Death's Nemesis: The Apocalypse Doctor Who Refused to Die

The antiseptic smell was the first thing Ethan noticed, which was stupid, because the whole world smelled of rot now and the only reason he could still catch a trace of alcohol swab was that he was carrying the last case of it.

Was. He had been carrying it.

"Lena," he said. "Put the case down."

She didn't. She stood in the doorway of the supply room with the crate hugged to her chest, the way she used to hold her tablet on ward rounds, and she did not look at him. Behind her, Dr. Marcus Hale had already gotten the shutters up on the loading bay. Cold air came in, thick with the sound of the horde, a wet, dragging murmur, like a river made of throats.

Three years. Ethan had spent three years of the end of the world sewing this team together. He had set Marcus's broken wrist in a gas station bathroom. He had given Lena his own antibiotics when her cut went red. He had asked her to marry him on a rooftop, with a ring made from a surgical clamp and a strip of copper wire, and she had laughed and cried and said yes.

"The horde is eleven minutes out," Marcus said. His voice was calm, almost kind. That was the worst part. "The truck holds two people and the supplies. Not three."

"So we leave the supplies."

"And then what, Ethan? You can't cure a person with a clean conscience."

Lena finally looked up. Her eyes were wet, and he would remember that for a long time, that she managed to cry and still do it. "You'd have done the same," she whispered. "If it were me out there. You'd have picked the one who could still be useful."

"I'd have picked you," Ethan said. "I did pick you. Every single day."

Marcus hit him with the fire axe handle.

It was not a clean blow. Ethan got an arm up, felt something in his forearm go with a sound like a green branch, and then he was on the floor with the world ringing white. Hands rolled him. Someone took the keys from his belt, someone took the satchel with his instruments, the roll of silk sutures he'd been rationing since spring. He tried to say her name. What came out was a cough.

They dragged him through the bay doors by his collar and let go.

The gravel was cold and wet against his cheek. He heard the truck start. He heard Lena say something, quick and low, and he never learned whether it was I'm sorry or go. The taillights swung across the wall of the depot, red, then smaller, then nothing.

The murmur of the horde got louder.

Ethan lay still and did what he had always done when a patient came in broken: he took inventory.

Radius, left arm, displaced fracture, maybe compound. Two ribs, probably the sixth and seventh, from the kick he didn't remember. A scalp laceration bleeding into his left eye. Pulse high, a hundred and thirty, thready. Blood loss moderate and climbing. Time to shock, forty minutes. Time to the horde, nine.

He laughed. It hurt. Nine minutes, he thought. And I'm still triaging myself.

He got to his knees, then to one foot. The depot's chain-link fence stood forty meters off, and past it the road, and past that, the shapes. They moved in the half-light the way the infected always did, loose in the joints, heads tilted as if listening for a song only they could hear. There were hundreds. Maybe more. The ones in front had been people eleven days ago.

He ran.

It wasn't a decision so much as his legs remembering. He made it perhaps sixty meters, down the length of the loading yard, past a rusted forklift and a pallet of bottled water nobody had thought to take, before the first of them hit him from the side. It was a heavy man in what had once been a delivery uniform. They went down together. Ethan felt teeth close on his shoulder, felt them find the meat and twist, and he screamed, a raw, animal sound that he didn't know was in him.

Then there were more of them.

He stopped counting the bites. Somewhere in the dark of it, with the weight of bodies pinning him to the gravel, he thought, quite clearly, of his mother's kitchen, the radio on the windowsill playing something with a trumpet in it. He thought: I'm a doctor. I was supposed to be the one who didn't die.

His blood ran into the gravel and into the seams of the concrete, and in the foundation of the old depot, under the oil stains and the weeds, something that had been sleeping for a very long time felt it arrive.

A sound like a bell struck underwater rolled through the ground.

The infected froze.

All of them, at once, heads snapping toward the same spot, the way dogs will before an earthquake. Ethan felt the weight on his chest ease. Hands, or what had been hands, withdrew. A low, thin note hung in the air, and the horde began to back away from him with small, stiff steps, like guests who had just realized the house belonged to someone else.

He lay there, bleeding, not understanding.

Then a voice spoke that was not a voice. It came from somewhere behind his eyes, flat and unhurried, and it sounded like a ledger being opened.

[Host vitality: 4%. Lethal threshold reached.]

[Compatible vessel detected. Bloodline resonance confirmed.]

[Death's Nemesis System: awakening.]

Ethan stared at the sky, which had gone the color of old bruises, and for the first time in three years he felt something that wasn't hunger or fear or grief.

He felt interested.

"Okay," he said hoarsely, to no one, to the dark, to the thing that had just turned a hundred dead things around. "Okay. I'm listening."

[Warning: Host will expire in 00:03:41 without intervention.]

[Offer: Contract. Terms to follow. Accept?]

Blood bubbled at the corner of his mouth. He thought of the truck's taillights. He thought of Lena's wet eyes, and Marcus's patient voice saying useful.

He was still a doctor. A doctor does not argue with the only treatment on the table.

"Accept," said Ethan Vance.