Flashback
A teenage girl clomping about with stumpy, stone pegs where legs should be.
A middle-aged woman trying to hold a fork and eat with a hand forever petrified into a closed fist.
An elderly man wandering half-naked down the hallway, sobbing noisily, crying for someone named 'Shelia'.
A boy no older than 20 sitting in a wheelchair, his own broken-off, stone foot sitting in his lap. He stares at nothing ahead of him, makes no reaction to the chaos around him.
Nurses are overwhelmed. Some don't even care anymore. They're all either hurrying around, trying to corral and comfort their patients; these are the ones that are new, that still have hope. The rest are simply locked inside their offices, no longer wanting to face the unstoppable epidemic and endless grief that is just on the other side of their doors.
The epidemic that Jenna Angel studies tirelessly. The grief that she has to walk past every time she comes to visit David in this godforsaken quarantine facility.
She hurries down these halls now, avoiding eye contact as always, keeping a practiced, neutral expression, rushing past the pleas of the patients that cry out to her, to take them home, to contact their family members, get them out of here, to find their wife, make the hurting stop, help me, help me, please help me.
I'm trying, is all she ever thinks in response, again and again, as she hurries to get to the elevator that'll take her to David's floor.
A middle-aged woman trying to hold a fork and eat with a hand forever petrified into a closed fist.
An elderly man wandering half-naked down the hallway, sobbing noisily, crying for someone named 'Shelia'.
A boy no older than 20 sitting in a wheelchair, his own broken-off, stone foot sitting in his lap. He stares at nothing ahead of him, makes no reaction to the chaos around him.
Nurses are overwhelmed. Some don't even care anymore. They're all either hurrying around, trying to corral and comfort their patients; these are the ones that are new, that still have hope. The rest are simply locked inside their offices, no longer wanting to face the unstoppable epidemic and endless grief that is just on the other side of their doors.
The epidemic that Jenna Angel studies tirelessly. The grief that she has to walk past every time she comes to visit David in this godforsaken quarantine facility.
She hurries down these halls now, avoiding eye contact as always, keeping a practiced, neutral expression, rushing past the pleas of the patients that cry out to her, to take them home, to contact their family members, get them out of here, to find their wife, make the hurting stop, help me, help me, please help me.
I'm trying, is all she ever thinks in response, again and again, as she hurries to get to the elevator that'll take her to David's floor.