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Our hero (to whom the narrative has now returned) goes to the doctor to check out his cold:

 

The cold hit me in the morning. I woke up with the tell-tale tickle in my throat. In years past, I would have drowned myself and the cold in vitamin C, but diseases of 2018 just laughed at vitamin C. They loved that shit. They asked for seconds. Cold medicine wasn’t much better. It used to just mask symptoms so you could get through the day. With these viruses, cold medicine actually made things worse. I saw a guy with H8N3~pt87 (a newer and rarer but less deadly strain of Westphail) on DayQuil who sneezed his own goddamn nose off. I’m not kidding. He covered his mouth and nose with a handkerchief, sneezed, and when he lowered his hand, his goddamned nose was gone from his face, sitting in the goddamned handkerchief in his hand. He freaked out. I freaked out. His mom freaked out. The whole situation was horrible and really put a damper on the mood of that evening. So, I stayed away from the C and the Quil, and headed out the door and right to the damned doctor. The closest doctors to me worked out of a Catholic Church which had been converted to a medical center the summer before. The building swarmed with nuns who’d been pressed into duty as medical assistants and security personnel who eyed everyone that entered the church as a potential threat. The line was long, but there was plenty of reading material on hand to make the wait go by faster. I put on the supplied surgical mask, its inability to block the virus had already been proven in clinical trials, but in terms of having something for show, there was no equal. I settled in to wait while reading a six year old copy of Time Magazine. When they finally called my name, I had read it cover to cover. Twice. “Right this way, Mr. Graves,” said a pleasant young woman. The yellow and black HAZMAT suit she wore did its best to mask her curvy figure but failed; the hooded headpiece was similarly ineffective at hiding her beautiful features. I tried to make out if she wore a habit underneath the suit but couldn’t. “Thank you, Miss –”  I made a show of reading the nameplate printed above her left breast; further excuse to stare. “Alcott. How are you today?” I saw her frown through the plexiglass covering her face. “It’s been a rough day,” she admitted. “We’ve had seven positive cases. Three went right to DEI.” She paused and collected herself. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be telling you that.” “No, it’s alright,” I said, though the news did little to calm my nerves. “I asked.” She sighed and shrugged, a gesture muted by the suit. “Still, I shouldn’t–” “Honestly,” I said, “it’s the new reality. The sooner we accept it, the better.” “I guess you’re right, but it’s easier to accept when you’re not about to face testing.” She shuddered and caught herself again. “Listen to me, going on and on like this.” She lead me into a makeshift examination room near what used to be the church altar and showed me to a gray folding chair next to a tray of medical instruments. A guard stood ominously behind the chair, a rifle slung across his back, his right hand resting on a pistol loosely carried in a holster on his hip. The visor on his helmet was tinted darkly; I couldn’t discern whether there was a man in there or some sort of brand new security robot. He stood so still, it was impossible to tell.  A pair of handcuffs seemed out of place amongst the swabs, scissors and other devices on the tray, but their import was not lost on me. If the test came back positive, I’d be wearing those in short order.

“The doctor will be with you shortly,” said the woman.

“Oh, I hoped you’d be doing the swabbing,” I said, imbuing my words with as much double meaning as I possibly could. Remarkably, even though I’d spent most of my days over the past several years just holed up in a fleabitten, run-down motel which catered to the lost and transient, I still hadn’t lost my natural rapport with members of the fairer sex. Or at least, I thought I hadn’t. Her face darkened visibly.

“Are you attempting to flirt with me, Mr. Graves?” she asked.

I hadn’t realized I’d been so transparent. “Can you blame a guy for trying?”

Her hand disappeared into a pocket of the suit, coming back out with a string of rosary beads which she fingered nervously. “With a nun in a church that has been turned into a last bastion in the defense against the growing horde of the walking dead which threatens to destroy everything that God and man have created? While on the verge, yourself, of learning whether you are to join that horde? Yes, I can blame a guy for trying.”

The guard behind the chair coughed, obviously trying to stifle a laugh. It must have been the funniest thing he’d heard all day if it caused him to break his stoic silence. At least now I knew there was something living and breathing inside that uniform.