"Shannon," a winded nurse peeked through the doorway. Shannon Woods was sitting on a stool, wrapping up the paperwork of the last person she and the doctor had seen. The patient was a soccer player with a torn ACL, who came in looking for relief and how to help it heal. Shannon had sat by and watched closely as the doctor examined and moved the leg, hoping that one day she would be in his position instead of a nurse who wants an inside look at her desired future career. Now, she scribbled new information on the paperwork of the patient's file. Her brown eyes hesitantly strayed from the paper, not quite done with her writing. The nurse was a heavier woman named Amelia, and she was known around the hospital as Bridgeport's sweetest nurse. She rested her elbow against the frame and continued now that she had Shannon's attention. "I've got a lot of patients under my watch and if it's not too much to ask, I'd love for some help checking in on them and setting up IV's for the more sick."

Shannon nodded. "Of course." It was her real job after all. She had a few patients of her own but they seemed to be all in stable health. One or two with bad flu cases, but nothing that hydration and bed rest shouldn't fix. "There have been a lot of ill patients lately, haven't there?" She stood from her chair and followed Amelia's lead.
"There sure have," she said. "Been a nasty season for the flu this year. And at least two of mine had a bite mark from a full grown man!" Her eyes widened as she expressed the peculiarity of it. "I've already got the police involved in both cases to see if there's been domestic assault on either of them, but the stories they've given are strange."

Amelia changed the topic as she lightly tapped a finger on one wall of a patient's room and then pointed to two more down the same aisle. "This one needs an IV, the next one needs strong antibiotics, and the last just has a broken arm so just check on her for me, will you?" She handed Shannon the files for each of them.
"Absolutely, thanks for getting me, Amelia." Shannon smiled and looked through the folder briefly before entering the first room. A man lay in the bunk looking rather exhausted, but alert. His droopy eyes looked to Shannon as she closed the door behind her. "Hello, Mr. White, how are you feeling?"
His voice had a sleepy sound to it, like he was about to fall asleep, but also a slight wheeze which tickled his throat and made him cough before sinking back into the pillows. "Well, I'll feel better once I'm back home with my wife," he said with a weak smile. Shannon gave him a small smile back. Having worked this job for quite a while now, she didn't feel very sympathetic towards the patients with small colds or basic needs anymore. She just thought of it as more of a job; get in, help them get better, leave the rest to the doctor, get out.

Shannon hooked Mr. White up to an IV, bid him goodbye and left the room. The next patient went much the same, only she looked much worse. Her eyes had dark circles and looked sunken. Her hair and lips looked dry. She didn't even acknowledge Shannon when she walked in the room. This one she did feel sympathy for. The way she lay lifeless but loudly breathing made Shannon wish she wasn't going through it. She found the antibiotics in a locked cabinet, looked at the woman's file and then gave her the proper dosage and hoped it would help before leaving the room. The next patient went without any odd happenings.

When she walked back into the hallway, Amelia had just finished up with her other patients. She looked at Shannon and closed her eyes as she exhaled and shook her head. "Ain't it funny how quiet this hospital is right before it gets so hectic?"
"It is! Everyone is always getting hurt or sick at once. That one lady, Ms. Doe, isn't looking well at all," Shannon noted.
"No, she isn't. She's one of quite a few in the same state... from what I hear from the other nurses, a lot of patients with the same illness are just about to drop," a solemn look came across her face. Shannon nodded and looked down to the floor. She never liked to hear about death.

Felix was used to death. He spent a lot of time working in the basement where the morgue was located and although he was often surrounded by death, today the grim reaper seemed to be working overtime.

Felix, in his white lab coat, rubber gloves, and a surgical mask around his nose and mouth, stood over one body making incisions, observing the findings and jotting notes down on a pad of paper. The door opened and he glanced up, dark eyes looking frustrated.

"More? I'm at capacity down here already! What the hell sickness do these people have?" His frustration had got the best of him and he threw a sheet over the cadaver he'd been working on and slid it back into the freezer drawer.

"Sorry Felix. Their dying in droves. The whole hospital is at capacity. The turn over rate is astonishing. For every one patient that dies, two come in with the same illness. They might actually call you up to help upstairs, especially since it's too crowded down here to really get anything done."

"I think I will do just that. Let me get these guys in the freezer and I'll be up." Felix replied and the man went back upstairs, zig zagging through 10 or 15 bodies that lay scattered on gurneys throughout the room.

Because the individual freezers were full, Felix slowly wheeled them one by one into a larger, meat locker type freezer in the back of the room. It was upon wheeling the last body in that he heard an odd noise.

"Wha-?" His dark eyes peered around, the noise coming from within the back corner of the freezer. He kept alert, waiting for more noise. But then, one of the body bags in the corner began to twit h and groan a little.

"Oh my god!" Thinking the person had been mistakenly thought dead, Felix pushed past the other bodies and tore open the twitching body bag expecting to find some scared, confused patient.

"WHAT THE FU--!" The corpse inside snapped at him wildly with bloody teeth, jerking towards him as he pushed back in panic. He stumbled, catching his fall against another body bag who, at his touch, seemed to spring back to life as well, squirming within the confines of the heavy duty plastic. Suddenly, panic rose in his chest as he realized that every single body bag was squirming as if the individual inside had reanimated.

He wasn't sure whether his eyes were playing tricks on him or not, but his instincts were almost crippling at the moment and he knew he needed to get out of the basement. Dodging live body bags, he escaped the freezer and slammed it shut. Hardly skipping a beat, he tore off his lab coat while racing up the stairs to the upper levels of the hospital.

Shannon bid Amelia goodbye, not wanting to keep her up with how chaotic things were right now. Shortly after, she herself was given two more patients, giving her a bit of a hectic load. How many would she and the other nurses and doctors be assigned to check in on before they couldn't juggle them anymore?

On her way back to the office with the desk where she was working on the paperwork, she heard a very airy breath of air come from around the empty hall's corner. Her eyebrows furrowed, and wondered if one of the patients left their room. That wouldn't be a good thing at all, with this virus being so unknown. Quarantine was taken very seriously within this hospital. Shannon lifted the latex mask hanging around her neck over her mouth and nose and turned around the corner to find the source of the raspy breathing.

"Shan...non..." it wheezed loudly. It was a fellow nurse who'd caught a cold, one who'd taken a few days off so she could heal. She never told the hospital that she'd actually caught the flu, however. Shannon's eyes were wide--the nurse, Kara, didn't even look human. The whites of her eyes were yellowing, with purple bags underneath them. Her lips seemed to be in an advanced stage of necrosis, pulling away from her dull teeth. Her body, usually full with beautiful skin, was grey in color and sickly thin. Kara collapsed to the linoleum floor without warning.
"Kara!" Shannon shouted, rushing to her side. She crouched down and put a hand on her back, flipping her over. Shannon frantically searched the hallways. "Someone, please help!" She shouted. Her words echoed off the walls but there came no response. It was useless, anyway. It was easy to hear Kara's last breath. Shannon's eyes watered and she desperately checked the pulse of her friend. There was none. A few tears overflowed and Shannon stood up and wiped them away. She looked around again but there was still nobody around.

Her steps also echoed in the hallway as she walked it. She sniffed her nose, sniffling away the snot that had formed while her eyes watered. She came to a door in the hallway and stepped inside. It opened to a long walk-in closet, where spare gurneys were kept. There were many of the closets around the hospital for easy access to them. Shannon pulled one out and began rolling it down the hallway back to Kara.

Shannon was a very healthy woman who enjoyed growing stronger and overall better as a person. Her arms were no exception; with a little effort, she lifted Kara from the ground. Her back protested a little, she wasn't eight years old anymore, but for the most part easily placed the deceased woman onto the gurney. As she was sliding her arms out from under her, she heard a deep, drawn out moan in her left ear. Eyebrows raised, she looked at Kara. Her eyes were open and actively moving. Her hands rose from her sides. Shannon grabbed them and sat her up on the gurney.
"Ohmigod! Kara, I'm so sorry! I didn't even realize you were-" A raspy growl came from her throat and her face drew closer to Shannon's arm. "Are you okay? Kara, what are you doing?" She watched as her mouth opened and her teeth began to wrap around the meat of her forearm. Shannon jerked her arm back. "Kara!" She shouted, pulling her other arm off of her own. Her arms continued to reach out to her. Spit was beginning to pool over from her lower lip and the airy moans grew louder in the halls. The force of her trying to grab hold of Shannon increased. Her heart was racing, and her mind was barely able to understand what was happening. Grabbing hold of Kara's shoulders, she pushed her back onto her back. The woman turned her head and tried to bite her hands. Shannon pulled them back and secured the woman's wrists one by one with the leather straps on the sides of the gurney. The woman was crunching forward, doing everything she could to get her face closer to Shannon. Her legs moved in the air like she couldn't control them. The growls continued.

Shannon's breathing sped up. What the hell had become of Kara? Five minutes ago she'd had no pulse! Shannon ran off down the hall to find someone; she'd never dealt with this situation before and frankly was scared out of her mind. She needed a doctor, but would settle for anyone. As she ran, she heard the door open to the room with the staircase and she sprinted toward it. She nearly ran into the man who'd entered the hallway. Out of breath, she barely managed to get out: "Please, I need help. A sick nurse came in and she collapsed and I thought she was dead, she looked dead, and, please, if you can't help me, help me find a doctor!" She stuttered her run-on sentence out, wanting to explain the situation as fast as she could. She prayed the man would be willing to help.