RQ Network Feed Drop – Not Quite Dead S1: I: The Girl on the Gurney

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Hi everyone, it's Anushia here. Today, we are sharing the first episode from an incredible podcast

on the Archune Network with you, not quite dead. Not quite dead is a UK-based, gory horror romance podcast from the award-winning team behind spirit box radio, remnants and clockwork bird. Follow Alfie, a nurse working over time when a patient arrives with her throat torn out. This is just the beginning of a terrifying night, as Alfie finds himself caught in a battle between the living and the undead, saved by mysterious vampire named

Casper. They find themselves in a scapebly bound together. Neither of them are happy about it, but the draw of each other's blood is irresistible. Find other brilliant episodes in this series by searching for not quite dead wherever you listen to podcasts. Click in the link in the show notes or on Rustyquill.com. If you want to support not quite dead and it's creators, head to www. Rustyquill.com/Fundraiser. Have fun and enjoy the episode.

Hello, my name is Alfie and I'm not quite dead. No, I'm Alfie and if you're listening to this tape, I'm probably dead or not quite dead, but in a different kind of way, and Jesus is also ridiculous, doesn't it? This is a lot more difficult than I thought it would be.

“Did I think it would be easy to write my own obituary? Is that what this even is?”

Honestly, I didn't give it much sleep before I sat down. I just knew I had to say something. Leave a little piece of me behind, you know. So the basics. I'm Alfie. I used to be an A&E nurse, but now I'm just me. I haven't left my flat in days. I think I'm dying. I know I'm dying. I should be dead already, but I'm not there's been a lot going on honestly and I just need to say all this now before I make any decisions because whatever I choose, I'm dead or I'm dead.

And either way, I'm pretty sure none of this is going to matter to me so much after that. Whatever it is that's happening to me now, it's important that people know. Not because I'm important, I am really, really not, but this is, so yeah. If you could just make sure my mum and my sisters don't hear this tape, that'd be great. I anonymise me or whatever. Call me. I don't know. Ben or something. And Casper can be built.

“Wait, no, there's already a vampire called Bell, isn't it?”

Wasn't me a confederate with something? I'm really awful thing, aren't I?

Mum always says, "I worry too much about whether people like me." She'd say like, "Crystall,

if you're picking up your anti-depressants, not doing an improv bit." And I'd be like, "Why not both?" Well, poor darling of the pharmacists won't have to deal with my terrible customer service standard routines anymore, so there is good to come out of this situation after all. I think I got this dictafone to do poetry. I will spare you my son poetry phase, nobody needs that in their life. I can't, then this is important, and I need to get this out, I need to.

There are only snatchers now where I'm awake and of the speak, and I think it's only going to get worse. And in approximately four days, when my supply of this blood runs out, I'm going to either die or become something else. I'm going ahead of myself. I need to start at the beginning, so you understand what happened. On the beginning, for me, was the people with the torn-out throats.

The first one I saw was the girl on the gurney.

This is not quite dead, episode one, the girl on the gurney.

Saturday nights are bad times to get hurt, because everyone's going hurt on the Saturday night.

That night, there was this guy down the hall where the rake in his foot. A woman who had cracked her head open on the curb, two lads getting a lit stitched in triage, of the two few people who were actually working that night, only three of us knew the hospital well. Me, Tracy, and Hayley, the junior doctor. When the girl on the gurney came in, I was on our 16 of a 12-hour shift with lead bones and eyes so wide. I was beginning to wonder if I'd ever be able to get them to shut again. I barely thought

anything of it. The rake gas on her neck was unusual, but not surprising. I didn't have the energy for surprise. When we transferred her over from the ambulance gurney onto another, she was cold to the touch, limbs loose, had lolling over the ward of gauze, taped her neck. Terry, the ambulance guy I've known for years, told me they thought it was a mugging, that she'd been drinking out with her friends and got separated from them, and when they found her,

“her throat was torn out and she was barely conscious. I don't remember what I said in response.”

It's not my job to care, and not about that. The girl's eyes were half open. Her hands were clammy loosely cut, shover her chest, sat in dress torn to allow for heart monitors. A blood pressure was through the floor. Her oxygen levels were no better, beneath the pad of gauze, her wound was jagged and strange, but despite its depth, it was no longer bleeding. The rackered flesh looked grey and almost dry. I didn't have time to think beyond assessing that this wouldn't be the

thing they killed her right away. With trauma, it's about priorities, and right then what we needed to do was whatever we could to get as much fluid in her system as possible. She came in,

pre-hooked up to IV fluids, ambulance Terry's work was nimble and efficient as always. The girl's

breath was coming heavy and slow. That's normal when your blood pressure is low, but it's not a good sign. When you first start losing blood, your heart beats faster, and your breath speeds up. There's less blood in the system, so your body is working extra hard to make sure that what is left is being used as best it can be. When things start to slow down like that, it means your body's running out of steam. It was very clear the girl on the gurney was almost entirely steamless by that

“point. She was in shock. What I remember really distinctly was she looked at me with those”

half-shot eyes, and she tried to say something, but I don't know what it was. I couldn't hear her, so I just smiled and said something generic. Like, we're going to look after you. Like I would do anyone. She looked me in the eye, and it wasn't acceptance exactly, but it was like she knew. She smiled as best she could, and very slightly shook her head. Behind me, I could hear the junior doctor Haley going spare, talking fast about calling the consultant about booking your

surgery, so we about ordering more bloods, more fluids to restock the fridges, and I couldn't make my body move. Haley grabbed my arm, wuffling still about calling the consultant or whatever, and I looked up from the patient's half-litted eyes, and Haley just immediately shut up. It felt like

we stood there in silence for ages, but it was probably only a second or two, really. It was one

of those transparent moments where you can see right through to exactly what is going to happen next, but for now you're just stuck there, knowing, powerless. Haley released her grip on my arm, and swallowed. Her expression was sat, drained, and we were both completely still for a second, looking at the girl on the gurney. I nodded at Haley. She nodded back. We did everything we could, filled up with fluid's blood plasma, but she died there on the gurney,

just like Haley and I both knew she would. Haley's silly-fitted ivies were stopped, monitors detached, I closed her eyes. Haley performed the slow, arduous task of pronouncing the definitely dead girl bed, and me and the other nurses went back to flitting between other patients in A&E as best as we could. All in, it was 32 minutes since she came through the door.

“I don't remember who I was seeing next, maybe stitching gashes on an arm, fitting an ivy,”

drawing blood, but I know at some point I looked up to see a distraught woman in slippers and pink flamingo pajamas with a duffel coat over the top, bounding through the door. She was the spitting image of the girl in the gurney. Haley had just finished pronouncing the girl dead, and as soon she saw the woman in the pink flamingo pajamas her face pale. I didn't hear the conversation, but I caught glimpses between pressing ice packs on four arms and checking trips in the back

of elderly people's hands. The woman in the pink flamingo pajamas covered her mouth and then her face. She sat down slowly, shoulders rising to areas. So it's the same. Haley wondered over to me,

half way. She told me it was the first person she declared dead that wasn't elderly.

“We went outside to smoke, down the back of the hospital. There were these unnaturally”

bright white lights which made the darkness beyond the little patch of light we were standing in field, even darker. We were standing slightly too far apart. I actually really strapped when I held out my box of cigarettes to Haley was in a smokeer, but she took one anyway. We stood there in silence, trading smoke and then whispers up towards the floodlights. Out with nowhere Haley made this strange noise like a kick dog. I looked up at her in a long with my sore so I had to sleep

deprived out his half-expecting. I liked to afford enough all gallons of blood to be pouring out of areas, but instead she was just crying. She bought the sleeves of her jacket over her hands and covered her face with them. All of a sudden she looked very young. I don't really know what it was. She just looked really small. Junior Doctor is a bit of a misnomer. Haley had been out of medical school for two years by the time she'd come to work with me on A&E. At that point I didn't know

“that well. She'd only been at York Hospital for a couple of weeks then, but over her stint working”

with me, I'd already learn. I liked her a lot. She was kind in spite of a job that punished that

sort of thing, and she was a laugh on a night out and never took things too seriously. She felt

more like a nurse than a doctor and I mean that as a compliment, not to deskt doctors or anything, but they can be a bit up themselves. Haley always listened to us when we gave her advice. Always remembered staff like me in Tracy might not have been doctors but we had been working in the hospital for years, something that she and her fellow junior doctors didn't have a lot of proof of doing. It was sad seeing us so distraught. So broken, but I understood it.

I told her it was fucking horrendous because it was. It always is. You get used to it in some ways, unshocked by the death and horrors, but it doesn't do you any good to get like that. Deep down under the layers of thick skin, you always feel it. Sometimes it's sharp enough to poke right through to the surface. We didn't say anything else. We just stood and Haley missed, silently wept. I didn't escape by any for another four and a half hours after that.

Several more people died and by the time I pulled into the drive and let myself back into my mum's house through the back door so I didn't wait my mum or mum's sisters. I'd almost completely forgotten about the girl on my gurney. I felt faced down, my unmade bed fully clothed and sticky

with swam god knows what else and finally finally I slept. Sorry. I was I. Oh yeah. The girl on

the gurney was gone from my mind completely by the time my mother woke me the next morning. I was fully dressed under the covers. I was not ready to be accosted when she burst in an immediately so I'd going on about how long my shift had been. It was not an ideal living situation much as I loved my mum and the weird thing was she hadn't talked about it at all really until that morning that I after I saw the girl on the gurney died. I wondered about that sense,

you know, like it feels like a weird cosmic coincidence. Casper says it probably wasn't a coincidence despite how many times I've told him that the girl on the gurney was no worse than any of the other patients that died that night. Apart from how it affected Haley but he doesn't believe

“me. It's bloody survivorship bias. That's what it is. All hindsight making connections. It wouldn't have”

been possible to make it all at the time but which feel really obvious when you look back. I mean it's not obvious. It's just convenient. That's just how it is with Casper there. Sorry. I'm getting off track again. My mother was stunning at the kitchen sink holding her cup of tea and when I walked in she said you look awful even though she hadn't even turned around. I told her thanks and said about me he's in breakfast. One of my sisters had clearly stolen my expensive

imported golden grams because there were only a few stale pieces left at the bottom of the box. I padded them out with corn flakes and was middle tree rather spoon from the dishwasher when my mum said, "Have you thought any more about moving out?" I froze in place like a particularly shit-street performer. I looked at my mother with a raised eyebrow. The truth was I had thought about it almost constantly since the moment I'd had to move back in. I was only very partially to do

with the laser ferroprotech. Everyone else in my media family seemed to have with cutlery storage. Mum's house was, like I say, at less than ideal, living situation for me. And it was not just because I was forced to share a single bathroom with another adult and almost adult and a preteen. Mid-warning is a good bet for showers in Mum's house. Tami, my little sister, has bats in the evenings. Mum's showers at the Crackathon and Grace in the glory of her late teens. Does not usually

emerge from her bedroom until early afternoon? When I first moved back, my old bedroom was full of Christmas decorations, including the artificial tree. Still decked out in all its borbol and light glory. Mum told me her friend Janet had been doing this for years. You'd just wrapped the

mum had never had before, so as soon as the opportunity arose, she seized it. She seemed to have

also applied to same logic to other occasional use household items, because my room was also home too. They never used stationary bike, which was dressed in several winter coats. The fully assembled ironing board, complete with a decorative layer of shirts that had never even heard of an iron, let alone been subject to a pressing bite one. A dog's bed filled with dog toys for the dog millie who had died five years previously. In fairness, Mum had cleared the suitcases off the

bed before her arrived, stacking them in a hat, has a tower between the bike and the tree units can film condom. When we need to move anything else, she'd asked and I told her no, because I thought I'd only be there for a few nights at worst. I come back to stay with Mum, because my partner, Ben, who I'd previously been living with, had forgotten to check in with

me about when my shift would likely be ending, so he'd failed to kick out the younger,

hotter version of me, he'd apparently been sleeping with for months before I got home. Younger Hotta Me was a medical student, who was also named Ben, which I found a particularly kicking the teeth. He wasn't that he'd be just called Ben, which was my partner's name too, or even that he was younger and unquestionably more attractive than I was. It was that he was a

“medical student. My Ben had started sleeping with me when I was a training nurse. I remember the night,”

I left for Mum's house right before I walked out of the door, I looked at them, sat together on the couch that my Ben and I had bought together, and asking days, if they said each other's names during sex, because it wasn't that weird, saying your own name. They both just looked at me with the same mix of horror and embarrassment. They'd been regarded me with, since I'd walked into the bedroom and my Ben had his pelvis and that's all against the other Ben's

ass cheeks. I've since come to the conclusion that they absolutely did, because my Ben refused to answer this question, no matter how many times I bought it to him. I tried to across York, on foot, because the car was broken, with my rucksack and my phone, and I was still crying when I opened the door to me. She made me a cup of tea, finished moving the suitcases and put me to bed, surrounded by all the strange off-season objects which had taken up residence in my absence.

I had assumed that first night that my Ben would come to me with significant apologies and I'd

forgive him like all the other times I discovered his infertility. However, when I returned back to our flat to pick up more underwear, I found other Ben making a cup of coffee in the kitchen, entirely nude, but for a pair of my socks. At that point, I decided I could probably do better. So, my couple of nights back at Mums became a few weeks. Those few weeks became a few months. Christmas came, and we decondoned the tree, letting it take pride of place in the living room.

And when the festive period was over, mum wouldlessly remove the borbols, disassembled the tree and shoved it up in the loft. The iron ring board also resumed its old folded position in the downstairs low. I still share a room with the stationary bike and the winter coats there. Through all of this, mum had not once brought up the fact that I could not, in fact, stay living back in my childhood home forever. I hopeing to not have to put the tree in the attic after

Christmas, I asked her. Mum's side. No, it's not that. It's just she just should vaguely at my entire body. You don't seem happy, healthy. I asked if she thought turning out on the street would put a spring

“in my stub. No, mum's side. Of course not. You can stay as long as you need to, but I'm worried”

that maybe you're worried about moving on. Have you even, you know, been with Emily Lads since? I asked her if she really wanted to answer to that question, which of course she didn't. The answer was no. Sorry, I just worry, mum, I'm sad. You should be in love. You should at least be out looking for it. And you need to take fewer shifts at work. That hospital is going to put you in an early grave. I told her that at least if I was going to have a heart attack

I'd be in the right place for it. She was right in the end, no, no, not in the way to short. I took my sad half-gold and grey and half-cooled flakes up to my room and wondered if mum was right. It had been comforting to hear her telling me there was no rush that if I didn't want to dive back into the dating pool before I was ready that was fine. My friends were in the opposite camp strong believers in that not so old average that the best way to go over someone is to get under someone else.

I didn't briefly toy for the idea of looking for someone else called Alfie that I could sleep with, just to see what it was like, but Jen's heart most mankled Alfie would be considered geriatric patients if they came into the hospital. And I couldn't even tell whether any of the ones I'd found were gay. It was one thing to walk up to a pretty guy in a bar and flirt with him to test the waters and another entirely to approach someone's granddad who isn't even heart

and say, "Hey, you've got the same name as me, fancy a shag to cure my trauma." Feeling quite sorry for myself, I don't my phone out of my jacket to scroll through as I ate my depressingly padded out, pulled of golden grey arms. And yep, there it is. That's 12 hours since

“I last drank my blood. Why am I telling you about the fucking cereal?”

How am I talking about Ben? None of this matters. I'm not excited to feel it yet.

least. Last time it was about 20 hours before I needed more. Casper said the time between would

get shorter and shorter and that it had helped us at last, you know, like building up a tolerance. Casper got all wise with me when I made that comparison though. He said, "Yes, but this tolerance would build to your death." Like that wasn't all we'd been talking about for the previous hour. It's the easiest comparison though, building up a tolerance. And before I need to drink more of it, it's like a process of withdrawal. And yes, Casper, if you're listening to this,

I know that's not exactly like that. That what's actually happening to me is that all the dying that the blood is keeping a bay is slowly creeping back into me, but this is the best analogy I've got, so bow with me. And I need my analogies Casper, they keep me saying. The withdrawal starts off like tingling in my fingers, almost like pins and needles, but kind of cold, like the feeling of mint in your mouth, you know, at any creeps and creeps. And I can

feel myself sweating. And my heart starts sluttering and I can't breathe. And all I can think about is the taste and I've tasted blood before, but it's not like Casper's. It's like rust and nothing, all blood. This is like it's sweet, like honey and wine and musk and boozy and friction. God, I should sleep before it starts. Casper said it would be like this. It can only serve as a pause. It can't heal what happened. So either I spread it out, or I drink two doses at once, and I become like him.

Like Casper. But I don't need to decide that yet. I have enough blood left. I've measured out,

“carefully, I don't need to decide yet. Could it be a few days before I need to decide?”

Maybe Casper will come back before then. It'd be easier. Casper came back. He said to put back three days ago though. So I don't think that's going to happen. Sorry, I stopped making sense of an I am. I'll pick this up later when I've slept. Not quite dead, it's written performed and edited by A-Ramager, and a creative comment for pointo attribution license. This. Life. Bait.

To listen to the rest of the series, search for not quite dead, wherever you find podcasts,

click the link in the description, or as always, you can visit RustyCold.com for more information.

“If you want to support not quite dead and its creators, head to www. RustyCold.com/Fundraiser.”

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