This Rotten World: Tempered in Blood, page 1
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One Night Stand at the End of the World Series
One Night Stand at the End of the World
One Night Stand in the Wastes
One Night Stand in Ike
One Night Stand in a Place with No Name
The Enemies of Our Ancestors Series
The Enemies of Our Ancestors
The Cult of the Skull
Broken Spirits
This Rotten World Series
This Rotten World
This Rotten World: Let It Burn
This Rotten World: No More Heroes
This Rotten World: Winter of Blood
This Rotten World: Choking on the Ashes
This Rotten World: Rally and Rot
This Rotten World: Tempered in Blood
This Rotten World: Summer of Slaughter
This Rotten World:
Tempered in Blood
By Jacy Morris
Copyright © Jacy Morris 2023
All Rights Reserved
Cover Illustration by Don Noble
Table of Contents
Prologue: On the Cusp of the End
Chapter 1: Breakfast of Champions
Chapter 2: Fuel Run
Chapter 3: Hitting the Road
Chapter 4: Breaking the Wall
Chapter 5: The Hospital
Chapter 6: Vic Meehan
Chapter 7: Conway Bundy
Chapter 8: Raining Dead
Chapter 9: Doctor Vic
Chapter 10: Psycho Killer
Chapter 11: Flippin' Out
Chapter 12: A Hope and a Prayer and Dead Things
Chapter 13: Good News, Bad News
Chapter 14: A New Dawn
Chapter 15: Flash Trask
Chapter 16: Through the Lobby
Chapter 17: Anybody Seen My Pen?
Chapter 18: Going Shopping
Chapter 19: Shooting Gallery
Chapter 20: Honey, I'm Home!
Chapter 21: A Crash
Chapter 22: Tempered in Blood
A Word From Jacy
About the Author
Prologue: On the Cusp of the End
Sterling Phillips' day had begun normal enough. Before he took off with his wife, he had slipped a finger in her so he could smell it throughout the day, poured himself a cup of coffee, and headed in at six in the morning. The streets of Casper were quiet, eerily so. On a normal day, he'd be surrounded by collections of laborers heading to work, their skin brown, piled three deep in barely running pick-ups ten years past their prime, but today there was nothing.
At the convenience store, he bought a pack of Camels to puff on throughout the day. When he entered his PIN on the debit card reader, he made sure to use his diddling finger so everyone who came through the store that day would get a piece of his wife. While he was too chicken to share his wife with any other men in real life, he thought about it a lot, often taking himself off to the bathroom at work to relieve himself of his dirty thoughts throughout the day.
On that morning, Josh, the man behind the counter, had been sick as a dog. Ancient and bedraggled, Sterling had come to know Josh fairly well during the clerk's many years of serving as his morning deliverer of nicotine. Never particularly hearty, the man always seemed a little down on his luck. Every morning he'd grump and gripe about how he needed more sleep. Sterling didn't mind. The man's misery was precious to him, let him know his life wasn't all that bad. Today, Josh coughed into his hand, his eyes red-rimmed and drippy.
Sterling was sixty-years-old with a head of hair that had gone silver in his late thirties. It seemed one minute he'd had light brown hair, and the next morning, he'd woken up as the manager of Evansville Ambulance, a subsidiary of Cascadia Ambulance Company, with a head of perfect silver hair. He'd done all the right things in his life. Got married. Had kids. Bought a house. He'd checked all the boxes. His kids were but afterthoughts these days. Now grown and attending colleges far from Wyoming—as many children from the area were wont to do—he seldom saw them outside of holidays.
His wife, solid and reliable, had become something of a downer ever since the kids had left. She worked at a pre-school bringing in extra money they didn't need and didn't use. All their money went to paying off their mortgage. And when that was paid off, they didn't know what they'd do. Retire? The thought of sitting in their house with nothing better to do than watch TV all day drove him crazy. Sterling didn't know if he could ever retire. Besides, who would he yell at then? Who would he take his existential angst out on if he was stuck in the house with Anne? Anne, that's who, and then it would only be a matter of time before his life went to shit, and he was starting over at the age of 65. No, Sterling planned on working for the rest of his days.
The man behind the counter coughed, and a thick gob of nasty phlegm splatted onto the counter.
"You feelin' alright?" Sterling asked.
Josh nodded his head and swiped at his mouth with the back of his hand.
After Sterling left the convenience store, he sat in his car, sipping a cup of watered-down coffee and smoking a cigarette in the crisp morning air. Outside, on the main drag, an ambulance sped by, sirens roaring, lights flashing. Sterling flicked the ash from the end of his cigarette, swore to himself, and backed his car out of the parking lot. Ambulance sirens this early in the morning never meant good news.
The summer was his company's easy time. The mornings were nice, while the afternoons were filled with people who had hurt themselves recreating. He'd dispatch ambulances to all the wild, green spaces Casper had to offer. Out to lakes for people who had almost drowned, out to rivers for people who had caught fishhooks in their ears or fallen off rocks, out to the national park for people who had sprained ankles and broken legs while hiking. Yes, in the summer it wasn't bad. It was the winter when the bad things happened, when cars skidded and lost control on the icy roads, when people wrapped themselves around telephone poles, and his workers had to expose themselves to messes of hamburger and broken bones. Glad it's not my job. Better to be the manager. Some of the accidents he'd heard his employees describe made him want to throw up on the spot.
Making his way to the outskirts of the sleepy town of Casper, he pulled up to the garage at the edge of town. There wasn't a single ambulance among the several parking bays, which struck him as odd. Oh, sure, a few of them would be out and about at any one time, stashed strategically at posts around town, but they usually had a couple in reserve in case a larger response was needed. That meant something was going down. In a panic, Sterling pulled his phone from his pocket as he skidded into his parking spot. Hot coffee spilled from the cup in the cup holder, and he swore as he checked his phone.
"Get your ass in here!" one of the texts from the night manager read. This text was followed by several more of increasing urgency, and Sterling's heart began to pound in his chest.
He stepped from his car, already dying to smoke another cigarette, and he hadn't even made it to the front door yet. Inside the Evansville Ambulance garage, he found a madhouse, which was weird because half the people were gone. The ones who were present walked around with big eyes and nervous energy.
"What's going on?" Sterling asked Hal, the normally busy mechanic left with no ambulances to tinker on.
Hal raised his hands in the air, palms up, his bloody, scabbed knuckles hidden from sight. With no ambulances on hand, he had nothing to do. Usually, Hal's days were filled with checking oil levels, tire treads, and light bulbs, but today, he stood around gripping a wrench in his hands in a pathetic effort to at least look busy.
Sterling rushed by him, climbed the small stairs to the offices on the side of the garage, and burst in to find Matthew Ross, the night manager, smoking cigarettes inside the building.
"What the hell are y—" Sterling began, but Matthew cut him off with a quick, "Shut up."
"Lemme get you up to speed," Matthew said as he leaned forward and stubbed the half-smoked cigarette out in an overflowing ashtray.
Sterling liked to think he would normally have punched the man in the mouth, but to be honest, his real move would be to go over Matthew's head and complain to his superiors at corporate. But, considering how strange the situation was around the garage, he decided to let it slide.
Matthew walked to a map on the wall and began pointing at places and cataloguing incidents that had occurred over night.
"Wait, bites?" Sterling asked.
"Yeah, bites."
"How many?"
"Dozens."
"Is it rabies?"
"That's the thing. No one seems to know."
Sterling absorbed the news, let it roll around in his head for a bit. "Any word from corporate?" Your average citizen might think of ambulances and the workers inside as some sort of noble profession, but in reality, they were all part of the health care industry, a bloated machine manufactured by capitalists with only one goal in mind… to make money. Corporate cared about the lives of its employees—up until the point when profits became involved. Paramedics and EMTs didn't go on strike, didn't quit, and were forced to work in all conditions. That's how the company got paid. If a killer virus was on the loose, the company didn't care. They'd just force Sterling's workers to mask up and head out. After all, the families of dead people still had to pay their bills. The post office might not fear rain, snow, or sleet, but in the ambulance world, Evansville Ambulance wasn't supposed to fear, germs, bacteria, or viruses. The show must go on.
"Anyway. Thanks for showing up," Matthew said. "Some of the drivers haven't."
Sterling's jaw hung open, too shocked to reply.
Matthew sauntered over to their shared desk, picked up his lunchbox and his thermos, then strode right past Sterling without a word. A sneaking suspicion began to blossom in Sterling's chest. He turned to Matthew, before he got too far away, and asked, "I'll see you tonight, right?"
Matthew kept walking, the coffee canister tucked under his arm. As he reached the edge of the garage, he threw his lunchbox in the garbage, giving Sterling the only answer he needed. Shit.
Sterling wanted a cigarette bad, so bad he thought about walking out with Matthew right then and there, but he had a job to do. Maybe Matthew was just fucking with him, giving him a hard time. Yeah. That's it. He always was a weird little fucker. Sterling wouldn't put it past the guy to play a prank like this.
His shoulder shook with bemused laughter, and Sterling stepped into the dispatch room. All of his certainty evaporated as he noted the dark circles ringing the eyes of his employees. Miette, with her curly hair and her adult braces on her teeth, looked to him with fear in her eyes.
Over the radio, another call came in. "We have someone sick on Missouri St. and 2nd Ave.," the police dispatcher relayed. "Ambulance requested."
Miette leaned forward and fiddled with the radio. "Ambulance number 207. You're the nearest. Code 33"
"Another one?" the EMT, Philly Corson asked.
"Another one," Miette replied.
"What is going on?" Philly asked, his voice tinny over the radio.
Miette could only shake her head. It was a rhetorical question anyway. From there, Sterling spent his day studying a map, marking the cases. A call to the CDC went unanswered but for a recording. A call to the hospital was similarly handled.
Sterling looked down at his watch at 6 PM. After a day of strange illnesses, he was thankful his shift was up in the next two hours. Matthew should be there. He still held out hope his nighttime counterpart would get a good day's sleep and come to relieve him.
Maybe it was all just the flu, like a twisted, robust version of it like in that Stephen King novel his wife read every year. The superflu, right? Yeah. That's it. That's what it's got to be. With thoughts of Stephen King running through his mind, he pulled a cigarette from his pocket, popped his head into the dispatch room and told the employees he was going to step out for a second. They looked at him with frazzled, world-weary eyes. Everyone knew something was off, but so far, no one was talking. No one was saying anything.
Outside, Sterling scrolled through news sites, fiending as much for answers as he was for nicotine. Every site he visited said the same thing. A mysterious illness was moving quickly through the United States, but no one could say what it was or what its outcome would be. With the yellow-orange butt of a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, he breathed inward and typed in the URL for The Grassy Knoll, a conspiracy website he liked to goof off on every now and then. The news on the channel wasn't reliable in the least, but somehow, seeing other people freak out over the day's news made him feel better, made him feel like maybe his own worries weren't all that ridiculous. It was easy to pretend you were sane when you could clearly spot the crazies.
His cloud of smoke hovered in front of his face as the sun began to edge behind the mountains to the west. On The Grassy Knoll, he found all sorts of theories, from a Chinese viral attack to zombie plagues of all things. He laughed for a second, and then one of his crews pulled up in an ambulance.
Without hesitation, he tossed his cigarette to the ground and slid his phone into his pocket. All business, that's what he was. He had to be with this crew. If you let them wallow in their consciences, they would burn themselves out. He didn't like to be hard on these guys. They did tough work. But the moment you let their whining and complaining take hold, it eroded the mind, the heart, turned good workers into weaklings who eventually walked away from the game. EMTs didn't grow on trees. Evansville paid them as if they did, but what did you expect in Wyoming where the lowest people on the totem pole were dirt poor and only a handful of people controlled all the wealth in the state?
"What the fuck are you doing back here?" Sterling began as two EMTs popped out of the ambulance. Their eyes were wide, and it took them a moment to understand what Sterling had even said.
Then, to Sterling's surprise, one of the EMTs, Philly Corson, held up his hand. It was bandaged, and Philly, a plump, ginger man, went from surprise to outrage in a second, his skin turning the color of strawberry milk. "They bit me!" Philly shouted.
Sterling didn't understand.
"Who bit you?" he asked.
"Some old bitch we were taking to the hospital."
Philly's partner, Mike Vallejo, walked next to him, his eyes large, his cheeks drawn. He looked like he was on the verge of death himself.
"You quittin' on me?" Sterling asked Philly.
"I'm injured," Philly said, holding his bitten arm in the air.
"Injured my ass. It's just a bite."
At this Philly's face transformed from a dulcet pink to a livid red. "You don't get it, Sterling. This wasn't like a kid biting your finger or something. This lady was trying to bite a chunk of meat out of me. She would have had it too if I didn't break her fucking jaw."
"You what?"
"He had to," Mike added.
Sterling ran a hand through his silver hair. "Jee-zus, Philly. You know what this is going to cost us?"
"I don't give a fuck, man."
Philly pushed past Sterling to the locker room, and Sterling stood fuming. Mike shrugged and held his arms out apologetically as he walked by. Unconsciously, another cigarette magically found its way to Sterling's lips. How the fuck am I going to explain this? If the press got a hold of this story, it wasn't going to be Philly's ass on the line; it would be his own.
A helicopter flew over, thunder-chopping the air, not the typical smalltown news helicopter, but an actual military helicopter, its wings loaded with ordnance. Sterling watched it speed away to the west, battering the air with its rotors. Where the hell are you going? Salt Lake City? Portland? Boise?
When it was gone, he set about figuring out a way to tell the boss one of his EMTs might have cost the company millions of dollars.
From the main part of Casper, more sirens wailed.
"What the fuck is going on today?"
****
When eight o'clock rolled around and the shifts changed, everyone fled home hurriedly. Panic hung in the air like gas fumes waiting for someone to light a match. Of course, Matthew Ross didn't show up for his shift. Sterling didn't know it, but Ross was hundreds of miles away, loaded down with supplies, and settling into a cabin he wouldn't leave for the rest of his life. Unfortunately, Ross' cabin didn't have cell phone reception, so all of Sterling's profanity-laced tirades went unheard.
Ambulance crews pulled in, hopping out of their rigs, not even bothering to finish their notes in the staff room before they headed out. They looked like spooked horses as they jogged across the concrete. The next batch of paramedics and EMTs who showed up seemed unaware of what awaited them, though there were a few no-shows.
"What's up, Sterling?" Sketchy Jeff called to him.
Sterling hated Sketchy Jeff, but he had to admit he did his job well. Although, he couldn't shake the feeling Sketchy Jeff spent an absurd amount of his day making fun of Sterling behind his back. Once, he'd walked into the staff breakroom and found Sketchy Jeff doing a pretty spot-on impression of him, complete with an imaginary cigarette clamped between his fingers.
"I'm not sure," Sterling answered honestly.
"Well, that's a new one. You usually know everything."
Sketchy Jeff flashed him a sardonic smile before heading back to the parking lot. Cashman, his partner, showed up next, his eyes still sleepy and his hand wrapped around a cup of coffee steaming in the evening.
There was no banter with Cashman. He was barely awake. That would be fixed soon enough. One run and Cashman and Sketchy Jeff's motors would be would be burning through adrenaline the way Sterling himself was.
