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Chapter 69


I know we’ve all asked why. Why did this happen? Why did we survive? Why the ten of us? Why are we here?

It’s been hard to accept that we may never know the answers. Not in this lifetime, at least.

But one thing became clear tonight: We are all here for a reason.

I know the others have questioned their faith, but more than ever, I believe someone – Someone – brought us together. Someone made us resilient against the plague that destroyed so many. Someone led us to this base, which has become our fortress. Someone gave us Kevin, our protector. Someone provided the supplies I’d need to put my skills to use in a crisis.

Someone is watching over us.



Friday, August 3, 2012
Week Fifteen

“Howie’s hurt. We need you, Jo. It’s… it’s bad.”

From the moment she’d heard the words pass through AJ’s lips, Jo had been in trauma nurse mode. She’d run faster than she’d known her body to move, driven on autopilot to the medical center, and now stood before a man on a gurney who desperately needed her help. She was in her element.

But as she came closer and saw the extent of the wounds on Howie’s exposed back, deep gashes the men had tried in vain to stop up with gauze, she suddenly froze. There was a reason hospitals had a policy against letting medical staff work on family members; it was simply too difficult, too stressful, to think clearly when you were trying to save the life of someone you loved. Though not a blood relative, Howie was as good as her younger brother, in the new family they’d formed on the base. For a moment, she was paralyzed with panic – panic at the realization that she was expected to save him, panic at the knowledge that she might not be able to.

“Can you do something?” Kevin asked in a low voice. “He’s bleeding out.”

He was right. Jo could see the blood seeping through the soaked gauze pads, spilling down Howie’s sides, and spattering wetly to the floor, where there was already a significant puddle. She estimated at least two liters, which was almost half his body’s blood volume. As the gravity of the situation hit her, she covered her mouth with her hand and shook her head in disbelief. Ever since she’d found out about Howie’s condition, she had known this could happen, but things had been going so well, and Howie had always been so cautious, it still came as a shock.

“Please,” Kayleigh begged, sounding near tears. “Do something.”

Jo wasn’t sure how much she’d be able to do. Howie was very still, already unconscious from the blood loss. One arm hung limply off the side of the gurney. Afraid of what she’d find, Jo nonetheless rushed forward and picked it up. The limb was dead weight in her hands, as she held it up and pressed two fingers to the radial artery in his wrist to feel for a pulse. It was very weak, but after a few seconds, she felt it, the faint fluttering beneath her fingertips that signaled life. His heart was still beating, barely, but if he kept on losing blood, eventually, the heart would have nothing left to pump.

The key was blood. If she could just get more blood into him, feed his heart enough to keep it beating, then she could work on trying to stop the bleeding. “He needs blood,” she said abruptly. “Does anyone know his blood type?”

She looked around at the others. They all exchanged uncertain looks.

“Can’t you just give him Type O?” asked Gretchen. “The universal donor?”

Jo answered the question with one of her own. “Are any of you O negative?”

Regretfully, they shook their heads.

“I’m sure there’s a blood bank here,” Kevin spoke up confidently, but Jo shook her head.

“He needs whole blood. Whole blood expires after thirty-five days. Any stored here will be useless now.” She sighed; if only someone had thought to ask Howie before he’d blacked out. As a hemophiliac, of course he would know his own blood type. It struck her as odd that, despite his condition, he didn’t wear a medical ID bracelet. Then she caught sight of the watch on his other wrist and wondered if it might serve the same purpose. “Take off his watch,” she ordered Brian, who was standing on that side of the gurney.

Brian unclasped the watch and handed it to Jo, who turned it over. Sure enough, the back was engraved.

Howard Dorough
Hemophilia
Blood type B+


“B positive…” she murmured. It wasn’t a common blood type, but in a stroke of luck, she was B positive herself. So was Gabby, as a matter of fact. At the very least, they could both donate blood.

She was just wondering how she was going to start an IV on herself when Brian said, “I’m B positive, too. Can you give him some of my blood?”

Before she could answer, Kevin added, “I’m also B positive.”

“Hey, so am I!” In shock, Jo looked over at Riley, who looked equally astonished. But it didn’t stop there.

“Me too,” said Gretchen, her eyes widening.

“Me three,” added Kayleigh, sounding equally shocked.

AJ snickered. “Well, what are the odds? So am I.”

Stunned, they all looked around for the only person who had not spoken. Nick’s face turned red, and he stammered, “I, uh… I don’t know what type I am. Sorry…”

Jo stared through him, trying to think back to when she’d treated him in the emergency room, the day before Infernal Friday. He had received a transfusion to make up for the blood he’d lost from his head wound, and she knew he’d been typed for that. She wished she could remember what she’d written on his chart. She was willing to bet he, too, was B positive. How could he not be? It was too much of a coincidence, and yet suddenly, it was starting to make sense.

“We’re all the same blood type,” breathed Kayleigh. “Could that be why…?”

But there was no time to debate it now. Howie was still hemorrhaging, dying before their eyes. If they were to save him, they had to act quickly.

In a frenzy, Jo started tearing apart the room, searching for the equipment she’d need to set up a blood transfusion. “Apply pressure to his back,” she ordered Kevin, tossing him more of the large-size gauze pads. While he leaned over Howie, pressing the dressings to his back to soak up the blood, Jo found an IV starter kit and ripped the package open, spreading its contents across a stainless steel tray.

She picked up Howie’s arm again and turned it over. His normally olive skin was gray and bloodless, clammy and cool to the touch. She tied a tourniquet around his upper arm, then swiped the crook of his elbow with an alcohol pad to disinfect it. From the selection of catheter sizes in the kit, she selected the largest, the fourteen-gauge, which would allow the most blood to be transfused in the shortest amount of time. She plunged the needle into the vein and watched for a blood flash. Then she advanced the catheter, pulled out the needle, took off the tourniquet, and hooked up the IV tubing. She started a bag of saline, figuring the least she could do was increase his fluid volume while she obtained the blood.

“Find another gurney,” she said to no one in particular, as she got out another IV kit and started setting it up.

AJ left and came back, rolling a second gurney up alongside Howie’s.

“Who’s first?” Jo asked, patting the gurney.

“I will,” AJ volunteered at once, hopping up and offering her his arm. It was so heavily tattooed, Jo couldn’t imagine he had an aversion to needles, but still, he looked away when she inserted the needle.

“Squeeze this every few seconds,” she said, handing him an enema bulb. “It’ll increase the blood flow.”

AJ squeezed, and she watched the dark, red blood flow through the tubing that ran from his arm to a collection container. While the container filled with blood, she found a suture kit and set it up to start closing Howie’s wounds.

“Jo, this is soaked through,” Kevin spoke up, pulling up the fresh gauze she had given him, now sopping wet with Howie’s blood.

She got him another one. “Keep applying pressure, as much as you can. If you get tired, have someone else take over.”

“I’m okay,” Kevin said determinedly, covering Howie’s wounds with the new dressing.

“What happened to him, anyway?” Riley asked. “Are those… bites?”

“Cuts,” answered Brian. “He fell onto a glass counter. We got to him before he could get bit, though.”

“That’s lucky,” said Kayleigh, without thinking. Everyone just stared at her. “Er… maybe not so much,” she whispered, looking away.

Jo alternated between suturing and checking on AJ. When he’d given a pint of blood, she set it up to transfuse into Howie’s IV line, then started the next donation. Brian offered to go next, and once she’d set him up, Jo returned to Howie. His vitals worried her; his heart rate too high, his blood pressure dangerously low. His heart was racing to circulate the little blood that was left throughout his body. His breathing was rapid and shallow, his body’s last-ditch effort to get enough oxygen to its cells and tissues. He was still losing blood as fast as she could give it to him.

As she hung Brian’s blood on the IV stand and hooked up Riley’s IV, Jo wondered if it was all in vain. But as long as Howie’s heart was beating, she had to keep going, too. She had to keep trying. She’d never forgive herself if she gave up on him too soon. So she took her place beside the gurney once more and continued her work, using tweezers to dig fragments of blood-stained glass out of Howie’s back, then stitching the deep gashes shut. Through her head ran a nursery rhyme she used to recite to Gabby: Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.

What if I can’t do it? she wondered again. What if I can’t put him together again?

When Brian’s blood finished running in, she swapped it for Riley’s and got Kevin ready to donate, while Nick volunteered to put pressure on the remaining open wounds. One by one, they all gave blood, even Gabby, who was too young and too light by Red Cross standards, and Kayleigh, who was terrified of needles, but consented to help Howie. Of them, only Jo did not donate because of the logistics of setting up her own IV while tending to Howie, and Nick, because there was no way to confirm his blood type. Still, eight units were donated, and eight units were transfused. By the time Kayleigh’s blood was running through Howie’s IV, Jo had finished suturing the last of his cuts. She had done all she could. It was a waiting game at that point.

“His vitals are improving,” she told the others. His respiratory and heart rate were down, his blood pressure higher than before. Both good signs.

“Is he going to make it?” Kevin wanted to know, voicing the question everyone was wondering, yet no one else seemed willing to ask.

“I hope so,” said Jo. “The fact that he’s still alive is encouraging.” But there were still so many things that could go wrong. A transfusion reaction… infection… internal hemorrhage… She had only treated the external injuries, the ones she could see. She didn’t have the skills to operate, should he have internal bleeding, too.

“Is there anything else we can do?”

Jo’s answer to that was simple. “Pray.”

***

They sat with their chairs in a circle, around the perimeter of the darkened hospital room. In the center lay Howie, still unconscious. They’d moved him to a bed, hoping he’d be able to rest comfortably until his body recovered from the massive blood loss.

While he slept, they had formed a prayer circle around him, praying for his survival. Jo knew not everyone in their group believed in God, but AJ and even Brian, after his tirade, had joined hands with them and bowed their heads. Perhaps they didn’t believe in the power of prayer, as she did, but the gesture showed their love for their friend. Howie hadn’t always been the easiest person to get along with on the base, but he was one of them now. He was family. And none of them could bear the thought of losing him. They had lost too many friends, too many family members, already.

Night was falling now, but none of them wanted to leave Howie alone. To conserve electricity, they’d left the lights off; the room was lit only by the monitor Jo had hooked Howie up to, which ran off the medical center’s emergency generator. It kept track of his vital signs, freeing her from the task of checking them every fifteen minutes. His heart rate was back to normal now, his blood pressure still low. All in all, he seemed stable. Without the donated blood, though, he surely would have bled to death.

She looked around the circle at the others, all of them with the same blood type. What were the odds? It couldn’t have been a coincidence. Not even God or fate would have brought ten people, all with B positive blood, together as the sole survivors of the zombie apocalypse. There had to be something more to it than that. Something scientific.

“Is that it, then?” she wondered aloud. “Is that all there is to it? Our blood type made us immune to the virus?”

It seemed too simple, but what other explanation was there?

“Maybe…” said Gretchen uncertainly.

“It’d be a damn freaky coincidence otherwise,” added AJ.

It was Brian who said, “It can’t be that.” They all looked at him. “It can’t be that, for the same reason our immunity wasn’t somehow inherited, either. Blood type is genetic, too. My twin girls had the same type as me. B positive. If that’s all that gave us immunity, they wouldn’t have caught the virus.”

He spoke in the same deadened tone he always used on the rare occasions he brought up his family, and despite their earlier differences, Jo’s heart went out to him. She knew what it was like to lose a spouse, but she could not imagine losing her child, too. Why had Gabby survived the pandemic, when his daughters had not?

“Maybe it’s a rare antibody in our blood,” Jo suggested. She knew that, even within the same blood type, there were differences caused by antibodies. It was the reason matching organs for transplantation was such a complicated process. Two people of the same blood type might not be a good match, and even a good match required powerful immunosuppressant drugs to keep the immune system from attacking the donor organ. Yet antibodies also defended the body against truly harmful antigens, including viruses. Could it be that they were the lucky few with an antibody that protected them from the Osiris Virus?

They discussed the possibility for awhile, but of course, they could reach no definitive conclusions. They might never know the key to their survival, at least not in their time on this earth. Jo hoped the answers lay beyond, that when she went home to Heaven, she would know everything. But until then, they could only wonder.

“When do you think he’ll wake up?” asked Nick, after they’d gotten quiet again, leaning forward to look at Howie.

Jo shook her head. “Hard to say. He was in hypovolemic shock from the blood loss. His body just needs time to recover.”

Nick nodded. He didn’t look satisfied, but he accepted the answer and sat back in his seat. As he leaned against the back of his chair, Jo saw him wince, a flicker of pain shooting across his face.

“Nick? Are you alright?” she asked in concern.

“Yeah?” Nick looked surprised. “Why?”

“You looked like you were in pain there for a moment.”

“Oh…” He glanced away. “It’s nothin’. I just got mistaken for a bowling pin back at the alley.” He tried to grin, but it came off looking more like a grimace.

“Stand up,” ordered Jo, getting up herself. She flipped on a light on her way over to Nick. “Turn around.”

Nick obeyed, childlike in his overgrown body, still programmed to listen to a motherly voice. With gentle hands, Jo lifted the back of his t-shirt. In the sudden, bright light, the pattern of bruises across his back stood out: a horizontal contusion, where he’d been banged against the edge of something hard, and a series of vaguely circular bruises that dotted his shoulders and neck. Fingerprints, she realized, disturbed by the familiar formation of bruises. It was the kind of pattern she saw on victims of abuse and strangulation, people who had been grabbed and choked by a pair of human hands. Zombie hands, in this case.

“You weren’t bitten, were you?” she asked quietly, as she inspected his skin for tears and teeth marks. But there were none, only bruises.

Nick shook his head. “I didn’t fit so well through that hole where the pins go.”

“It’s your big ol’ head,” joked Brian, grinning. “Like trying to fit a square peg through a round hole… or vice versa, I guess.”

The others chuckled, and Jo let Nick sit back down, satisfied that he’d live. Their attention returned to Howie.

Their vigil at his bedside lasted into the night, and just when Jo was about to suggest that Kevin take Gabby home, their patience was rewarded, when Howie’s eyes fluttered open at last.

“What happened?” he croaked.

“Get him a glass of water, someone,” Jo said, as she hurried to his side. “Welcome back to us, Howard.” She smiled down at him. “You’re going to be okay,” she assured him, softly stroking his arm. “You lost a lot of blood, and I took enough glass out of your back to make a mosaic, but you’re on the mend now.”

Gretchen brought a glass of water, and she helped him lift his head enough to take a few sips. His eyelids drooped, and she knew he was still weak. He would need time and rest to recover. Eventually, he would want to know how they’d managed to control his bleeding, and she would have quite the story to tell. But for now, she told him only, “Lie back and relax. You’re safe here.”

She spoke the words convincingly, but she knew, as Howie knew, that they weren’t an absolute truth. In the undead world, safety was relative. They may have been immune to the virus that had turned their friends and neighbors to zombies, but they were still under constant threat. They would never, ever be truly safe. Not there. Not anywhere.

Still, as Howie settled back against his pillows and drifted off to sleep once more, Jo’s gaze shifted from him to Nick, and she offered up a silent prayer of thanks.

Thank you, Lord, my rock and my shield. Thank You for Your protection.

***