Much like hell, the emergency department in which Compton worked was laid out in the shape of a circle within a circle within a circle. Low-acuity rooms lined the outer perimeter, all of which were currently occupied by high-acuity patients in the throes of agony. The second ring—for the worst emergencies—contained the trauma bays and critical care equipment, and it too was filled to overflowing with high-acuity patients in the throes of agony. “Overflowing” was not an exaggeration; they’d run out of patient rooms, so rows and rows of yet more high-acuity patients in the throes of agony lined every hallway, parked on gurneys and yelling their heads off. The ones who could yell were yelling, anyway. Quite a few of them could not.

The final inner circle consisted of the administrative area. A wall of plexiglass encircled a long, curved work desk at which the physicians sat and did their charting or looked up labs or entered orders. No one had time to sit and do anything now, obviously, so all the chairs were empty, save for one occupied by a bewildered-looking unit secretary wearing an enormous antique gas mask. In theory, she was there to page people and answer the phone, but no one could hear her through the gas mask, so her entire ineffectual presence was one more horrible fucked-up thing in a horrible fucked-up charade of horrible fucked-up care. The doctors, meanwhile, looked up labs and entered orders on tablets while running from room to room trying to put out fires. As for coherent charting, forget about it.

Compton had arrived one minute earlier. This would be her seventh straight night shift, but since so many ER and critical care docs were out sick, there would be no respite; as one of the few people who had survived an infection and was therefore thought to have earned immunity to the virus, she couldn’t be spared. The second she entered, people screamed for her.

She grabbed her tablet, swiped it with an antiseptic wipe, and set off into the depths of hell. A patient had just been whisked through the segregated ART entrance by a pair of EMTs. Both of them wore head-to-toe industrial-looking PPE of some off brand they’d probably scrounged on the black market, along with face shields and respirator masks. They didn’t bother with the usual concise reporting they’d have delivered in the pre-ART period. Instead, one of them ran alongside the gurney, squeezing a purple Ambu bag attached to an oxygen mask, as the other gestured to the prone form on the stretcher and grunted. “Bad,” he said.

Compton looked. Yes, bad. The patient was dead. She motioned to the nurse, a large man in his fifties named Jerry, to start chest compressions as the paramedics parked the stretcher.

“Downtime?” she asked, moving to the head of the bed.