RQ Network Feed Drop – Not Quite Dead S1: I:The Girl on the Gurney
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Hi everyone, it's Anusha here. Today, we are sharing the first episode from an incredible podcast on the RQ Network with you, Not Quite Dead. Not Quite Dead is a UK-based gory horror romance podcast from the award-winning team behind Spiritboxx Radio, Remnants and Clockwork Bird.

follow Alfie, a nurse working overtime, 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 a mysterious vampire named Casper,

they find themselves inescapably 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, clicking the link in the show notes, or on RustyQuill.com. If you want to support Not Quite Dead and its creators, until April 3rd, head to www.rustyquill.com forward slash 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, this all sounds 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 thought 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 undead. 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. Anonymise me or whatever. Call me, I don't know, Ben or something. And Casper can be Bill. Wait, no, there's already a vampire called Bill, isn't there? Wasn't he a confederate or something? Oh, I'm really waffling, aren't I?

Mum always says I worry too much about whether people like me. She'd say like, Christ Alfie, you're picking up your antidepressants, not doing an improv bit, and I'd be like, why not both? Well, poor Darla the pharmacist won't have to deal with my terrible customer service stand-up routines anymore, so there is good to come out of this situation after all. I think I got this dictaphone to do poetry. God, I will spare you my slam poetry phase, nobody needs that in their life. God, no, no, this is important and I need to get this out, I need to.

There are only snatches now where I'm awake enough to 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 getting ahead of myself. I need to start at the beginning so you understand what happened. And 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 1. The Girl on the Gurney. The Girl on the Gurney came in at half ten on a Saturday night. Saturday night's a bad time to get hurt because everyone's getting hurt on a Saturday night.

That night, there was this guy down the hall with a rake in his foot. A woman who had cracked her head open on the curb. Two lads getting their lips stitched in triage. Of the too 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 hour 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 ragged gash 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, head lolling over the wad of gauze taped to 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 clutched over her chest, sat in dress torn to allow for heart monitors. Her 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 ragged flesh looked grey and almost dry.

I didn't have time to think beyond assessing that this wouldn't be the thing that 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 into 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-shut 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 to 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, Hayley, going spare, talking fast about calling the consultant, about booking a surgery suite, about ordering more bloods, more fluids to restock the fridges, and I couldn't make my body move. Hayley grabbed my arm, waffling still about calling the consultant or whatever, and I looked up from the patient's half-lidded eyes, and Hayley 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. Hayley released her grip on my arm and swallowed. Her expression was set, drained, and we were both completely still for a second, looking at the girl on the gurney. I nodded at Hayley. She nodded back. We did everything we could, filled her with fluids, blood, plasma, but she died there, on the gurney, just like Hayley and I both knew she would. Hastily fitted IVs were stopped, monitors detached. I closed her eyes.

Hayley performed the slow, arduous task of pronouncing the definitely dead girl dead, 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 IV, drawing blood, but I know at some point I looked up to see a distraught woman in slippers and pink flamingo pyjamas with a duffel coat over the top, bounding through the door. She was the spitting image of the girl on the gurney.

Hayley had just finished pronouncing the girl dead, and as soon as she saw the woman in the pink flamingo pyjamas, her face paled. I didn't hear the conversation, but I caught glimpses between pressing ice packs on forearms and checking trips in the back of elderly people's hands. The woman in the pink flamingo pyjamas covered her mouth, and then her face. She sat down slowly, shoulders rising to her ears. It's always the same. Hayley wandered over to me, limply, and I politely excused myself from whatever tired I was attempting to stem to meet her halfway.

She told me it was the first person she'd 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 feel even darker. We were standing slightly too far apart. I had to really stretch when I held out my box of cigarettes to... Hayley wasn't a smoker, but she took one anyway. We stood there in silence, trailing smoke in thin wisps up towards the floodlights.

Out of nowhere, Hayley made this strange noise like a kicked dog. I looked up at her in alarm with my saucer-wide, sleep-deprived eyes, half expecting her leg to have fallen off or gallons of blood to be pouring out of her ears, but instead she was just crying. She pulled 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. Hayley 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 her 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 learned 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 diss doctors or anything, but they can be a bit up themselves.

but Hayley always listened to us when we gave her advice. Always remembered staff like me and 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 the luxury of doing. It was sad seeing her 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 near silently wept. I didn't escape A&E for another four and a half hours after that. Seven 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 wake my mum or my sisters, I'd almost completely forgotten about the girl on the gurney. I fell face down into my unmade bed, fully clothed and sticky with sweat and God knows what else, and finally, finally, I slept. Ha!

Sorry. Where 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 and immediately started going on about how long my shift had been. It was not an ideal living situation, much as I love my mum. And the weird thing was she hadn't talked about it at all, really, until that morning, the day after I saw the girl on the gurney died. I've wondered about that since, you know. 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 Hayley, 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 at all at the time, but which feel really obvious when you look back. Only it's not obvious, it's just convenient. That's just how it is with Casper though. Sorry, I'm getting off track again.

My mother was standing 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 set about making some breakfast. One of my sisters had clearly stolen my expensive imported golden grahams because there were only a few stale pieces left at the bottom of the box. I padded them out with cornflakes and was mid-retriever of a 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, and it was only very partially to do with the laissez-faire approach everyone else in my immediate family seemed to have with cutlery storage. Mum's house was, like I say, a less-than-ideal living situation for me, and it was not just because I was forced to share a single bathroom with another adult, an almost-adult and a pre-teen.

Mid-morning is a good bet for showers in Mum's house. Tammy, my littlest sister, has baths in the evenings. Mum showers at the crack of dawn 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 bauble and light glory. Mum told me her friend Janet had been doing this for years. You just wrap the bastard in a couple of loops of cling film and shove it out of sight.

Janet had a spare room, which Mum had never had before, so as soon as the opportunity arose, she ceased it. She seemed to have also applied this same logic to other occasional-use household items, because my room was also home to the 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 by 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 I arrived, stacking them in a haphazard tower between the bike and the tree in its clingfilm condom. Will 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'd 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, hotter me was a medical student who was also named Ben, which I found a particular kick in the teeth. It wasn't that he was 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 trainee nurse.

I remember the night I left for my mum's house, right before I walked out the door, I looked at them, sat together on the couch that my Ben and I had bought together, and asking, dazed, if they said each other's names during sex, because 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 regarding me with since I'd walked into the bedroom and my Ben had his pelvis nestled against the other Ben's arse 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 put it to him.

I trudged across York, on foot because the car was broken, with my rucksack and my phone, and I was still crying when Mum 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 snivelling apologies, and I'd forgive him like all the other times I'd discovered his infidelity.

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 Mum's became a few weeks. Those few weeks became a few months.

Christmas came and we decondomed the tree, letting it take pride of place in the living room. And when the festive period was over, mum wordlessly removed the baubles, disassembled the tree and shoved it up in the loft. The ironing board also resumed its old folded position in the downstairs low. I still share a room with the stationary bike and the winter coats though. 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. Are you hoping to not have to put the tree in the attic after Christmas? I asked her.

Mum sighed. No, it's not that. It's just she gestured vaguely at my entire body. You don't seem happy, Elfie. I asked if she thought turning out on the street would put a spring in my stub. No, Mum sighed. 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 any lads since? I asked her if she really wanted an answer to that question, which of course she didn't. The answer was no.

"'Sorry, I just worry,' my mum said. "'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, though. "'No, not in the ways she thought. "'I took my sad half-golden grahams, half-cornflakes 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 adage that the best way to get over someone is to get under someone else. I did briefly toy with the idea of looking for someone else called Alfie that I could sleep with just to see what it was like, but it turns out most men called 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 grandad who isn't even hot and say "Hey, you've got the same name as me. Fancy a shag to cure my trauma?" Feeling quite sorry for myself, I dug my phone out of my jacket to scroll through as I ate my depressingly padded out pole of Golden Grahams and... Yep. There it is. That's 12 hours since I last drank the blood. Why am I telling you about the fucking cereal? Why am I talking about Ben? None of this matters. I've not started to feel it yet.

There's a cold that creeps in when the blood wears off, but it's not started yet. That's good, at 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'd help less and less, 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 will build 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, Caspar, 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 at bay is slowly creeping back into me. But this is the best analogy I've got, so bear with me. And I need my analogies, Caspar, they keep me sane. 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? And he creeps and creeps. And I can feel myself sweating and my heart starts thundering 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. Normal blood. This is like, it's sweet. Like honey and wine and musk and boozy and rich. And 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 it out carefully. I don't need to decide yet. Could be a few days before I need to decide. Maybe Casper will come back before then. It'd be easier if Casper came back. He said he'd be back three days ago though. So I don't think that's going to happen.

Sorry, I've stopped making sense of it. I'll pick this up later when I've slept. Not Quite Dead is written, performed and edited by Aira Major under a Creative Commons 4.0 attribution licence. Live.

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 RustyQuill.com for more information. If you want to support Not Quite Dead and its creators, until April 3rd, head to www.rustyquill.com forward slash fundraiser.