"Who are we kidding? Reconstituted disinterred entities? The formerly expired? The prematurely lamented?" Sprague had used his last euphemism. Frustration and fatigue finally stripped him of his last ounce of professional prudence as he bickered with the chief of staff at Arnesville Regional Hospital. Surrounding the two men, the dead huddled in a once spotless hallway, many clustered in familial groups, whimpering and trembling. They had spilled into the corridors from an overcrowded and understaffed emergency room. Outside, they shambled through the parking lot, gazed despondently at their reflections in car windows, and picked at their own putrescent flesh. "They're walking corpses. How am I supposed to treat walking corpses?"

"Just do your job, Dr. Sprague." Dr. Zephram Ames responded to Sprague's outburst with a cold stare and an unsympathetic tone. The 50-something physician ran the hospital with an iron fist in the best of times. The current crisis had transformed him into a fascist despot devoid of compassion for his colleagues. "I expect you to treat each one like any other patient: examine their symptoms, manage their pain and monitor their progress. It's all we can do until a treatment or a cure is developed."

"There won't be a treatment or a cure," Sprague said, his tone growing more insubordinate as his discontent and resentment mounted. Those who required and deserved legitimate health care were being turned away from the hospital because of the extraordinary circumstances. Sprague had not worked his way through medical school to spend the rest of his life dealing with an endless parade of moldering patients. "This isn't a disease. It's an aberration of nature."

"We have our orders." Ames referred to strict government directives outlined in a hastily drafted Presidential Executive Order shortly after the onset of the epidemic. "Our hands are tied. The law dictates our actions. I won't risk my career over this."

"And I won't waste mine medicating things that by all rights should be destroyed."

Sprague turned his back and walked down the grim corridor, navigating the ghastly tangle of fetid flesh and moaning cadavers. He longed for fresh air, untainted by the lurid stench of the dead. At the end of the hallway he hesitated in front of a service entrance, wishing he could leave it all behind him, wishing he could ignore his conscience, go home, and wait it out.

He could not help but feel beguiled by the bliss of seclusion, the promise of total tranquility as could only be achieved in complete isolation. At the same time, he feared what might become of the city----of the world----in his absence. What today manifested itself as a plague of the dead could tomorrow become a scourge of the living. He had an obligation to stay alert, to stay focused, to watch for signs of mutation.

After a moment's deliberation he turned toward the stairwell and headed for the roof. Though he had no weather reports to notify him, he could tell a cold front was pushing through the mountains. He hoped the arctic winds would offer a temporary reprieve from the stomach-turning aroma saturating the hospital's lower levels.

Down there, everything smelled like the grave.

He had examined dozens of reconstituted disinterred entities over the last few weeks, poked and prodded them, even gathered specimens to be forwarded to the USAMRIID task force facility located on the outskirts of the city. He continually questioned the military's unprecedented utilization of civilian medical personnel to act as first responders in the outbreak, criticizing army scientists for distancing themselves from the hot zone.

Nothing about the epidemic made sense. The government's initial reaction had been to quarantine the city----a feat made feasible thanks to the area's rugged topography. Set in the Appalachian Mountains in far western North Carolina, Arnesville could be cut off from the rest of the region relatively easily with the closure of four state highways and a 20-mile stretch of the Interstate system. State police simply rerouted traffic through nearby Canton and Waynesville.

A media blackout quickly followed. All television, radio, and newspaper services were terminated with swift and shocking efficiency. The military apparently deployed some form of equipment that jammed external radio signals and made satellite dishes ineffective. All phones, both land-line and cellular, ceased to function. Postal deliveries were halted.

Not a single journalist entered the city after the implementation of the quarantine.

Then, instead of inserting troops to round up the infected corpses, the military positioned itself along the quarantine perimeter and set about patrolling the back country in Black Hawk choppers. No epidemiologists arrived to relieve the overtaxed medical community. No FEMA workers appeared to assess the conditions and provide logistical support. No government representatives visited to address the concerns of local residents, to offer reassurances or provide explanations and chart strategies.

Finally, word came down that the president had extended limited Constitutional rights to those affected----and that the "killing" of any such entity constituted a federal offense punishable by, ironically, death.

Unlike those in Washington D.C., Sprague had no misconceptions about the state of the "corporeal undead," the term employed to describe the entities in the official document. The dead rarely spoke, exhibited no emotion other than chronic depression and appeared to have only limited fine motor skills. He saw no spark of intelligence in their eyes, no flicker of remembrance and no internal motivation to survive. Left to their own devices, they might well waste away into nothingness. They ate nothing, drank nothing, and, aside from wandering aimlessly and groaning unremittingly, they did nothing.

Admittedly, some of Ames' closest associates had achieved some success with experimental therapy. His team worked in secrecy in the upper levels of the hospital, selecting trial candidates through a careful screening process. From the notes he had shared with other staff members, the things could be nourished intravenously, taught to perform simple skills, prompted into speech.

That Ames sanctioned such trials repulsed Sprague. Those responsible for the research argued that their work was a logical extension of their scientific background. They considered themselves medical revolutionaries exploring cutting-edge rehabilitation techniques.

Sprague likened them to grave-robbers bent on harvesting the dead for their own selfish professional purposes.

"Fed up with the working conditions down there, Dr. Sprague?" Arriving on the roof, the physician found a congregation of expatriated interns smoking and sharing a bottle of Jack Daniels beneath the ruddy evening skies. "Or have you come to collect us and usher us back down to our stations?" Randy Donne had apparently been elected as the group's provisional spokesperson. The other greenhorns lacked the courage to voice their antipathy and aversion to dealing with the dead. "If that's the case, I'm afraid that we'll have to decline the invitation."

"No," Sprague said, "I'm here for some fresh air."

"Not much to go around." Donne flicked his cigarette butt over the side of the building, followed its descent with his gaze. The street in front of the hospital teemed with squirmy corpses. "There's so many of them now you can smell 'em all the way up here."

"Damn worm-sacks and dirt-backs," Freddie Julian said, downing a swig from the bottle. Sprague had heard both expressions in recent days, counted them among the more evocative inventions in an evolving lexicon. Worm-sacksreferred to corpses over six months old, dug up by optimistic relatives and subsequently abandoned due to their advanced state of decomposition. Dirt-backswere the recent dead, in most cases spontaneously reawakened in the midst of their own burial. "Someone should be corralling them, herding them toward a crematorium or something."