Chapter One - Julia
The first thing I did when I woke up was to groan.
It wasn’t the best way to start off the day, but it energized me to kick off the sheets, so it beat just staying in bed, which wasn’t an option for me.
People used to wake up at the crack of dawn, or “as the rooster crows,” as the old saying went. Not much had changed, to be honest. Except that now I had been beckoned back to the land of the living by the squawk of an alarm clock, instead of the primordial call of a bird, which had been intended for just such a purpose.
Sometimes I think past generations had it right.
About some things, anyway.
Once I hit the shower, icy water cascaded down onto my body, causing my aching muscles to snap back into a state that was something like wakefulness. The previous night’s skeleton shift had been brutal, and they were only more awaiting me at any time.
As a doctor in the E.R. during a pandemic, I was living and breathing my work. Schedules were, if not a thing of the past, then, at the very least, more of a polite suggestion than a hard and fast rule.
The actual fact of the matter was that we’d all been put on call, without it actually being made official, even though we all knew what was going on. It was just the nature of the beast we were trying to slay.
I knew it was what I had signed up for, though, when I had become a doctor. But that didn’t mean it made getting up after such long shifts, just to get ready to likely be called in for another one, any more bearable.
Stepping out of the cold shower and into my sweats, taking time to dry off first, I jogged down the stairs and out the door, doing my damndest to get in the full ten miles before my phone could go off and call me back to the hospital at any moment.
I was doing pretty well during the first leg of my run. Especially for someone trying to operate on a grand total of three hours’ worth of sleep.
Other than serial killers and Tyler Durden, who only gets three hours of sleep a night?
Medical students, that’s who.
Only I was a good distance away from that. Now I was older, wiser and, if not taller, then at least in good athletic shape since I decided to deal with it all by exercising instead of stress eating. I still had some extra weight I’d likely never get rid of but that was okay— everyone said I had nice curves.
The intense competition of medical school was enough to make anyone need to run for miles a day, so it was a habit I had picked up from other med school students and still continued to this day. There were times I was convinced the course work was designed to see who would crack first, as if it was some kind of bizarre experiment in Social Darwinism.
Only the strongest survived, as if medical school was a sort of boot camp, which in a way it was. Nursing school was, too, I’d heard. It really did take a certain breed of person not only to get into a medical career but also to stick to it.
To be fair, medical treatment was one area where things had certainly gotten better over the past few centuries. The first attempt at a surgical saw didn’t go very well. A massive, intimidating clockwork contraption, it was used only once, claiming the lives of not only the patient, from post-operation infection, but also the doctor’s assistant, who lost three fingers to it and later developed gangrene, and even a nearby spectator who had had a fatal heart attack when his coat was slashed after the doctor had lost control of the tool.
It was the first, and only, instance of an operation with a three hundred percent fatality rate. So, things had really progressed since then and we had a lot to be thankful for.
Something that hadn’t been so great about medical school was the attitude of some of the other students. The masterminds on the board had arranged it so that our close friends, and most bitter enemies, were in the same class with us.
As one professor bluntly put it, we were not in competition with him, or with ourselves, but instead with each other. Some students seemed to take that a bit too literally. There was never any cheating, or at least not that I ever saw, anyway. Just some very cut-throat attitudes and a whole lot of cockiness.
The worst of them all was Jake.
Jake Booth, or The Iceman, as he was more commonly known, was cocky as fuck and didn’t even feel the need to engage in the normal pleasantries most human beings found comforting.