Chapter One

The world ended on Boxing Day, with blowflies providing a droning soundtrack to the summer heat. People nationwide were still recovering from gorging themselves the day before.

Sarah worked in aged care in Geelong and didn’t usually get a chance to work in the acute sector. The overload of patients, however, meant they needed all hands on deck and she found herself called in to work at the public hospital. As to be expected, major holidays meant busy emergency wards, and very little time to assimilate the goings on in one case before being called away to work on something completely different. Sarah had spent most of the afternoon tending to her four patients, and forcing down a coffee whenever she could tear herself away.

She nearly overlooked the memo on the desk in the nurse’s station; it might have been a normal warning for a potential viral infection that may be seen in newly-admitted patients, briefly reminding nurses of care instructions and advising use of full precautions. Sarah brushed her lank black hair out of her face and picked up the memo to read it properly. The last alert they had been given for a viral outbreak had been the influenza strain last winter, but something about the tone of the memo insisted she pay attention. She decided to play into her paranoia and ducked out into the fire escape to call Jen, a fellow student nurse she had worked with. They’d kept in contact after Jen was moved to the Royal Melbourne Hospital to complete her final year.

‘Jen, hey, how are you? How’s work?’

‘Nope, not doing it,’ Jen replied. Her tinny, brusque tone seemed rude to those who were unaccustomed to her personality.

‘Doing what?’ Sarah asked innocently.

‘Small talk? You don’t do small talk. What’s up?’

Sarah grinned and looked down at the memo in her hand. ‘Has your hospital received a memo on this new outbreak?’ she asked, purposefully keeping it vague and playing into the tight suspicion that curled down her spine.

‘Actually, yes, we got the alert that there was something happening in Geelong. I’m not sure how far it’s spread though. We had one of our regional patients come in this morning, hyper-aggressive, extremely violent behaviour. We had to call a code black on him. I think he came from down your way.’ She laughed but it sounded strained.