Nurse Jessica Strong’s shoes squeaked on the polished tile floor. It didn’t matter which shoes she wore or how she altered her gait, they squealed with every step. It drove her absolutely bonkers. Luckily, her patients didn’t seem to mind. To be fair, it was hard to be annoyed by a sound you couldn’t even hear. The residents of Twisting Oaks Nursing Home were a hard-of-hearing bunch. She had been told by the veteran nurses that the noise would soon fade into the background, and soon, she wouldn’t even notice it anymore.

Working the night shift made the squeak worse. The place was so quiet; every sound was amplified like it was shouted into an echo chamber. She couldn’t do anything about that, though. Newbies always got stuck with the least desirable shifts.

Most people thought of nursing homes as a place where old folk went to die. Lonely, boring places where Wednesday morning bingo was the highlight of the week. That was partly true. Twisting Oaks was the last stop for most of the residents. A few were there to recuperate from acute issues that families or friends couldn’t handle on their own. Those residents were the lucky ones. Those got to go home once they convalesced. The rest were permanent fixtures.

“Permanent” wasn’t exactly the right word. The life expectancy of a new resident was less than two years. Jessica hadn’t lost anyone yet, but her coworkers assured her it was definitely a when and not an if. She dreaded the day she lost her first patient.

Jessica hadn’t expected to grow so close to the residents. Prior to her interview for the position she had never been in a nursing home, so she didn’t know what to expect. Most of what she knew came from movies and TV shows; the residents were comatose, vegetative, or bat-shit crazy out of their minds.

The truth, as was often the case, was much stranger than fiction.

Nursing homes, at least the good ones like Twisting Oaks, kept the residents active, entertained, and engaged. Not that the residents of Twisting Oaks needed any help with that. There was always something going on. Birthday parties, holiday parties, celebrations of life. If there was an occasion, the residents were celebrating it. Her first week on the job they’d thrown a party for Sandy passing a large kidney stone. The cake decorations were…terrifying.

Any chance to throw a party. They also organized dances, ice cream socials, and field trips to nearby venues like the park, library, or movie theater. And that didn’t include all the outside organizations that came to visit. Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, and some local schools to perform plays or put on talent shows for the residents. And then, of course, there were the most popular visitors: the four-legged kind. The local Humane Society brought animals in once a week to visit.

And all that was just the events that happened out in the open. What most people didn’t know—and probably never, ever, wanted to think about—was that the prevalence of STIs in nursing homes was eight times higher than the national average. Old people be getting it on! Since Jessica had started, her blissful ignorance of post-septuagenarian sexual habits had been shattered.

Many residents were injured during their tenure. Poor eyesight and fragile bodies were a recipe for orthopedic disaster. What most people didn’t know was that many—so many!—of those injuries were actually caused by bedroom acrobatics gone awry. If anyone ever reviewed the medical records, they’d see that the cause of most orthopedic injuries were chalked up to trips and falls. But that was just what the nursing staff put on the paperwork.

People who worked in the retail, food service, or medical industries often talked about how the moon cycle affected the craziness of the population. Jessica didn’t know if she believed in any of that, but the new moon was a couple days away, and the residents of Twisting Oaks Nursing Home were busier than usual. Getting busier than normal, that is. The inhabitants shuffled, wheeled, and were rolled into each other’s rooms for late-night rendezvous.

Once the initial surprise passed, Jessica realized she didn’t mind at all. It kept things interesting, and she was genuinely happy her patients found comfort in each other’s arms. As happy as she was for the amorous residents, that didn’t mean she enjoyed walking in on two of them going at it like wild animals. Doing the late-night medication run was often an awkward and horrifying experience.

The med cart clattered as she pushed it into its home in the medication closet and locked the wheels. She took a moment to rest her head on the cool stainless-steel metal top and congratulated herself on navigating through yet another night of coital escapades. After three weeks of doing med runs, she had the process down. The key was to give plenty of warning before opening any doors.

She spent the next twenty minutes cleaning and prepping the med cart for the next round. Not every nurse took the time to do it, but it was always easier for her starting off with a fresh one, so she made it a habit. When she finally left the closet, the pneumatic arm sucked the door into place, and the lock beeped. The last step of the med run procedure was to make sure the lock engaged properly, so Jess gave the door a yank. Satisfied, she headed down the hallway. It was late, just past midnight. She did one last round through the hallways to make sure all was well. By that hour, the residents had finished their trysts and shuffled back to their own rooms, so it was all quiet.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

“How’d it go?” Maggie popped her gum and leaned back in the ergonomic chair at the nurses’ station. A long bank of monitors and speakers crammed the countertop behind her. If something went awry with any of the monitored patients, or if any resident called for assistance, one of those devices would notify them.

“All the Romeos and Juliets are back in bed.” She and Maggie shared a laugh. Jessica pulled her lunch pail from the tiny fridge under the counter and melted into a chair. It was the first time she had sat in hours, and her feet made their protests clear. Keeping up with the residents, even at a quarter of their age, took a lot out of her.

Maggie rolled her chair over to bump against Jessica’s. “Hey, do you mind if…”

Jessica swallowed a spoonful of yogurt. “Didn’t get any sleep again today?”

“What can I say? The newlywed life is a busy time.”

“I can’t even get a guy to sleep with me once, and here you’ve got one who can’t keep his hands off you.”

Maggie barked a laugh. “Trust me, sister. It took time. You gotta lay the groundwork before you reap the rewards.”

“That’s all I’m looking for. Someone to lay the groundwork.” They shared another laugh, and Jessica nodded toward the dormitories. “Go ahead.”

Maggie logged out of the monitoring system so Jess could sign in and waved over her shoulder. Maggie walked across the hall and slipped into a vacant room. There were a lot of regulations for running a nursing home. Sleeping on the job was technically violating nurse-to-patient ratio regs, but once Jessica started on the night shift, she soon found out that it was one of those things that happened that everyone pretended didn’t.

So far Jess had kept her sleeping to quick naps during scheduled breaks, but she was young, unmarried, and didn’t have children or any kind of social life. She didn’t mind covering for her coworker, especially when things were quiet. She didn’t mind working through her lunch so Maggie could sleep. It wasn’t like she could go anywhere during lunch, anyway. She pulled up the Netflix app on her phone and pressed play on something from her queue to keep her awake.

Even when everyone was supposed to be asleep, the night shift at a nursing home wasn’t idle. Medications had to be dispensed, and residents needed help going to the bathroom or shifting positions. Old bodies ached easily, and bedsores were a major concern for some of their less mobile residents. New meds wreaked havoc on circadian rhythms, and residents’ meds were constantly getting changed.

That night was no different. While Maggie slept, Jess took bites of her lunch and watched Jackie Chan kick a bunch of gangsters’ asses between all the calls. Two to four o’clock was the quietest time. Despite all the hubbub and her efforts, the quiet lulled Jessica to sleep.

She didn’t wake until she heard the screaming. The chair nearly toppled as she jerked awake. Maggie burst from the vacant room, wide awake. She’d been on night shift for nearly a decade and was well accustomed to waking quickly.

Hallway A echoed with another scream. They rounded the corner together and saw Roberta, one of their more spry patients, dressed in a long periwinkle robe. She stood in Darnell’s doorway, her hands clasped over her mouth, cane forgotten on the floor. No doubt there for their daily coffee and game of checkers. Jessica and Maggie’s shoes sounded like an orchestra of baby birds as they rushed past the distraught woman, stopping dead in their tracks. More experienced nurses liked to pretend they’d seen it all, but even Maggie was speechless.

Darnell was an early riser. He may be old, but he prided himself on his dapper appearance, treating each day and each outfit like it was his last.

That morning, Darnell was not wearing one of his favorite suits. He didn’t have a fresh flower in his jacket pocket, no silken cravat, no gleaming cufflinks at his wrists. Instead, he lay in bed, in a pair of flannel pajamas favored by so many grandpas. His chest wasn’t moving, but that wasn’t surprising.

Maggie and Jessica hesitated for the briefest of moments before their training kicked in, and they rushed to check his vitals.

“Gloves.” Maggie’s pair of purple nitrile gloves were already on her hands. Jessica fumbled to get her own out of the pocket of her scrubs. Her hands shook.

Twisted Oaks wasn’t a hospital. Yes, they still went through a lot of gloves, but they didn’t wear them for every little thing, especially not on the night shift. The complicated and messy things were supposed to happen during the day shift. The night shift motto was “Keep ’em alive till 7:05.” Most nights it was med runs and helping residents walk to the bathroom. It was a rare shift when Jess went through two pairs.

But she didn’t argue Maggie’s order. Not once she saw Darnell’s skin. “What the…”

With an adroit motion honed by years of experience, Maggie slipped her stethoscope off her neck and into position. Jessica’s already high estimation of Maggie leaped up a few notches when the older nurse only hesitated a single instant before pressing her fingers to Darnell’s carotid artery and checking for a pulse.

Holes pocked his dark skin and bored through the flannel and blankets alike like he’d been eaten through by worms, and he looked like he hadn’t had a sip of water for weeks. What little skin they could see was covered in a dark…something.

“Is this…bark?” Jessica hesitated to touch it. It was the color and texture of wet oak bark, split and cracked like the surface of a desiccated mud puddle.

“Call it in!”

Jessica lifted the phone, her fingers punching in the number she’d memorized since her first shift at Twisted Oaks.

Neither said it, but they knew it was no use. Darnell was dead.

Soon after the paramedics arrived, Jessica and Maggie started their morning rounds. That's when they discovered everyone else was dead, too.