I stifled a groan. “I don’t think Mr. Johnson will fit in any of the storage units we have down there,” I said, aware of how morbid this must sound to Ben. It had become so commonplace to us now, we didn’t even think about it anymore. “If you and Jenna will get him on a gurney, I’ll take him out back.”
She nodded and padded away, and Ben gave me a worried look. “Out back?”
“There’s an empty lot we’ve been using for body storage,” I said tiredly. “When the freezers downstairs get full, we move them outside. This place was set up pretty fast, so it didn’t come with a proper morgue. We’ve had to improvise.”
“You’re going outside? Now?”
“I can’t leave a cadaver lying on a bed all night.”
He rose swiftly, his gaze narrowing. “I’ll come with you.”
I frowned at his sudden change of mood. “There’s no need. I’m capable of handling a dead body by myself. Besides—” I glanced back toward the bed “—I thought you wanted to stay with your friend.”
“Please.” He took a step forward, not intimidating, but intense. “Let me help. It’s the least I can do.”
There was more to it than that, I thought. I wasn’t stupid. He was still hiding something, and I was going to find out what. Just not tonight. I was tired, my head hurt and I didn’t want to fight him. “All right,” I sighed. “If you think you can stomach working with a dead body, then I’ll put those muscles of yours to work. Follow me.”
We walked back to the main room, where Maggie and Jenna were struggling to load the body onto a gurney. In times past, I’d had a couple of the male interns perform this task. But they were gone now; it was just the three of us left.
Plus Ben. Who didn’t flinch as he hefted Mr. Johnson onto the cart, handling the body like he might a sick calf. His face remained businesslike as he laid the corpse down gently, and Jenna and Maggie gaped at him.
As I covered the body with a sheet, I caught a faint hint of rot coming off the corpse. What the hell? It hadn’t even been an hour since Mr. Johnson had passed; there was no way the body would start to decompose so quickly.
“What is it?” Ben asked quietly. I shook my head.
“Nothing.” I flipped the sheet over the body’s head, and the smell vanished. Maybe I’d imagined it, or maybe I was smelling something else: a dead animal outside. I maneuvered the gurney around him and the interns, ducked through the curtains surrounding the bed and headed out the back door. Ben followed.
Outside, the temperature was cool, chilly even. Which was a good thing, given the number of dead things lying everywhere around us, hidden away in houses and beds; the ones who had died alone and forgotten. As it was, the stench coming from the back lot was always there, drifting in the clinic when the breeze blew just right. If it had been high summer, the smell would’ve been unbearable.
As we made our way down the sidewalk, I was struck again by how quiet everything was. Not long ago, the sounds of sirens and cars, screaming, gunshots and breaking glass, had been constant. Just across the river, in monument D.C., the city had been a war zone. Now, an eerie silence hung over everything, and the buildings around us were dark. Of course, our small clinic was located just outside the city limits, so I didn’t know what was happening closer to downtown. Occasionally, I heard screams or the roar of a distant car engine, signs that there was still human life somewhere out there. But the city seemed abandoned now, left to the desperate and the dying.
I sneaked a glance at Ben, walking beside me, one hand on the corner of the gurney. His gaze scanned the buildings and the shadows around us, every fiber of his body on high alert. The same look he’d had in the clinic when night was starting to fall, only amplified a hundred-fold.
He didn’t come out here to help me, I realized with a cold feeling in my stomach. He’s afraid there’s something out here now. I pulled the gurney to a halt in the middle of the sidewalk. “Ben...”
Something big slipped from the shadows into our path, making us both jump. I flinched, but Ben lunged forward and grabbed my arm as if prepared to yank me behind him. A stray dog, big and black, drew back when it saw us. It dropped what it was carrying and darted out of sight between two cars, its tail between its legs.
Ben relaxed. Quickly, he dropped my wrist, looking embarrassed. “Sorry,” he murmured, staring at the ground. “I’m not usually this jumpy, I swear. Are you all right?”
I rubbed my arm, wincing from the strength in those hands. “I’m fine,” I told him, and was about to ask him why he was so twitchy. But then I noticed what the dog had been carrying and stifled a groan.
“Is that...an arm?” Ben asked, peering past the gurney.
“Yeah.” I sighed, knowing where the dog had probably gotten it. As we got closer to our destination, the smell began to permeate the darkness around us. That familiar knot of dread, guilt, sorrow and anger coiled in my stomach. “Just a warning,” I told Ben, “this isn’t going to be pretty. Steel yourself.”
“For what?”
I smiled humorlessly and turned the corner of the alley.
From the corner of my eye, I saw Ben straighten, though he didn’t say anything. The drone of insects was a constant hum over the hundreds of bodies lined up in neat rows up and down the empty lot. Most were covered with sheets and tarps, but several covers were torn off or had blown away, leaving the corpses to stare empty-eyed at the sky. And, from the looks of the older, “riper” corpses, the scavengers were already gathering en masse.
Ben made a sound in the back of his throat, as if he was struggling not to gag. For a moment, I was sorry for bringing him out here, letting him see the stark reality we faced every day. But he set his jaw and walked with me to the edge of the last row, where I’d laid three people—a mother and her two sons—side by side last week. I tried not to look at them as we lifted Mr. Johnson’s body up in the sheet and set it on the pavement. But it was hard not to remember. I’d stayed up countless nights with that family, trying desperately to save them, but the virus had taken the mother first and the boys hours later, and that failure still haunted me.
Ben was quiet as we left the lot and pushed the empty gurney back to the clinic. He didn’t say anything, but instead of scanning the streets and shadows, he appeared deep in thought, brooding over what he had just seen. It was pretty sobering, when you realized how much we had lost, how insidious this thing was: an enemy that couldn’t be stopped, put down, reasoned with. It made you realize...we might not make it through this.
“How do you do it?”
I blinked. I’d gotten so used to his silence; the question caught me off guard. Strange, thinking I knew a man after only a few hours with him. His brown eyes were on me now, solemn and assessing.
“Because you have to,” I said, ducking through the back door with him behind me. “Because you have to give people hope. Because sometimes that’s the only thing that will get them through, the only thing that keeps them alive.”
His next words were a whisper. I barely caught them as we moved through the main room into the dark hall beyond. “What if there is no hope?”
I shoved the gurney against the wall and turned, pinning him with my fiercest glare. “There is always hope, Ben. And I will thank you to keep any doom-and-gloom observations to yourself while you’re here. I don’t need my patients hearing it. Or my interns, for that matter.”
He ducked his head, looking contrite. “I’m sorry. It’s just...it’s hard to keep an open mind when you’ve seen...what I have.” I raised an eyebrow at him, and he had the grace to wince. “And...you’ve seen a lot worse, I know. My apologies. I’ll...stop whining, now.”
I sighed. “Have you had anything to eat lately?”