An emergency transport stretcher sits in the middle of the corridor, with a stack of unarchived observation records pressed beneath it. The edges are worn and frayed from repeated handling.

What you thinkThe top few sheets were from the same day. One recorded a patient brought in from the east side of the city, bitten by a neighbor's dog, who didn't develop a fever until the fifth day. Another recorded a nurse from this hospital who was scratched and bitten on the forearm while treating that patient. The time column only advanced forty minutes before adding: "Same symptoms, extremely rapid onset, less than one hour." At the bottom, someone had circled both entries in red pen: "Such different incubation periods? Depends on who bit them."

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