better places to be

Why didn’t they just die already?

He wasn’t supposed to be here, doing this. He wasn’t even trained to do this. Yes, he was a doctor. Yes, he worked in a hospital. But he didn’t actually work with the sick. Not this kind of sick. He didn’t work with the bleeding and leakage and the hacking coughs that he could almost feel covering him and -- oh god the puss. This wasn’t his kind of shit. He wasn’t this kind of doctor. And he sure as hell wasn’t a specialist. There had been no desire to continue on so far. He had the job, it paid well, he had weekends, he had the car he had always wanted, and anything serious was handed off and to a specialist.

But right now there weren’t any kind of specialists. There weren’t any other doctors. Not here, not now. Just him. Being here, doing something he was not trained to do and, honestly?, he didn’t even remember volunteering for it. Actually, he was pretty damn certain he hadn’t. He had been trying to get out. Leave this place, head back home. Leave this diseased petri dish for someone else because it wasn’t like there was something he could even do. But then somebody found him, and had offered him up, and there had been pleading and some general consensus that never seemed to consider that he would really much rather be home. It wasn’t his problem; it shouldn’t have to be his problem. He couldn’t do anything, Nobody could. And he had a home and a house and his car and a place that wasn’t overrun with disease and needy people too stupid to realize when things were useless.

He walked around, stepping over bodies that hacked and sputtered and could just feel somebody’s saliva land on his shoe. There was no cure, the ‘medicine’ did jack shit, and they were all dying. But none of them were dead, and he was still here, administering.

Why didn’t they just die?