"Code 27, 1124 Ergarten Street."

This is what he awakens to, at twelve forty-three in the morning; the call, a double-tone at first, then the voice ―― monotonous with a problem unknown and an address in the dangerous part of town. Nothing new, really, for a Saturday; they'd been out three times this night alone when the overall average was at least seven, perhaps eight. Especially on a weekend.

Christiaan awoke groggily and without grace, but his exhaustion was forgivable, he felt. He was in overtime. They were short on staff. What had been punched in as a twelve-hour shift was looking closer to sixteen.

He hasn't slept properly in nearly fourteen hours. None of them have.

"That's in South Hirromyl," Paul, his partner, tells him as he diverts down a side street so they are on-route to their new destination. "Let us pray it's just an overindulgence this time, eh?"

He laughs, rosy and round-bellied even at this time of night. That was Paul. Always one to might good light of any given situation. He was black, well over six feet tall and 250 pounds, and was a pretty good linebacker during his high school days. His friends would tell you he was a funny guy, the kind who was quick to lend money to a friend and then forget about the debt. Christiaan agreed, but only on the former, because he knew that Paul didn't have any money to lend.

Rubbing his eyes, Christiaan felt his neck prickle unpleasantly at the reminder of 'this time', and shifted against the sudden queasiness in his stomach, sitting up in his chair. He had been a paramedic for just over two years, after spending roughly the same amount of time at the University of Vohengeismar working towards a Master's degree in Science, and had been called down to Hirromyl at least fifty times in half that period. Most of them weren't in the way of normal 'health issues', like cardiac arrests and sicknesses, but instead, incidents like stabbings and shootings and God knows what else. Incidents that involved a heavy police presence and a shock to the system. Sirens blaring and red lights flashing, Christiaan's heart pounds.

He had grown up in New Columbia, the grandson of American-Copenvaan expats where the streets were clean and everyone called your 'sir'. South Hirromyl, by comparison, looked like a scene out of a disaster movie.

Paul radios the dispatcher after a few minutes of hurried driving to get more information about what to expect. Was this a fight? Are the police there already? Will they arrive in time to back them up in case things got ugly? Ever since the riots last year, not everyone saw them as angel's of mercy coming to help, but rather another form of cop. Recently, especially, they had EMT's getting attacked when they came to give aid. It was quickly becoming a nasty sort of job, more than it already had been ―― in those poverty-wracked neighborhoods, sometimes safety was an obscure sort of concept.

"No further information on the call." The dispatcher's words tighten his chest. Paul shrugs.

"We're going in blind."

And they are, both literally and metaphorically, for power cuts have left this area of town in pitch black darkness. Grabbing the bag, Christiaan hits the slide door and the first thing he sees is a crowd of people. Few are smiling. Some look absolutely menacing. They don't want them here.

Christiaan brushes past one of them and makes the mistake of looking up to whom he touched, and a ragged looking fellow with long dark hair pulled back under a baseball cap ripped his cigarette from the end of his mouth, and spat.

"What the fuck are you looking at?" The man barks. He's got at least a foot on Christiaan, and while he doesn't look as fit, there is a gleam behind his eyes that suggests it wouldn't matter regardless. Bloodyfok. Christiaan thought. What if these guys have knives?

Paul moves in between him and angry cap wearing smoker and pushes further past the crowd. "Gaan kak in die mielies, you ass!" He snaps, and looks around. "Who called for an ambulance here?" And then, just in case. "Wie benodig 'n ambulans?"

"Here!" Someone shouts further down the street, near an opening to an alleyway. "Over here!"

Turns out the caller is a man in his early to middle fifties, balding and thin, clutching a dark wet patch on his left arm. He waves them over erratically.

"I think he's not right in the head," he tells them once they both arrive and get to work. "Came running over screaming and trying to attack people. The punk bit me like a fucking animal!"

Paul makes a face. "Do you know him?" He asks. Christiaan pulls the man's sleeve up to examine the damage. It's a mess.

This whole place was a mess. This month alone they had heard of five incidents in which someone had snapped and started attacking people, and it was only six days into November. They had three on Wednesday. Three.

"Me?" The man snorts. "I knew him, but not personally; I recognized that punk's face, yes. Booysen. Or, maybe it is Bosman." He looked further down the street. "He was attacking a group of girls, that bastard. Attacking girls! So I went in to teach him a lesson."

The injury is not horrendous, nothing life threatening, but it's definitely a bite mark, and that needs cleaning. He'll need stitches, too. It's not bad, no, but it's bad enough. Bad enough for hospital at any rate. So into the ambulance they go. The man ―― Michal, he says ―― informs them that at least two of the girls appeared to be hurt after the first attack. There isn't much they can do.

"Hopefully, they'll come to an A&E, if it's bad." Christiaan shrugs, and he hopes that they will. The man mirrors his gesture.

"At least you lot are free," he says. "The doctors, vah! They are so expensive now. No wonder people die in their homes sick, sick, sick!"

Christiaan nods. He knows.

His father and older brother were both physicians. After the economy borderline on crashed three years ago, and income redistribution brought along inflated prices on everything from bread to central heating, it became too expensive for the National Copenvaan Health Association to continue giving free healthcare to everyone in the country on an unlimited basis. It became too expensive to do almost anything for anyone, actually. Only essential services were allowed to drive on Sundays, now, to save fuel; nobody was allowed to drive at all from six at night to six in the morning. Trains were capped from eight till eight. At night, all 'non-essentials' had their power cut off, and there were allowances placed on those who were on state benefits; fifty rands of 'gas' on a card a week, and if you ran out, you had to wait or buy out of your own pocket. For the NCHA, however, it also meant that acquiring drugs and providing care was more expensive than it had been originally and for a country that was below the standard poverty level, that meant trouble.

Now, everyone had to pay to see a doctor. Prescriptions and care itself was still free, but if you went to a doctor it was around thirty rands an hour. There was also the Hospital Admittance Charge, that was fifteen rands a day plus any other specific fees.

Christiaan's father was a private physician, so he could hike up his prices as much as he liked. He didn't, however. He kept the price roughly the same. Simply because he was a business person as much as he was a healthcare professional, and he knew that charging lower than his competitors while providing exceptional service would mean that people stayed.

He didn't blame this man here, Michal, for being sour about it, though. Things were rough.

"What do you think caused him to attack you like that?" Christiaan asks as he started writing down the usuals in the handbook provided, his hand slipping against the paper when Paul swerved the Ambulance to the left, too sharply. "Hey!" He shouts towards the front. "Kyk na die wiel!"

"Fuck off!" Paul shouts back. "Got people running the road―" A honk of the horn. "―Watch where you are going! Bloodyfokker!"

Mr. Michal shrugs again as if he did not hear Paul's verbal onslaught, wincing as he puts a little too much pressure on his bandaged arm. "God knows, son. Drugs, probably. Lots of Booysens or Bosmans on drugs around here."

 

By the time they get to the emergency department of Delétern-Einhausen Hospital, it's clear that it's a very busy night. They bring Michal in and are just about to get everything sorted when Maria Malan shakes her head.

"What do you mean we're full?!" Paul exclaims and looks around the bustling A&E, eyes wide. "You're telling me we've managed to fill over three thousand beds?"

"Not the entire hospital," Maria sighs. "Psych and LD are still open. There's a few in maternity, but here? We're full."

"Yissus," Christiaan breathes out. "What's going on?"

It reminds him of the riots. Doctors and nurses, orderlies and residents, EMT's and paramedics; they were all out in force, screaming down the corridors and across the A&E's main floor in a colourful flow of controlled excitement. The only people who were standing still were the patients themselves, and most of them were rolling about; groaning and holding themselves. A few of them were shaking. Some had injuries. Others just lay there. Even the security was moving about; restlessly from one end of the department to the other, most of them in pairs, a few of them pacing smaller routes alone.

Christiaan notices that most of the security had their hands on the pepper spray at their waists.

Maria blows a strand of dark hair from out of her eyes. "You'd be the tenth person to ask me in the last thirty minutes," she says. "We don't know yet. We've got injured coming in from Central Amersdorn. I think there has been an accident or something, but we don't know."

Christiaan frowns, and Paul tutts under his breath.

"Power is off, remember?" He shakes his head. "No TV."

"Nothing on the radio, either?"

Maria shook her head. "Nobody really knows; we're swamped here. Between the people coming in with injuries we've got people sick as well, and a bunch of people getting snippy with us and starting fights." She sighs, long and deep, and Christiaan can see the hallmarks of a long, intense shift. "I've got people saying it's flu, I've got others saying mass-drug poisoning, we've got people running tests just to be sure."

"I heard that," Paul grumbled. "My ex-wife's had the flu for weeks."

"She didn't come here?" Christiaan asks.

"For flu meds? I'm not made of money, boy."

Lifting up her clipboard, Maria shakes her head. "Well, what can you do?" And then, a little more gently: "I need you guys to go back out and receive more calls ― we've got dozens more coming in."

"The nearest hospital from here is Women's Presbyterian, right?" Christiaan frowned. Paul nods. "If we call for an emergency we can transfer most of our patients en-route, that might ease the strain."

"We'd have to call in NIPH, but yeah. Good idea."

For that they'd have to get someone higher up to call the National Institute of Public Health on their behalf, and that might not even do anything, either. Phone lines were 24/7, still, but most offices we're still abandoned at night. That and NIPH we're notorious for being slow about things.

"To avoid unnecessary public panic," they often said.

Right.

The woman in front of them, stood slouched in her blue washed-out scrubs, looked down at her clipboard. "We can't be the only hospital receiving this many patients, but I'll put the call in. I think this is only going to get worse." It's the only reassurance she can give them, and Christiaan gives her a small smile.

"Eh, chin up. How long you been on, what, thirteen, fourteen hours now? You'll be off soo―"

He can't get the rest of his sentence out, because someone barged into him at speed, sending him flying into the wall in a rebound and on to the floor. He must have blacked out, because he doesn't remember the wall bit; he just focuses back in time to see himself looking up, the lights bright and burning into the back of his irises, like his brain had just been turned on and off again in quick succession and it had slammed it into stupor, struggling to reboot. Paul shouted something just as Maria screamed for security, and Christiaan had a split second to bring both his hands up as a woman in her early twenties pinned him down around the waist and went for his face.

And he means it. She went for him. Teeth snapping together with a loud crack as she screamed nonsense at the top of her lungs.

"Here!" The woman shouts. "You!"

"Jesus!" His curse is interrupted with ―― "YOU!" ―― and he struggles to keep her at bay. "Christ!―" He screams at the screaming woman, hands planted just below her collar bones to keep her flailing limbs away from his face.

"Here!" she screams back. "Here! Here! You did this!"

"Get the fuck offa' me!"

"You did this!"

"Sonova―!"

The woman attempts sends a fist upwards, and, probably downwards on top him soon afterwards, so Christiaan brings one knee up, then his foot, pushing her away by the pelvis. She was close enough for him to feel her breath on his arm.

"You did this you did this you―"

She's dragged off just as she tries to dig her nails into his face by two big men in grey uniforms. Even though she's being pulled, bodily, she's still screaming the same thing at him.

"YOU! You did this. HERE YOU! You, you did this, you you you you youyouyouyyou―"

From seemingly nowhere, a pair of white-sleeved arms come around over the top of Christiaan's head and then down, under his arms and he's lifted up harshly but securely. He doesn't need to look up or turn around to see who it is. Christiaan knows that aftershave anywhere.

"What the Hell is going on here?" Dr. Filip Malherbe shouts over the screaming. Christiaan swallows hard, his heart beating so quickly he could feel it in his throat like the pulse didn't really belong there, a foreign entity hammering away in sync with the adrenaline coursing through his veins. He doesn't want to watch, but he can't help but not look away, eyes locked on as the screaming woman is pushed into a nearby wall and forcibly injected with a syringe. It's like when he was little and he used to watch those shitty horror films on video. He could never pry his eyes away at the worst part.

It took her a few seconds to go down. She didn't look well, that much Christiaan could guess; pale with red rings under her eyes, pupils dilated to the point where it looked like she had no blue in her irises at all. Her hair was mangled, he saw, and if that was her cardigan, she'd bought one three sizes too large.

"Darn druggies," Paul snarled. "You okay there, son?"

"Fine." Christiaan managed to squeak. Filip's hands tightened around his arms.

"You hurt?" The taller man asks.

Christiaan shakes his head. "No..." Then he remembers the fall, and he blinks, swallowing forcibly. "No... I." He inhales as the woman, limp and unmoving, was taken back to wherever she must have come from. The security guys looked haggard, as if this had happened all too often lately. "No." He forces out. "I'm fine."

"Jesus you're breathing like a darn racehorse." Filip grumbles. "She just go and attack him, like that? Christ."

"Must be some bad batch of drug going around Hirromyl," Paul mumbled and he gives Christiaan a long, hard look. "I think you ought to go home. You look as white as a ghost, and we're both exhausted."

"Can't," Christiaan replies after a gulp of air. "No driving rule."

"Well," Paul looks at Filip for advice, and the man sighs.

"I have a permit," he says. "But I'll have to clock off too if that's the case."

Maria looks borderline on distraught, but the doctor can only shrug.

"I'm on a half-tank and I can't afford to drive back. I'm sorry, I really am. You should think about clocking off, too."

Maria groans and runs a hand along the top of her hair. She couldn't thread her fingers through the silky strands because they were tied back tight into a ponytail. The shadows under her eyes suddenly look a lot worse, and feel just that bit more relatable.

"I don't know what is going on," she grumbled, tired and displeased. "But I'm getting bloddyfokken sick of it."

Christiaan giggles. It's not out of humor.

"You can say that again."