her new friend said as he shook her awake. She pushed his hand off her shoulder and sat up. “What’s going on, Josh?” she asked, wiping the sleep from her eyes.“We need all the help we can get over at the hospital. There was some kind of attack involving a large Army group in the city. The helicopters will be here in a few minutes. Please, get up, we need everybody to help out. I’m going to go wake the other volunteers.”Great. I didn’t realize when I volunteered to help out at the hospital that I’d be woken up in the middle of the night so often. She put on the scrubs they’d given her and raked her fingers through her hair. This was the third time in as many nights since she’d volunteered at the hospital that there was an emergency. All of the other times it was a new batch of refugees being brought in, this was the first time that a military unit had been attacked here at ground zero that she knew of. Sure, all over the country there were reports of small-scale civil war that was slowly being suppressed, but the local region around the blast site had been relatively calm as people tried to deal with the repercussions of a nuclear detonation sixty miles away. Was the violence and madness beginning to take hold here too?She shuffled her feet along the wooden pallet walkway to the hospital. The designers of the camp had wisely installed the pallets as a pathway between each of the tents as protection against the mud that was sure to build up when it finally rained. That would be a treat, poison rain collecting in puddles where the survivors were taking refuge. When she reached the hospital fence she waved to the guard who opened the gate for her. “Good morning Miss Perry,”
