A Lucky Apocalypse II

I dropped it with a sigh, and crawled across the bed to retrieve my purse from the floor. Sure enough, my iPhone was in it. This time I glanced at the caller ID before answering, and realized it was work.

“Hello?” I said blearily.

“Kim? This is Liz. Can you come in early today? Tammy had to clock out, got bitten by a patient of all things. She’s getting stitches now, but things were getting crazy down here even before that. We’re getting swamped.”

“Oh,” I said dumbly. I glanced at the clock, and saw it was already after five am. For about the thousandth time, I wondered if becoming an ER nurse had been such a great idea.

“Sure,” I sighed. “I’m not getting back to sleep now anyway. I can be there in half an hour.”

“Thanks, Kim. You’re a lifesaver. Oh, drive safe, ok? You wouldn’t believe how many accidents we’ve gotten in here tonight. Must be a full moon or something.”

“Not for another four days, Liz. See you in a bit.”

I put the phone down, and stared at it in confusion. If my phone was in my purse, how did I get that prank call? Or was that a dream, too?

Fifteen minutes later, with my head marginally clearer after a quick shower, I decided it must have been. What a weird night.

I eyed myself critically in the bathroom mirror, wishing for a moment that I actually looked like I had in that first dream. The girl flying over the ocean had sported a body that a porn star would envy, which made me wonder what was going on in my subconscious. The real me was pretty enough, with deep green eyes and straight black hair made more striking by my pale complexion. But I was painfully thin and depressingly flat, and despite years of trying my hair stubbornly refused to grow past my shoulders. At twenty-six I still looked more like an anorexic high school student than a competent professional.

Naturally most of the doctors I worked with didn’t take me seriously. Worse, just about every man I met these days assumed I was jailbait, and steered clear of me. Some days I wasn’t sure which problem was more frustrating.

“Ah, well,” I sighed. “At least I’ve got a pretty face. Time to quit woolgathering.”

I was tired, but then I’d been tired as long as I could remember. Whether I slept twelve hours a day or three it was always the same, a dull sense of fatigue that dogged my every step. The doctors I’d consulted in college had scratched their heads, run dozens of tests, and finally concluded that it was all in my head. The fact that lack of sleep didn’t make me feel worse than normal led me to suspect they didn’t know what they were talking about. But what else could I do?

Back in college I’d once gone eight days without sleep during finals. Then I turned in my last exam, went up to my dorm room to see my roommate off on her summer vacation, sat down on the couch… and woke up three days later.

Even back then I knew I should have been half dead of dehydration after being unconscious that long, but somehow I didn’t feel much worse than usual. Still, the incident spooked me enough that I’d resolved not to poke at my body’s various inexplicable eccentricities. Maybe someday I’d find an explanation, but I wasn’t going to risk hurting myself looking for one.
Or ending up in some government lab.

Because being tired all the time is the least of my oddities. I’ve never been sick, and I’m stronger than most men despite the fact that I don’t even work out. I can pluck a fly out of the air with my fingers, which is supposed to be some kind of impossible martial arts trick. I can see in the dark almost as well as in daylight, and on a cold night I can make out the faint glow of my own body heat. At least, I hope that’s what that glow is.

I’m pretty sure that somewhere in the world, there must be a secret lab that’s missing an experimental subject. There are too many little oddities for me to just be a mutant, and the other explanations are too crazy to take seriously. Aliens? That look just like humans, but with low-grade superpowers? Yeah, right.

If there’s anyone looking for me, they’ve somehow missed me for twenty-four years. With any luck they’ve long since given up. But I try to avoid attention, just in case.

I threw on a set of scrubs with my usual quick efficiency, grabbing my purse and a handful of meal bars on my way out the door. My metabolism is absurdly high, and if I make a habit of skipping breakfast I start looking like a famine victim pretty quick.

It was normally a ten minute drive from my little apartment to Ben Derrick Memorial, the hospital where I’d worked for the last two years. But if anything Liz had understated things. I passed two accidents on the way in, one of them a nasty-looking auto-pedestrian. There were more people than usual roaming about on foot as well, and once I had to swerve around some drunk who wandered into the road.

If I lived in New York I might have shrugged it off, but this was Houston. Downtown might have problems like that, but Ben Derrick was well outside the loop. Something really strange was going on, but the news I could find on the radio didn’t give much clue about what. Just some reports on a sudden upsurge of violence in Los Angeles, and a rash of shootings in New York.

Something about this situation was definitely tickling my memory, but I couldn’t place it. Frustrated, I pulled my little blue sedan into an empty spot in the employee lot and headed in to find Liz.

Elizabeth Harris was a big, brassy woman who’d been head nurse of the ER night shift for years before I came along. The night shift gets a lot of problem patients – drunks, drug addicts, DV cases, petty criminals who get injured resisting arrest, it’s just an endless tour of the seamy side of civilization. Liz took it all in stride, maintaining a reasonable approximation of order with a loud voice, an intimidating stare, and occasional help from whichever rent-a-cop the hospital had on duty that night.

Tonight, she was apparently fighting a losing battle.

As I came down the hall behind the nurse’s station I saw that the waiting room was packed with people, several of them bleeding on the floor. A beefy guy was leaning over the nurse’s station shouting something about his wife at Liz, but there was such a din I could barely understand him. The reedy brunette leaning on his shoulder was a little pale from blood loss, but I could see at a glance that the ragged wound on her shoulder had already stopped bleeding. On a night like this the odds of her getting a transfusion were low, but she’d probably be fine without it.

Then I spotted the revolver that Beefy was waving around, and I understood why Liz hadn’t shut him down yet.