CHAPTER 1 - GROSS HUMAN ANATOMY

Do you remember where you were, the day the Earth stood still? The day everything went boom, the old order came crashing down, and everything old was new? The day when magic returned, and all the fancy toys we’d built for ourselves stopped working?

Of course you do. Everyone who was alive that day remembers it. Probably right down to the moment, right? I’ve heard a thousand of those stories since then. It’s a shared trauma, something we can all collectively agree was absolute shit.

A lot of folks didn’t live through those first few minutes, hours, and days.

But enough of us did.

My experience of the apocalypse was as weird as anyone else’s. I was in school when it all went down. Med school, at the University of Vermont, to be specific. To be more precise, I was in Gross Human Anatomy class, getting ready to slice my way into a cadaver for the first time. Creepy enough vibe for you? Yeah, they make all medical students practice on dead bodies before slicing into living ones.

Well, they used to, anyway. Nowadays we just have healers, right? But I’m getting ahead of myself in the story.

I rolled into class dead last. Everyone was looking forward to this for some reason. For me, not so much. It wasn’t that dead things bothered me. Really, it was the opposite. I’d seen enough dead bodies already, so it didn’t have a ton of oomph for me.

Still, the class would be fun, and our teacher was none other than Dr. Gideon Carver. With a name like that, you’d think he’d be the perfect person to teach this class, and you’d be right: the man had locked down the dissection of human remains for over a decade. On the plus side, that meant he knew this subject cold, and he’d had plenty of experience teaching it.

On the down side, he had a rep as an asshole, so I needed to watch my mouth around him if I wanted to pass. So far, that hadn’t been an issue. I just had to keep the streak going!

“Selena, get in here!” That was Mark, the Nice Guy in my lab group. It was nice to see him show up; he missed the first two classes, and I wasn’t sure if he was dropping or just not bothering to show until the actual cutting began. Must be the latter.

“Heya, Mark. Guys.” I nodded to the other two students at our table. Karen Looming was blonde, sharp-tongued, and annoying. Alfred Castle was the final member of the team; a close friend of Karen’s, he had a bad habit of believing he was the smartest person in the room, when he rarely if ever was.

“Glad you made it, Miss Serrano,” Dr. Carver called from the front of the room. I flashed him my best smile, but it wasn’t good enough, because it didn’t turn his frown upside-down. He did turn his attention elsewhere, at least, directing the other tables as they prepared to begin the lab.

Today was basics. We were doing some simple incisions and closures. Cutting and suturing. Easy stuff, really. With six tables and twenty-four students, it was still enough to keep the good doctor busy. Someone was bound to screw something up. Hopefully not me.

“Selena, you mind if I do the first cut today?” Karen asked, her voice saccharine.

“Sure, no problem,” I replied.

“I’ve been looking forward to getting into Mercutio here,” Alfred added. “But you can go first, Karen.”

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I rolled my eyes at the name. Naming dissection subjects was a long-standing tradition. Hell, when we did this in undergrad, it was cats, and everyone had Garfield or Bill or some other popular cat name on the table in front of them. It was a staple part of the class.

When one of the teams decided to name their guy "Guildenstern," everyone thought it was cool. Then the second group went from there to name their guy "Rosencrantz," and most people got the joke. Because ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are…’

Either you get it or you don't. Not gonna spell it out for you.

All of this was cute and fun, but then my darling team decided they were going to hop on the Shakespeare train by naming our cadaver "Mercutio." Mark wasn't there to vote against it, and I got overruled. That's my defense, and I'm sticking to it. So, there we were, about to explore one of the more exciting, if a little over-dramatized, parts of doctor training.

It was annoying, but fine. I was in this to win it. My diploma was the only thing about medical school that mattered to me. I wasn’t interested in making friends or influencing people. I had a job to do, and I focused wholly on that. The rest of them could all go hang.

I picked up a scalpel, weighing the instrument in my hand and thinking about where I’d want to make my cut. Even though Karen was the one making the first slices, I figured I could hop in next.

That turned out to be fortunate.

When it happened, when the Event went down, nobody was prepared at all. Karen was in mid-cut, making a small incision that Alfred was going to suture back up. Mark was standing there looking stupid, while I tried to pay attention to what our professor was saying as he explained the process. Dr. Carver was droning on talking about the angle of incision, the right pressure to cut just so much, but not deeper than necessary, and other factoids. In fact, everything was exactly the way it had been the day before, and the way nothing ever would be again.

The first thing everyone noticed was the power going out. The projector showing images on the whiteboard at the front of class died, along with the overhead lights. The next thing we all felt was a moment of intense fear, like something was happening around me or to me that I couldn't explain. That fear felt primordial, something I feared even though I’d never felt or experienced anything like it.

The next moment, pain flared in my skull like someone stuck a dagger between my ears. I screamed and almost dropped the scalpel. I couldn't remember ever feeling pain that intense.

But as quickly as it arrived, it was gone again. What remained was that feeling that something had changed. Something I had taken for granted forever wasn't there anymore.

The quiet was what struck me next. There was no hum from the air conditioning units blowing air into the room. But it was more than that, because I quickly realized there was no noise from outside, either. No cars honking. No engines racing. It was like the beating heart of modern society had just turned off.

I pulled my iPhone from my pocket, but it wouldn't power on. I slipped it back into the pocket, wondering what the hell was going on. I knew for sure my phone was charged. For it to fail so completely, that implied whatever this was, it was a lot bigger than a power outage. I started thinking over possible reasons, but none of them were good. Had we been hit by an EMP?

”Is anyone's phone working?" I asked. If it was just mine, that was a lot better for all of us. If all the phones were out, that was extra bad news.

While I'd been recovering from my migraine, I wasn't paying attention to what the rest of my classmates were doing. As I glanced around the room, I realized most of them were holding their heads. A few lay on the classroom floor where they’d fallen, only now starting to climb back to their feet. Everyone in the room had the same brief migraine experience I had, Carver included.

Uh-oh. That wasn't good. I didn't have to be a full doctor to know that an entire room full of people all coming down with the same symptom at the same time was not a great thing. Was this some kind of an attack? Had we been hit by radiation? Or something worse?

I turned to the professor. "Doctor, what the hell is happening?"

"I don't know. We should call—"

He was cut off by someone screaming behind me. It was more of a shriek, really, and it ended with a gurgling sound that just enhanced the creep factor. I whirled in place and managed to pivot in time to see our cadaver, Mercutio, sitting up the table while he held Karen with both arms, chewing on her neck.

Whoever said that Gross Human Anatomy would be boring?