Zoe Patrick, MD

Zoe Patrick, MD: 36. Infectious disease specialist assigned to the late-stage contamination unit. My job has become extremely sad since the outbreak. Currently stationed in Albuquerque, NM. [1x1 RP account/ mun 21+ NSFW content tagged, but no readmores.]

[doctor-zoe]

Close Quarters

[littlesecretxxx-deactivated2015]

Jack hadn’t always lived in a place with a working shower, and she had to admit it was one of the upsides of living here. Not that there were too many, but some days she thanked everything for at least that shower. After leaving home at eighteen, abandoned places had been her home; their peeling walls welcoming her with open arms. But the water came out like rust, and burned her skin when it wasn’t freezing it. She hadn’t been alone, groups of other lost souls with her, but they were nomads, and sometimes Jack found herself in the arms of a more homely place, somewhere where a warm shower would greet her happily. But after the plague, as she watched her friends die around her, Jack found something she was good at.

Scavenging. While no one risked going to the infected dead, a few did, picking things off the bodies before the extractors. And it had worked just fine, up until three weeks ago. Now she was here, working for those who she used to run away from, working as one of them. They’d all gotten back late, but Jack had been the one to stay eating when they had all gone to shower, leaving her alone. 

Marks of the suit she wore while working clung to her skin, the hot water not helping to wash them away. Her skin was raw from the lifting, a fresh bruise on her upper arm from having to push past people while working. But most importantly, at her temples lay fresh the indents of her mask, the straps too tight around her head, the recreation of a Renaissance plague mask repurposed for their time. The correlation didn’t escape her, and she both praised and scoffed at the sick bastard who came up with that. This was a plague. This was death incarnate, and here she was, profiting from it.

Ever the bottom feeder.

Jack shut off the shower with a sigh, before she stepped out to wrap herself in a towel, her highlighted hair still dripping as she rung it out onto the tiles bellow. Looking up, though, she smirked lightly before nodding, having not expected to see anyone else walk in when Zoey did. “What’s up, doc? That busy downstairs, or you couldn’t sleep?” she asked, pulling her hair over her shoulder as she stepped over to the mirrors.

[doctor-zoe]

Zoe would have been content with a smile at her fellow late-nighter but the other woman opted to address her verbally. She welcomed it, actually. After hearing nothing but questions, cries, and beeping all day, the physician welcomed the simple greeting, despite feeling beyond med-school exhausted.

"Just getting in, actually," Zoe answered the other brunette while pulling her flip-flops from her basket and dropping them on the floor. She'd seen the other woman around from a distance with a silicone beak mask and knew what her job was. "What about you? Coming or all-nighter?"

Their voices echoed throughout the bathroom. Only one other running shower kept the communal bathroom from being completely silent. The slap of Zoe's flip-flops bounced off the walls as she set her things in a shower stall and stripped out of her robe to hang it and her towel just outside of it.

[doctor-zoe]

Close Quarters

Hysteria, looting, hypochondria... it all happened outside the walls of the quarantine facility. It seemed the US was turned upside down and torn to shreds since the outbreak began. "The Red Plague" was the name the media quickly gave it. It was an extremely mutated form of the plague bacteria and it was resistant to all forms of antibiotics save for vancomycin. What made it worse was that it was highly adaptive and easily spread through a cough, sneeze, or even yawn.

Zoe was barely through with her subspecialty training when she took the opportunity to to help out at the disease's epicenter in Albuquerque. When one specializes in infectious disease, it's hard not to feel morally compelled. She packed up her things and moved for what she thought would only be a few weeks to New Mexico from Seattle, Washington.

That was two months and three-hundred million deaths ago.

It was after two AM when the doctor returned to her room for three hours of rest before heading back down to the containment unit. She stripped out of her scrubs, threw on a robe, collected her shower supplies, and made her way down the hall to the showers to scrub off before getting into bed.  She hated the specialized soap they needed to use; it left her skin just short of scaly and it reeked like Pinsol. Zoe wondered if it actually was Pinsol.