Just like we have, in order to survive them, so they do too in order to survive us. By the time a demortified body has been active for months, it is very hard to "kill" again. Every piece of its flesh can operate independently, to whatever extent its structure permits, hard as stone, tough as nails. Blow the head apart and the hands will still choke you to death. Blow the arms off and it will still try to run after you on its legs, to hound you to some panicky accident or into the hands of more of its kind. And then you die, and shortly after that you become another one of them. Every time.
-
I can't pay attention to the firefight that breaks out. I have to save this girl. I'm working as fast as I can. I hope the deader in the woods doesn't jump me from behind. My team really needs to get that thing put down immediately. How hard can it be? It's only been dead forty minutes. Jesus Christ, this girl has lost a lot of blood. Is she already in terminal arrest? Should I just hollow out her skull right now? No, no, I have to try.
There's a scream from across the clearing, then a huge boom. Not good.
-
Thank god they don't have a way to reproduce, other than killing.
The demortified don't spread their infection to you, of course. It's already in you. They just need you to die, so that the infection that you already have can take over. But the tricky little proteins, when they've had a reasonable amount of time to develop, have a whole host of upgrades that they sometimes outfit their bodies with. They'll build poison glands, for example, so that the least scratch or bite has deadly toxic effect. They'll grow thorny claws or hooks on their hands and arms to aid in grappling. Often, they'll specialize in one or another specific part of the body they've rebuilt, so that they have legs that can jump onto a second story from the ground, or especially strong hands, or the ability to rotate their head or torso completely around to permit independent movement and facing. They get better at it the longer they survive. "Leveling up", we call it. I don't even want to think about what they must be like, the ones out there that are surely still operating since the first outbreak fifty years ago.
-
I have the girl stable so I can turn back to the firefight. It's over. They hit the second deader with a grenade and now they're flamethrowering the many pieces of the body, all of which are still twitching. "How did it get so animate so quickly after death?" I ask. Hutchins shakes his head. "I think it was dead for a while. Somehow they subverted his alert so it didn't report that he was dead. Maybe the others were taking him somewhere for burial or destruction or maybe they were in denial about his condition. But I bet he's what caused the accident. It got up in the back and went to town on them…" He gestures with his head over toward the shadows nearby. "We, uh, still have a problem." I look over where he indicated.
Laramie is resting against a tree, covered in blood, while the rest talk about what to do.
-
The greatest sin you can commit in this world, now, is to know you're dying and not do the right thing first.
Thousands die every year because they think they're going to pull through, or they think their loved one will pull through. Even now, after all this, we still desperately want to not face our inevitable mortality. Now more than ever, I guess. But if you know you're doing to die - from cancer, or injury, or whatever - then you have to remove yourself from the danger pool. The most responsible thing you can possibly do is commit suicide in as head-destructive a manner as possible. If you can't do it, every village has at least one executioner. (Executioners are quite often paramedics, in fact.) We simply have to make sure that people die effectively, properly, preventatively. There is no alternative. And yet, every year, there's always somebody…
-
"How you doing, buddy?" I ask Laramie. "I'm going to be fine," he gasps, lying. "I don't think it had poison or anything like that, so it's just some nasty scratches. Treat it with disinfectant and I'll be fine by morning." He tries to stand, has a hard time. I push him back down. "Look at that. You're body is already failing you. They've already started working on you." I hold out my gun. "Are you going to do this, or am I?" I watch his eyes very carefully, hoping for the right thing, fearing the wrong. For a moment, I'm afraid he'll choose poorly, take the gun and threaten us with it for a few more minutes of his own life. But no, he considers and discards the idea. He knows it's true. It got him with something. He can feel his own heart already stumbling. He's in the second group, not the first or third. Lots of time to handle the inevitable. He closes his eyes: "You do it."
So I do. And then we go on, as we always have.
-
There are only two things in the world that are certain. One of them is death.
But the other is always life.
------
For consideration: lunchtime conversational topic
My grandfather used to say that, when he was a boy, the other was taxes, but that ain't the case now. Taxes require centralized government, and centralized governments require urban centers, and urban centers require that concentrated numbers of people are a benefit, not a hazard. Time was that cities brought all sorts of security to populations, but not anymore. Not for half a century, at this point. The only way we've managed to survive is through diffusion, spreading humanity out as widely and thinly as possible, in small ad hoc cells linked by highly resilient communication. Self-sufficiency, compartmentalization, and most of all: localized containment response.
-
We roll the ambulance to a halt fifty meters from the crash, per standard practice. Alert says one alive, one critical… and two dead. We won't have long to identify which is which. The crash was almost half an hour ago; the two corpses will be a problem very soon, if not already. We power down the cruiser, prep the hatches for a rapid return if we need it, and exit with full gear. The alert sensors are reasonably accurate, to within a few meters, but once the body's electrical field fades they don't retain charge long. Plus, the demortifiers go to work on them pretty fast, so by the time they're animate again, we can't get a clean read on where they are or how fast they're moving.
Which is why there ain't no job more dangerous than being a paramedic.
-
To this day, nobody knows how it got started or where it came from originally.
My grandparents' generation were too busy fighting the war and reasserting survivable balance to really care exactly how demortification had happened. I'm sure they wondered, but they had to be more pragmatic than that. They needed to know what it was, how to combat it - both in the body and on the street. It was my parents' generation that really felt outrage about the lack of answers. Lots of speculation. Lotta folks think it came from space, off a comet or brought by one of the probes. My own dad thought it was a military project to extend soldiers' survival on the battlefield. Make them shrug off mortal injury. Preternatural rejuvenation. Keep on fighting long past the point of normal death. And then… it would have gotten out, I guess. Into the biosphere, into everyone and everything. Doing its best to make us immortal. Only, the living body's own anti-pathogens and bioelectric field were sufficient to keep it in check, when fully healthy. It was only when seriously injured, deeply ill, or actually dead that the demortifiers were no longer held back, and were free to take over the body as much as they wanted, to drive it forward for their purpose… which was to kill.
-
We fan out. The first body is visible pretty much immediately, lying in the road about three meters from the twisted wreck of the car. Thrown from the vehicle as it tumbled, I guess. I'm on lead triage today, while the rest make sure the area is the least bit secure. There's a lot of foliage along the side of the road and it's late enough that the light is starting to dim. Night calls are the worst - the demortified quickly reach ambient temperature, making infrared mostly pointless - but fortunately we're not quite that bad yet. We have twenty minutes of light. Should be enough to determine which, if any, are already remobilized, and respond appropriately. We're well-equipped, which means everything from several liters of blood supply to a full white-phosphorus flamethrower.
While the rest of the squad surrounds the crash site, I approach the first body. It twitches, and I know what comes next.
-
Horribly enough, we do know a lot about demortification… just not how to end it.
The demortifiers are an infection, but not a bacterium, not a virus. More like a prion, I guess, but far more mobile than even germs. There's been some research to suggest that they possess something of a collective intelligence, able to assemble a kind of reptilian awareness in their rejuvenated bodies. Whatever they are, they got into everything very quickly, and we'll never be rid of them now. They insert into mammalian eggs within minutes of fertilization; nothing of any size gets born on this planet without being infected. They get into other lifeforms, too, but aren't nearly as effective there as they are in warm-blooded creatures. They're in you your whole life, held at bay by your living aura or something, only a problem when your flesh is too weak to fend them off. Then they take over, starting in your brain, but rapidly asserting their control in the rest as well. Within minutes of death, the new… awareness… starts to take hold in the corpse. Within an hour, the limbs work again (as well as they can, depending on what their condition is) and the body starts looking for raw material to use for rejuvenation. They really can subsist on almost anything organic, even leaves and dust, but they thrive best on meat. Especially ours.
-
The key to first responder triage is to quickly categorize the injured into four groups. In order of response priority, from least to most: Those who will be fine for a while without help; those who are going to die soon no matter what you do; those who will only live if they receive medical aid immediately; and those who are already dead. The ones who are already dead are the first concern because they're the most likely to try to get you to join them. The ones who will probably die without help are the second concern because every death is not just a tragedy, but an actual problem for everyone around it. But someone who's certainly going to die, but hasn't yet…? Piece of cake. The moment the immediate concerns are handled, you'll just explode their head with a point-blank HE round. Every paramedic carries a spare pistol loaded for exactly that.
I point mine on the body lying in the road. Just as I take aim, it rolls over - its first full exertion since it made the return - and takes a swipe at me. The HE hits it in the face.
-
Humanity fell completely apart there for a while, but we got through it, okay?
Sure, billions died. And turned into more of the same problem. It was close, absolutely. But we applied technological solutions and eventually had the upper hand more often than not. It took a generation, but we got it under control. The threat is always there, and will always be there. Your own bloodstream is a time bomb, as is everyone else's. There are millions of the things roaming loose in the wilderness, in the unreclaimed old city ruins, all over the place. If they get near a community, they are pretty easily dispatched. We can spot them and track them and defend against them pretty readily. But we don't congregate in the thousands anymore (much less millions) because someone's always dying unexpectedly somewhere, and in a dense urban center that's the end of everyone. You need to spread thin, to survive under these conditions. But survive we do, and will, and must. It ain't like we're going to stop having babies.
-
Inside the car, there are two figures in the front seat. Both seatbelted. Both alive, one bleeding very badly. Bleedout death is bad, because it leaves the body especially hungry when it reanimates. But I think I can save her. The other, her brother or boyfriend or whatever, is unconscious but it looks like he's going to be okay. No sign of concussion, at least. Best I can do at the moment. I sling the shotgun and break out the transfusion box. Then I notice how much blood there is all over the back seat. It's not from the body out on the road, it wasn't covered in blood. No, the blood goes out the passenger side door and into the brush by the car. Oh, shit, the other dead is already mobile. "Team!" I shout into my collar mic - no sense in being quiet, it surely knows we're here - "One dead on the move somewhere! Started on the north side."
But the sudden rustle of branches, a shout, and a spray of gunfire across the clearing tells me that it didn't stay there.
-
Ironically, the demortifiers have the same problem we do.
For the first couple of days after revival, everything is controlled from that initial cerebral flash point. There's a strong hierarchy of communication from the lizard stem out to the extremities and such. During that time, catastrophic head trauma is usually enough to disrupt their command and control, and the whole animation fails, the body falls down and eventually natural decay does its job. But once they start getting new organic material into their system? Then they can build new construction throughout the body, replicating their command centers, improving bandwidth, decentralizing authority. Just like we have, in order to survive them, so they do too in order to survive us. By the time a demortified body has been active for months, it is very hard to "kill" again. Every piece of its flesh can operate independently, to whatever extent its structure permits, hard as stone, tough as nails. Blow the head apart and the hands will still choke you to death. Blow the arms off and it will still try to run after you on its legs, to hound you to some panicky accident or into the hands of more of its kind. And then you die, and shortly after that you become another one of them. Every time.
-
I can't pay attention to the firefight that breaks out. I have to save this girl. I'm working as fast as I can. I hope the deader in the woods doesn't jump me from behind. My team really needs to get that thing put down immediately. How hard can it be? It's only been dead forty minutes. Jesus Christ, this girl has lost a lot of blood. Is she already in terminal arrest? Should I just hollow out her skull right now? No, no, I have to try.
There's a scream from across the clearing, then a huge boom. Not good.
-
Thank god they don't have a way to reproduce, other than killing.
The demortified don't spread their infection to you, of course. It's already in you. They just need you to die, so that the infection that you already have can take over. But the tricky little proteins, when they've had a reasonable amount of time to develop, have a whole host of upgrades that they sometimes outfit their bodies with. They'll build poison glands, for example, so that the least scratch or bite has deadly toxic effect. They'll grow thorny claws or hooks on their hands and arms to aid in grappling. Often, they'll specialize in one or another specific part of the body they've rebuilt, so that they have legs that can jump onto a second story from the ground, or especially strong hands, or the ability to rotate their head or torso completely around to permit independent movement and facing. They get better at it the longer they survive. "Leveling up", we call it. I don't even want to think about what they must be like, the ones out there that are surely still operating since the first outbreak fifty years ago.
-
I have the girl stable so I can turn back to the firefight. It's over. They hit the second deader with a grenade and now they're flamethrowering the many pieces of the body, all of which are still twitching. "How did it get so animate so quickly after death?" I ask. Hutchins shakes his head. "I think it was dead for a while. Somehow they subverted his alert so it didn't report that he was dead. Maybe the others were taking him somewhere for burial or destruction or maybe they were in denial about his condition. But I bet he's what caused the accident. It got up in the back and went to town on them…" He gestures with his head over toward the shadows nearby. "We, uh, still have a problem." I look over where he indicated.
Laramie is resting against a tree, covered in blood, while the rest talk about what to do.
-
The greatest sin you can commit in this world, now, is to know you're dying and not do the right thing first.
Thousands die every year because they think they're going to pull through, or they think their loved one will pull through. Even now, after all this, we still desperately want to not face our inevitable mortality. Now more than ever, I guess. But if you know you're doing to die - from cancer, or injury, or whatever - then you have to remove yourself from the danger pool. The most responsible thing you can possibly do is commit suicide in as head-destructive a manner as possible. If you can't do it, every village has at least one executioner. (Executioners are quite often paramedics, in fact.) We simply have to make sure that people die effectively, properly, preventatively. There is no alternative. And yet, every year, there's always somebody…
-
"How you doing, buddy?" I ask Laramie. "I'm going to be fine," he gasps, lying. "I don't think it had poison or anything like that, so it's just some nasty scratches. Treat it with disinfectant and I'll be fine by morning." He tries to stand, has a hard time. I push him back down. "Look at that. You're body is already failing you. They've already started working on you." I hold out my gun. "Are you going to do this, or am I?" I watch his eyes very carefully, hoping for the right thing, fearing the wrong. For a moment, I'm afraid he'll choose poorly, take the gun and threaten us with it for a few more minutes of his own life. But no, he considers and discards the idea. He knows it's true. It got him with something. He can feel his own heart already stumbling. He's in the second group, not the first or third. Lots of time to handle the inevitable. He closes his eyes: "You do it."
So I do. And then we go on, as we always have.
-
There are only two things in the world that are certain. One of them is death.
But the other is always life.
------
For consideration: lunchtime conversational topic