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fandom: House, MD, slight H/W, apocafic
rating: who knows these days. it's safe for anybody who doesn't have adverse reaction to apocolyptic situations, men kissing, and biting sarcasm
notes: Tahlia mused about an House apocafic. I couldn't get the idea out of my system, but I scared myself with this one, guys. carry on.
Day 1
12:06 A.M.
Linda Alley’s been on the night shift of Princeton-Plainsboro since she graduated nursing school. She went to Princeton-Plainsboro for that too. At any other hospital, closer to the city, closer to Camden, she’d be a hardened veteran of two a.m. gunshot wounds and death by exposure. At an Ivy-league associated hospital this late at night, she only sees alcohol binges and unsuccessful suicide attempts.
Poor kids, she thinks, and poor me, stuck in this hospital while the world sleeps, hardly ever seeing daylight. It’s worse in the winter. Immune systems are down, red-eyed parents bring their kids into the emergency room for a cough, and so they run into the Princeton-induced binges, and they see their worst nightmares of the future.
Poor kids.
An old man with a broken hip moans about his pain, and coughs into a nurse's face. He is wheeled into the elevator as Linda opens the next curtain. A young man grimaces as her. His long brown hair hides his face a little bit, but the style doesn’t fit with his clothes, solid colors and jeans that actually fit correctly. His hands are twitching, and his eyes are darting back and forth.
“Hello.” Linda flips open her chart. “What seems to be wrong?”
“I feel…” The young man doubles over and throws up over the side of the bed. Linda backs up to avoid the puke and to try to catch him from careening over to one side, but he has already fallen to the floor, retching and gasping and coughing and it sounds like his stomach and his lungs are fighting their way up his throat, clawing out like they’ve come to life. He drips sweat from his forehead and his face turns deeper and deeper red. Linda realizes that he is younger than she first thought. He is still somewhat a boy, maybe still in high school.
She calls for a doctor; she tries to calm his cough and relax his throat.
The doctor on call rushes in, but Super-flu Andrew (as the journalists will refer to him later) is already coughing up blood.
11:21 A.M.
For the first and last time, House gets his differential diagnosis from CNN.
A midday anchor announces breaking news and there on screen is on-the-scene reporter, standing in a hospital waiting room. The anxiety in the man’s voice doesn’t match up to the complete lack of movement and the pale beige color of the hospital walls behind him.
City hospitals are reporting overwhelming levels of admitted patients, Jeanine, who all seem to have similar symptoms. No official word from the CDC yet, but an inside source says that the center is treating this as local outbreak, but of the security level of an air-borne contagion.
Chris, what symptoms have you –
And there is a crash behind the reporter and the camera whips around to capture a pregnant woman rushing through a door and falling across a slippery hospital floor. Cameron winces when the woman falls. The pregnant woman stays on the floor and sits, barely making words out between coughs and tears.
My little baby… little girl… what if she…what if… she’ll catch it too.
House walks closer to the TV, and CNN, being considerate, zooms the camera in on the woman.
“Hysteria. Intensive sweating. Dry cough. Rapid blinking. Anybody think she looks a little yellow? Or is the color just off on this TV?”
Foreman and Cameron share a look across the table.
“We have a new case this morning. The woman with the hair loss and amnesia…” Foreman says.
“Let’s chalk that one up to old age.” House wipes the white-board clean and begins writing the pregnant woman’s visual symptoms.
Cuddy slides in through the door and motions towards the TV, her hair is out of place, and it looks like she’s been running.
“Where is our young Australian friend?” House asks.
“He took today off,” she says. “A long weekend in the city. Said he’d been back tomorrow. Is…”
CNN has broken off their feed of the reporter and the pregnant woman and the bare hospital walls. The anchor begins to talk to a M.D. Cuddy listens for a moment and her mouth changes every so slightly before she looks at House.
“Is the balding woman critical?” she asks.
“Unless the fact it’s usually male pattern baldness and she thinks the Gipper is still in the White House…”
“I need all of you in the E.R. We’ve had thirty-six admits in the past hour, all with the same symptoms.”
“… as New York?” Cameron asks.
She only says: “It’s an emergency.”
Cameron and Foreman are up from their seats immediately and through the door. House stays by the whiteboard. Cuddy closes the door behind her, only saying “Don’t freeze up now. House, not now.” He feels the room go cold, the sterility of the hospital suddenly threatening.
He shakes it off, the room is normal, same as everyday. The faucet drips, the red marker lies unused and eternally capped on the base of the whiteboard. He wonders if General Hospital will still be on at its regular time.
5:35 P.M.
Foreman rushes around the E.R., a thin face mask and some loosely tied surgical scrubs his only protection.
House walks up to the glass divider and taps on it. An overcrowded room of patients and doctors look up. It is hard to tell the difference. He gets Foreman’s attention and motions. Foreman glares, and walks towards the divider.
“Are you going to help me” Foreman’s voice is hoarse. “Or are you going to stop bothering me?”
“I don’t see why I couldn’t do both, but I was mainly wondering if Cuddy knew that you’re not following hospital quarantine procedures.”
Foreman snaps off his face mask so House can see his whole face. “Go back to your office. There’s a bunch of sick people here, and you can’t treat people.”
House bristles at the sight of Foreman walking back into the maelstrom of people and carts. Hospital beds have been lined up in the lobby; he took the back door out at lunch.
“What are you trying to prove, Foreman?”
Foreman takes a hard right and comes back at him, with his own challenge. He stifles a cough. “That I’m not just your lackey. That I can be a good doctor. That I can save some people here today. What are you trying to prove?”
House snorts in laughter hard enough that Foreman flinches.
“That I don’t have false hope.”
Foreman stalks off to attend to an elderly woman next to the wall. His body eases when he stands by her bedside, but his anger is still there. The woman is too sick to notice anything. He places his hand on hers, leaning over to hear her whisper.
Later, Foreman will lean on the attending desk to support his weight and say: “She asked me if I was scared.”
“What did you tell her?” House will lean forward like a priest in a confessional, chomping through a perfectly ripe orange.
“That I wasn’t.” Foreman will respond. “I really wasn’t.”
The woman smiles sadly at Foreman’s response. The next instant, she convulses, the last of her life shaking out of her. He lets go of her hand to grab a needle, and she is gone.
Day 2
6:05 A.M.
Lisa Cuddy wakes up to the long side of a pencil pressing up against her cheek and drool pooling around today’s date in her appointment book. The light is coming in through the wooden blinds in her office, waking her where she passed out four hours earlier.
She’d fallen asleep at her desk in med school a lot, an uncomfortable sleep in which she had short and disturbing dreams that couldn’t quite be called nightmares. She certainly didn’t remember dreaming now.
Her television has been left on and a panicked anchor’s voice fills her office. As she wakes, Cuddy begins to recognize that her body is feverishly hot, her mind muddled by pain, so she closes her eyes and focuses on the words instead. Massive contagion… closed airports…20 hour incubation period. She forces her eyelids open and sees Hazmat suits carrying bodies across the Avenue of the Americas. She closes her eyes and replaces her head on the desk. No reports from the West Coast or Chicago yet the anchor says, but even with the airports closed it will near impossible to stop a widespread infection. No official reports have been released, but it’s estimated that 1 million have already been infected with the past day and the death toll is creeping up towards 500,000. The feed changes and to a reporter sits outside a city hospital. There are patients in the parking lot and ambulances crashed into one another. The reporter looks like he’s supposed to be saying something, but he simply sits on a stone wall, and looks down an empty street, coughing. He finally turns to the camera and only says: The estimations are conservative. It’s much worse than we thought. It’s over. The whole fucking city is over.
Then the anchor is back, pausing a moment in silence and unpreperation. Cuddy finds the remote in her deck drawer and turns it off. The sound of sirens, screams, and groans cuts out. Outside her office, Plainsboro is silent.
10:13 A.M.
Chase died quickly. He never saw the light at the end of the Lincoln Tunnel.
In the short run, nuking the city was a bad decision, but there was panic and there was absolute fear, and there were the images of rows of hospital beds, their inhabitants’ eyes sucked dry of hope. In the long run, it was a mercy killing.
The President is already pale when he makes the address.
10:29 A.M.
The trip from Wilson’s house to Princeton-Plainsboro takes 50 minutes on a good day. His house is a suburban monument, although there are no kids playing on his lawn, no bumper stickers affixed to his Lexus. He gets on the highway a mile from his house, by way of another subdivision, where people actually walk out with coffee to get the morning newspaper, sleepily waving at the person they might know.
Today, he takes the back roads and he’s still driving after two hours. Cars are abandoned on the turnpike, and the moving traffic starts to push them aside. There is a house on fire on the corner of an intersection and his first reaction is to stop the car and try to help. He cannot think of how he could, though. He is not a firefighter, not a daredevil. If there was anyone in that house in the first place, they are not alive now.
As he drives along, he replays the fresh memory of radioactive fallout almost blowing his car off the road and tries not to think about what that means. His hands grip the steering wheel tighter, knowing that when he sees the sign in the parking lot, the sign that cheerily reminds patients that Princeton-Plainsboro is ‘a teaching hospital,' all the strength and adrenaline will rush out of him, leaving only radioactive decay.
He’s got to get to the hospital.
4:22 P.M.
Wilson considers the phrase “last man on earth” and its usual prefix, “I wouldn’t do that even if I was the." The title will probably belong to House. House who is sitting next to his hospital bed, staring off into the red and firelight and smoke framed by a window. Gregory House, M.D.: the last man on earth. There will not be a damn thing he can do about it. Not one person who can lie to him, because everyone will be gone.
“Are you going to say something, or are you just going to lay there, creeping me out?” he says, still looking out the window.
“What should I say?”
“How sorry you are for getting yourself a lethal dose of radiation?”
“You shouldn’t be in here,” Wilson says “I could still be emitting.”
“What, are you an expert on this or something?” He turns to glare at Wilson. “Stop trying to get rid of me.” His smile cracks a little and he returns to the window.
Wilson feels his skin crawl; feels it tingle and slide and creep right up and down his arm. He starts to multiply roentgens, divide half-lives, and add days. There is no reason why he couldn’t be up in a few hours, when the residual radiation is gone and he’s got a couple days before he starts vomiting up blood. He should be helping where he can in E.R. He is a doctor, after all.
The ironic thing is, he’s probably not infected. He’d probably have lived otherwise.
Day 3
8:56 A.M.
Wilson has to sit down. Today he is feeling weaker. Today he can feel the life drain out of him from his fingertips and his insides heating and churning. Or he could be imagining that. Too much literature on radiation treatment and safety.
House walks back through the kitchen with two cans of beans and bowl full of Jello. He’s got an industrial-sized spoon that the cafeteria ladies ladle food out with and the dessert is colored radioactive green.
“Very clever, House. Make a joke about the impending nuclear winter.” Wilson shakes his head.
“See? You assume the morbid joke. I couldn’t find the blue, and come on, we all know the orange tastes like puke.” He puts one of the cans, pried open, in front of Wilson. “Oh, you’re probably going to want a spoon too.”
“Unless you want to see beans and brown sauce all over my tie.”
“Come on, give a dying man his last wish.” House says with a sneer.
Wilson looks at House without sympathy or care for the first time in his life. “Are you still going to be a bastard when there’s nobody around?”
“Just because it’s the end of the world, doesn’t mean I’m going to be Mother Teresa, or worse, Cameron. People don’t change, especially when things are disastrous. Haven’t you been in medicine long enough?” He props himself up with his elbows and leans over towards him. “Besides, you’re already dead. I’ve been dying for years.”
“You’ll be happier.”
“What did I tell you about people?”
“You’ll be happier without anyone to bother you.” Wilson pushes his chair away from the table slowly, and gets up even slower.
“Good-bye.” He turns. “Good luck.”
“And where are you going this early in the morning?” House leans back in his chair, slurping Jello.
“Back home. I’m a hospice patient.” He smiles a little. “I’m going to die at home.”
House snorts. “Yeah, right, like you’re going anywhere.”
Wilson shakes his head and leaves. House waits ten minutes, finishes his Jello and walks to the parking lot.
It’s just what he’s figured. Wilson passed out in his car before he even got it started. House pushes him over to the passenger seat and drives him home, over the hills of the back roads, watching a cold grey cloud cover up what’s left of the sunny sky as his best friend sleeps.
House lets them in with a key on Wilson’s keychain. Wilson is back up, and tells him he’s at least going to make some tea before he needs to rest again. House drops into a chair, cataloguing the contents of the far wall of his living room. Around the fireplace are shelves built into the wall, painted bright white against the forest green of the wall. There is no place on the wall that is not carved off, separated into boxes of various sizes and shapes. They are cell cultures of his life. Some shelves have books, others are devoted to pictures. There are cousins and sisters and wives, all wives, and Wilson doesn’t seem to notice that House is staring at the picture of absent wife number four when he finds his way to the couch opposite him.
“So, do you want me to read you a bed time story?” House snaps his stare away from the wall.
“What?”
“I thought the one about the doctor who refuses to stay in a hospital when he’s sick would be good. It’s a cautionary tale. ”
“I’m going to die here, in this bed. Give me those novels. Give me that cup of tea. Let me be. There’s nothing left to diagnose. I know how I’ll die. Let me do it.”
Outside, snow fell in the June afternoon. It was ash, grey and white and softly falling on the grass.
“Why do you have to be so mean to me?” House gets up, hovers over Wilson, and folds his arms.
Wilson studies him for a moment. “Come here,” he says.
“What sort of Betty Grable routine is this?” House rolls his eyes.
“Shut up, come here.”
House sits down, facing him. Wilson says. “‘Cause people don’t change.” He leans over and kisses him slowly.
“Now get out.” Wilson says. “Don’t be here when I die.”
House leans there, waiting for something else to happen, waiting for the ash cloud to pass. At the nape of Wilson’s neck, a pustule is beginning to form. He squeezes his eyes closed and gets off the couch.
“Hope the tea’s good.” House says, feeling joyous and sick simultaneously. He leaves the door open when he leaves, so the house will not be so revoltingly warm.
8:45 P.M.
He drives back to the hospital. It is better than going home.
He finds Cameron sitting in the lab, lit by a single overhead lamp she has cramped her work into. Her back arches into a C over the desk, her hair threatening to fall completely out of her rushed ponytail.
When he motions to the other lights, she says, “The other ones were broken when the looters came in,” like she is mentioning the weather.
“There were looters?” He looks around and starts noticing little things. Broken windows, an alarm sounding somewhere in the distance; the overhead lights in the lab are all gone.
“They came in around lunch,” she says. House knows that she means noon and wonders when the last time Cameron ate was. She curls her fingers into a ball and stretches them out again. “Cuddy tried to reason with them….”
“What are you doing?”
“Testing the pathogen’s response against various inoculations. The inability for any patient to respond to antibiotics doesn’t necessarily mean that it isn’t something else. I figure if I can observe how the pathogen mutates…” She keeps trailing off, partly because she has nothing else to say, and because it doesn’t seem to matter anyway.
He wants to make a sarcastic remark. It is taking him a little longer than it should, which is a half of a second. Cameron hasn’t even looked up from her microscope.
“Foreman died an hour ago.” He says. Proving something, he wants to add.
“I know.” She finally looks up, her hands flying up to her face to hide a tear in the corner of her eye. “We should contact his family when it’s safer. It’s the least we can do, right?”
“If his family is alive.”
Cameron grimaces quickly and writes on a scrap of paper. “Someone’s got to.” She returns to the microscope and coughs.
Later, she passes out on the computer’s keyboard. She doesn’t even wake to the sound of a thousand error messages, a little box on the screen informing her that “Virtual Memory Overloaded. Please end operations.” House lifts her head and places it back on her forearm leaning on the desk. He can’t lift her up entirely.
Drool leaks out of the corner of her mouth; he wipes it off on his sleeve. For a moment he wants to press his tongue to the wet spot on his shirt, damning him along with her and the others.
He goes back to his office, to watch the two channels left broadcasting on the TV. One is replaying the minutes of Plainsboro’s latest town meeting. Hours of discussion on water mains comes to a happy end when the alderman announces that his mother will turn 102 next week, officially making her the oldest town denizen in Plainsboro history.
The other channel is a woman shouting through the TV, denouncing the evils of a godless country from her basement. Her guest shouts a couple of amens along with her until she has calmed, and says, “But we are strong, we have each other in God, sister.”
He falls asleep as their signals inevitably turn to snow.
Day 4
10:36 A.M.
Cameron finds a spot in the kids’ waiting area to sit down in. House is already there, his eyes closed, humming along with the music pumping out of his iPod. She props herself up against a garishly bright red bean bag. A week ago they used this area to tell two parents that their younger daughter had cancer. It probably means nothing to them now, if they’re alive.
She goes into a coughing attack, the third this hour. House’s eyes snap open and he pushes his half drunk water bottle at her.
“Finish it. I don’t want it back.”
She considers spitting in his face, but takes the bottle. Maybe her immune system is strong enough, maybe she just needs a few hours of rest to recharge. But she closes her eyes and sees rows and rows of pale bodies, violently ill a few hours ago, but now just lying, waiting for death. She blinks them open again to find House staring at her.
“What.” It’s not a question.
“I’m wondering why I never contracted the disease. It’s persistent, airborne, mutative.” House says.
“No disease kills 100 percent of the population. Pandemics can be as low as 40 percent.”
“You see a lot of living people hanging around here?”
“Just you and me.” Cameron finishes the water, and throws the plastic bottle down on the D in the alphabet rug. Her bloodshot eyes start to wander across the hallway, avoiding the elevator wedged open, stuck between floors. “We should have seen this coming. We should have prepared better.”
“Nice thing, hindsight.”
She laughs quietly, but her high pitched voice fills up the children’s area. She reaches over and pulls the headphones out of his ears, cups his face and kisses him lightly on the cheek.
“You’re not going anywhere, huh?” She starts coughing again. Her stomach feels turned inside out; she feels sweat beading everywhere, but it’s not cooling her down.
“Wish I was.” He cocks his head and smiles at her. “But it doesn’t look like it, so you’re stuck with me.”
“Damn.” She says, in a whisper.
Day 5
12:12 a.m.
His cane hits the tile floor and reverberates off the glass dividers of the hospital. Knock thump knock thump knock thump, a steady sound with no one else to listen. A cart of bed linens is left unattended in the center of the hallway; a few vials have fallen to the floor, making glass and dried plasma kaleidoscopes. Most made a point to die in their hospital beds or in the E.R. or in their homes, but one man is slumped against the side of the tree in the atrium part of the lobby. There is a gun at his side, streaked with his own blood, and House realizes he must have been one of the looters. The dead man is framed by the broken window, where he was thrown through.
There is a breeze through the glass, cold with a little ash.
House gets onto his motorcycle and rides off towards the turnpike. Maybe someone will be there to collect the tolls.
fandom: House, MD, slight H/W, apocafic
rating: who knows these days. it's safe for anybody who doesn't have adverse reaction to apocolyptic situations, men kissing, and biting sarcasm
notes: Tahlia mused about an House apocafic. I couldn't get the idea out of my system, but I scared myself with this one, guys. carry on.
Day 1
12:06 A.M.
Linda Alley’s been on the night shift of Princeton-Plainsboro since she graduated nursing school. She went to Princeton-Plainsboro for that too. At any other hospital, closer to the city, closer to Camden, she’d be a hardened veteran of two a.m. gunshot wounds and death by exposure. At an Ivy-league associated hospital this late at night, she only sees alcohol binges and unsuccessful suicide attempts.
Poor kids, she thinks, and poor me, stuck in this hospital while the world sleeps, hardly ever seeing daylight. It’s worse in the winter. Immune systems are down, red-eyed parents bring their kids into the emergency room for a cough, and so they run into the Princeton-induced binges, and they see their worst nightmares of the future.
Poor kids.
An old man with a broken hip moans about his pain, and coughs into a nurse's face. He is wheeled into the elevator as Linda opens the next curtain. A young man grimaces as her. His long brown hair hides his face a little bit, but the style doesn’t fit with his clothes, solid colors and jeans that actually fit correctly. His hands are twitching, and his eyes are darting back and forth.
“Hello.” Linda flips open her chart. “What seems to be wrong?”
“I feel…” The young man doubles over and throws up over the side of the bed. Linda backs up to avoid the puke and to try to catch him from careening over to one side, but he has already fallen to the floor, retching and gasping and coughing and it sounds like his stomach and his lungs are fighting their way up his throat, clawing out like they’ve come to life. He drips sweat from his forehead and his face turns deeper and deeper red. Linda realizes that he is younger than she first thought. He is still somewhat a boy, maybe still in high school.
She calls for a doctor; she tries to calm his cough and relax his throat.
The doctor on call rushes in, but Super-flu Andrew (as the journalists will refer to him later) is already coughing up blood.
11:21 A.M.
For the first and last time, House gets his differential diagnosis from CNN.
A midday anchor announces breaking news and there on screen is on-the-scene reporter, standing in a hospital waiting room. The anxiety in the man’s voice doesn’t match up to the complete lack of movement and the pale beige color of the hospital walls behind him.
City hospitals are reporting overwhelming levels of admitted patients, Jeanine, who all seem to have similar symptoms. No official word from the CDC yet, but an inside source says that the center is treating this as local outbreak, but of the security level of an air-borne contagion.
Chris, what symptoms have you –
And there is a crash behind the reporter and the camera whips around to capture a pregnant woman rushing through a door and falling across a slippery hospital floor. Cameron winces when the woman falls. The pregnant woman stays on the floor and sits, barely making words out between coughs and tears.
My little baby… little girl… what if she…what if… she’ll catch it too.
House walks closer to the TV, and CNN, being considerate, zooms the camera in on the woman.
“Hysteria. Intensive sweating. Dry cough. Rapid blinking. Anybody think she looks a little yellow? Or is the color just off on this TV?”
Foreman and Cameron share a look across the table.
“We have a new case this morning. The woman with the hair loss and amnesia…” Foreman says.
“Let’s chalk that one up to old age.” House wipes the white-board clean and begins writing the pregnant woman’s visual symptoms.
Cuddy slides in through the door and motions towards the TV, her hair is out of place, and it looks like she’s been running.
“Where is our young Australian friend?” House asks.
“He took today off,” she says. “A long weekend in the city. Said he’d been back tomorrow. Is…”
CNN has broken off their feed of the reporter and the pregnant woman and the bare hospital walls. The anchor begins to talk to a M.D. Cuddy listens for a moment and her mouth changes every so slightly before she looks at House.
“Is the balding woman critical?” she asks.
“Unless the fact it’s usually male pattern baldness and she thinks the Gipper is still in the White House…”
“I need all of you in the E.R. We’ve had thirty-six admits in the past hour, all with the same symptoms.”
“… as New York?” Cameron asks.
She only says: “It’s an emergency.”
Cameron and Foreman are up from their seats immediately and through the door. House stays by the whiteboard. Cuddy closes the door behind her, only saying “Don’t freeze up now. House, not now.” He feels the room go cold, the sterility of the hospital suddenly threatening.
He shakes it off, the room is normal, same as everyday. The faucet drips, the red marker lies unused and eternally capped on the base of the whiteboard. He wonders if General Hospital will still be on at its regular time.
5:35 P.M.
Foreman rushes around the E.R., a thin face mask and some loosely tied surgical scrubs his only protection.
House walks up to the glass divider and taps on it. An overcrowded room of patients and doctors look up. It is hard to tell the difference. He gets Foreman’s attention and motions. Foreman glares, and walks towards the divider.
“Are you going to help me” Foreman’s voice is hoarse. “Or are you going to stop bothering me?”
“I don’t see why I couldn’t do both, but I was mainly wondering if Cuddy knew that you’re not following hospital quarantine procedures.”
Foreman snaps off his face mask so House can see his whole face. “Go back to your office. There’s a bunch of sick people here, and you can’t treat people.”
House bristles at the sight of Foreman walking back into the maelstrom of people and carts. Hospital beds have been lined up in the lobby; he took the back door out at lunch.
“What are you trying to prove, Foreman?”
Foreman takes a hard right and comes back at him, with his own challenge. He stifles a cough. “That I’m not just your lackey. That I can be a good doctor. That I can save some people here today. What are you trying to prove?”
House snorts in laughter hard enough that Foreman flinches.
“That I don’t have false hope.”
Foreman stalks off to attend to an elderly woman next to the wall. His body eases when he stands by her bedside, but his anger is still there. The woman is too sick to notice anything. He places his hand on hers, leaning over to hear her whisper.
Later, Foreman will lean on the attending desk to support his weight and say: “She asked me if I was scared.”
“What did you tell her?” House will lean forward like a priest in a confessional, chomping through a perfectly ripe orange.
“That I wasn’t.” Foreman will respond. “I really wasn’t.”
The woman smiles sadly at Foreman’s response. The next instant, she convulses, the last of her life shaking out of her. He lets go of her hand to grab a needle, and she is gone.
Day 2
6:05 A.M.
Lisa Cuddy wakes up to the long side of a pencil pressing up against her cheek and drool pooling around today’s date in her appointment book. The light is coming in through the wooden blinds in her office, waking her where she passed out four hours earlier.
She’d fallen asleep at her desk in med school a lot, an uncomfortable sleep in which she had short and disturbing dreams that couldn’t quite be called nightmares. She certainly didn’t remember dreaming now.
Her television has been left on and a panicked anchor’s voice fills her office. As she wakes, Cuddy begins to recognize that her body is feverishly hot, her mind muddled by pain, so she closes her eyes and focuses on the words instead. Massive contagion… closed airports…20 hour incubation period. She forces her eyelids open and sees Hazmat suits carrying bodies across the Avenue of the Americas. She closes her eyes and replaces her head on the desk. No reports from the West Coast or Chicago yet the anchor says, but even with the airports closed it will near impossible to stop a widespread infection. No official reports have been released, but it’s estimated that 1 million have already been infected with the past day and the death toll is creeping up towards 500,000. The feed changes and to a reporter sits outside a city hospital. There are patients in the parking lot and ambulances crashed into one another. The reporter looks like he’s supposed to be saying something, but he simply sits on a stone wall, and looks down an empty street, coughing. He finally turns to the camera and only says: The estimations are conservative. It’s much worse than we thought. It’s over. The whole fucking city is over.
Then the anchor is back, pausing a moment in silence and unpreperation. Cuddy finds the remote in her deck drawer and turns it off. The sound of sirens, screams, and groans cuts out. Outside her office, Plainsboro is silent.
10:13 A.M.
Chase died quickly. He never saw the light at the end of the Lincoln Tunnel.
In the short run, nuking the city was a bad decision, but there was panic and there was absolute fear, and there were the images of rows of hospital beds, their inhabitants’ eyes sucked dry of hope. In the long run, it was a mercy killing.
The President is already pale when he makes the address.
10:29 A.M.
The trip from Wilson’s house to Princeton-Plainsboro takes 50 minutes on a good day. His house is a suburban monument, although there are no kids playing on his lawn, no bumper stickers affixed to his Lexus. He gets on the highway a mile from his house, by way of another subdivision, where people actually walk out with coffee to get the morning newspaper, sleepily waving at the person they might know.
Today, he takes the back roads and he’s still driving after two hours. Cars are abandoned on the turnpike, and the moving traffic starts to push them aside. There is a house on fire on the corner of an intersection and his first reaction is to stop the car and try to help. He cannot think of how he could, though. He is not a firefighter, not a daredevil. If there was anyone in that house in the first place, they are not alive now.
As he drives along, he replays the fresh memory of radioactive fallout almost blowing his car off the road and tries not to think about what that means. His hands grip the steering wheel tighter, knowing that when he sees the sign in the parking lot, the sign that cheerily reminds patients that Princeton-Plainsboro is ‘a teaching hospital,' all the strength and adrenaline will rush out of him, leaving only radioactive decay.
He’s got to get to the hospital.
4:22 P.M.
Wilson considers the phrase “last man on earth” and its usual prefix, “I wouldn’t do that even if I was the." The title will probably belong to House. House who is sitting next to his hospital bed, staring off into the red and firelight and smoke framed by a window. Gregory House, M.D.: the last man on earth. There will not be a damn thing he can do about it. Not one person who can lie to him, because everyone will be gone.
“Are you going to say something, or are you just going to lay there, creeping me out?” he says, still looking out the window.
“What should I say?”
“How sorry you are for getting yourself a lethal dose of radiation?”
“You shouldn’t be in here,” Wilson says “I could still be emitting.”
“What, are you an expert on this or something?” He turns to glare at Wilson. “Stop trying to get rid of me.” His smile cracks a little and he returns to the window.
Wilson feels his skin crawl; feels it tingle and slide and creep right up and down his arm. He starts to multiply roentgens, divide half-lives, and add days. There is no reason why he couldn’t be up in a few hours, when the residual radiation is gone and he’s got a couple days before he starts vomiting up blood. He should be helping where he can in E.R. He is a doctor, after all.
The ironic thing is, he’s probably not infected. He’d probably have lived otherwise.
Day 3
8:56 A.M.
Wilson has to sit down. Today he is feeling weaker. Today he can feel the life drain out of him from his fingertips and his insides heating and churning. Or he could be imagining that. Too much literature on radiation treatment and safety.
House walks back through the kitchen with two cans of beans and bowl full of Jello. He’s got an industrial-sized spoon that the cafeteria ladies ladle food out with and the dessert is colored radioactive green.
“Very clever, House. Make a joke about the impending nuclear winter.” Wilson shakes his head.
“See? You assume the morbid joke. I couldn’t find the blue, and come on, we all know the orange tastes like puke.” He puts one of the cans, pried open, in front of Wilson. “Oh, you’re probably going to want a spoon too.”
“Unless you want to see beans and brown sauce all over my tie.”
“Come on, give a dying man his last wish.” House says with a sneer.
Wilson looks at House without sympathy or care for the first time in his life. “Are you still going to be a bastard when there’s nobody around?”
“Just because it’s the end of the world, doesn’t mean I’m going to be Mother Teresa, or worse, Cameron. People don’t change, especially when things are disastrous. Haven’t you been in medicine long enough?” He props himself up with his elbows and leans over towards him. “Besides, you’re already dead. I’ve been dying for years.”
“You’ll be happier.”
“What did I tell you about people?”
“You’ll be happier without anyone to bother you.” Wilson pushes his chair away from the table slowly, and gets up even slower.
“Good-bye.” He turns. “Good luck.”
“And where are you going this early in the morning?” House leans back in his chair, slurping Jello.
“Back home. I’m a hospice patient.” He smiles a little. “I’m going to die at home.”
House snorts. “Yeah, right, like you’re going anywhere.”
Wilson shakes his head and leaves. House waits ten minutes, finishes his Jello and walks to the parking lot.
It’s just what he’s figured. Wilson passed out in his car before he even got it started. House pushes him over to the passenger seat and drives him home, over the hills of the back roads, watching a cold grey cloud cover up what’s left of the sunny sky as his best friend sleeps.
House lets them in with a key on Wilson’s keychain. Wilson is back up, and tells him he’s at least going to make some tea before he needs to rest again. House drops into a chair, cataloguing the contents of the far wall of his living room. Around the fireplace are shelves built into the wall, painted bright white against the forest green of the wall. There is no place on the wall that is not carved off, separated into boxes of various sizes and shapes. They are cell cultures of his life. Some shelves have books, others are devoted to pictures. There are cousins and sisters and wives, all wives, and Wilson doesn’t seem to notice that House is staring at the picture of absent wife number four when he finds his way to the couch opposite him.
“So, do you want me to read you a bed time story?” House snaps his stare away from the wall.
“What?”
“I thought the one about the doctor who refuses to stay in a hospital when he’s sick would be good. It’s a cautionary tale. ”
“I’m going to die here, in this bed. Give me those novels. Give me that cup of tea. Let me be. There’s nothing left to diagnose. I know how I’ll die. Let me do it.”
Outside, snow fell in the June afternoon. It was ash, grey and white and softly falling on the grass.
“Why do you have to be so mean to me?” House gets up, hovers over Wilson, and folds his arms.
Wilson studies him for a moment. “Come here,” he says.
“What sort of Betty Grable routine is this?” House rolls his eyes.
“Shut up, come here.”
House sits down, facing him. Wilson says. “‘Cause people don’t change.” He leans over and kisses him slowly.
“Now get out.” Wilson says. “Don’t be here when I die.”
House leans there, waiting for something else to happen, waiting for the ash cloud to pass. At the nape of Wilson’s neck, a pustule is beginning to form. He squeezes his eyes closed and gets off the couch.
“Hope the tea’s good.” House says, feeling joyous and sick simultaneously. He leaves the door open when he leaves, so the house will not be so revoltingly warm.
8:45 P.M.
He drives back to the hospital. It is better than going home.
He finds Cameron sitting in the lab, lit by a single overhead lamp she has cramped her work into. Her back arches into a C over the desk, her hair threatening to fall completely out of her rushed ponytail.
When he motions to the other lights, she says, “The other ones were broken when the looters came in,” like she is mentioning the weather.
“There were looters?” He looks around and starts noticing little things. Broken windows, an alarm sounding somewhere in the distance; the overhead lights in the lab are all gone.
“They came in around lunch,” she says. House knows that she means noon and wonders when the last time Cameron ate was. She curls her fingers into a ball and stretches them out again. “Cuddy tried to reason with them….”
“What are you doing?”
“Testing the pathogen’s response against various inoculations. The inability for any patient to respond to antibiotics doesn’t necessarily mean that it isn’t something else. I figure if I can observe how the pathogen mutates…” She keeps trailing off, partly because she has nothing else to say, and because it doesn’t seem to matter anyway.
He wants to make a sarcastic remark. It is taking him a little longer than it should, which is a half of a second. Cameron hasn’t even looked up from her microscope.
“Foreman died an hour ago.” He says. Proving something, he wants to add.
“I know.” She finally looks up, her hands flying up to her face to hide a tear in the corner of her eye. “We should contact his family when it’s safer. It’s the least we can do, right?”
“If his family is alive.”
Cameron grimaces quickly and writes on a scrap of paper. “Someone’s got to.” She returns to the microscope and coughs.
Later, she passes out on the computer’s keyboard. She doesn’t even wake to the sound of a thousand error messages, a little box on the screen informing her that “Virtual Memory Overloaded. Please end operations.” House lifts her head and places it back on her forearm leaning on the desk. He can’t lift her up entirely.
Drool leaks out of the corner of her mouth; he wipes it off on his sleeve. For a moment he wants to press his tongue to the wet spot on his shirt, damning him along with her and the others.
He goes back to his office, to watch the two channels left broadcasting on the TV. One is replaying the minutes of Plainsboro’s latest town meeting. Hours of discussion on water mains comes to a happy end when the alderman announces that his mother will turn 102 next week, officially making her the oldest town denizen in Plainsboro history.
The other channel is a woman shouting through the TV, denouncing the evils of a godless country from her basement. Her guest shouts a couple of amens along with her until she has calmed, and says, “But we are strong, we have each other in God, sister.”
He falls asleep as their signals inevitably turn to snow.
Day 4
10:36 A.M.
Cameron finds a spot in the kids’ waiting area to sit down in. House is already there, his eyes closed, humming along with the music pumping out of his iPod. She props herself up against a garishly bright red bean bag. A week ago they used this area to tell two parents that their younger daughter had cancer. It probably means nothing to them now, if they’re alive.
She goes into a coughing attack, the third this hour. House’s eyes snap open and he pushes his half drunk water bottle at her.
“Finish it. I don’t want it back.”
She considers spitting in his face, but takes the bottle. Maybe her immune system is strong enough, maybe she just needs a few hours of rest to recharge. But she closes her eyes and sees rows and rows of pale bodies, violently ill a few hours ago, but now just lying, waiting for death. She blinks them open again to find House staring at her.
“What.” It’s not a question.
“I’m wondering why I never contracted the disease. It’s persistent, airborne, mutative.” House says.
“No disease kills 100 percent of the population. Pandemics can be as low as 40 percent.”
“You see a lot of living people hanging around here?”
“Just you and me.” Cameron finishes the water, and throws the plastic bottle down on the D in the alphabet rug. Her bloodshot eyes start to wander across the hallway, avoiding the elevator wedged open, stuck between floors. “We should have seen this coming. We should have prepared better.”
“Nice thing, hindsight.”
She laughs quietly, but her high pitched voice fills up the children’s area. She reaches over and pulls the headphones out of his ears, cups his face and kisses him lightly on the cheek.
“You’re not going anywhere, huh?” She starts coughing again. Her stomach feels turned inside out; she feels sweat beading everywhere, but it’s not cooling her down.
“Wish I was.” He cocks his head and smiles at her. “But it doesn’t look like it, so you’re stuck with me.”
“Damn.” She says, in a whisper.
Day 5
12:12 a.m.
His cane hits the tile floor and reverberates off the glass dividers of the hospital. Knock thump knock thump knock thump, a steady sound with no one else to listen. A cart of bed linens is left unattended in the center of the hallway; a few vials have fallen to the floor, making glass and dried plasma kaleidoscopes. Most made a point to die in their hospital beds or in the E.R. or in their homes, but one man is slumped against the side of the tree in the atrium part of the lobby. There is a gun at his side, streaked with his own blood, and House realizes he must have been one of the looters. The dead man is framed by the broken window, where he was thrown through.
There is a breeze through the glass, cold with a little ash.
House gets onto his motorcycle and rides off towards the turnpike. Maybe someone will be there to collect the tolls.
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no subject
Date: 2006-03-19 11:41 pm (UTC)*wibble*
*flail*
Okay, coherent thought: Liked the spare writing style, oddly loved how scared I was about the nuke (and Wilson, poor Wilson). The bit where House is the only one not infected made me think of The Stand, though, and I kind of imagined him riding off to the last stand in Vegas or something, but I didn't actually mind that as I loved The Stand.
Very scary, and creepy, and wonderful.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-20 01:40 am (UTC)Oh good, as The Stand is basically the book that informs all my apocafic writing and this one (with the flu and all) especially. I finished that 1000 page sucker in a week, and I would dare to say it's King's best.
Thanks :)
no subject
Date: 2006-03-20 10:46 pm (UTC)(*tries not to imagine that this is the Orii plague*)
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Date: 2006-03-20 11:13 pm (UTC)yes, it's DONE, FINALLY. another apocafic to add to my pantheon.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-21 01:44 am (UTC)um.
wow.
um.
*eyes water*
no subject
Date: 2006-05-21 02:06 am (UTC)Out of curiosity, how did you find the fic? I forgot to pimp it outside of my flist.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-21 03:44 am (UTC)Peoples were talking about how House would react in a large-scale pandemic scenario in
Love the fic, so interesting and I enjoy your writing style.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-21 03:18 am (UTC)Amazingly beautiful, and sad, and yet so perfectly House.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go curl up underneath a very warm blanket...
no subject
Date: 2006-06-05 02:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-21 10:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-05 02:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-29 06:18 pm (UTC)Strong and quite chilling.
I'm here from GAFF, where this was recommended as a good read. I've gone ahead and recced this on TWoP.
Looking forward to more of your work!
no subject
Date: 2006-06-05 02:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-29 06:57 pm (UTC)I feel a little shivery now. I'm going to go look at pictures of kittens until I'm better again.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-05 02:34 am (UTC)Glad you liked, and hoped the cute kittens helped.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-30 11:34 pm (UTC)Just commenting to say three things:
1. Sorry I can't read this due to my own barriers.
2. Excellent writing from what I got through, and I wish I could continue.
3. Are you a Metric fan? Because Calculation Theme is my favorite song.
So.. uh, this is pretty much a pointless comment....
no subject
Date: 2006-06-05 02:31 am (UTC)