Backstage: "Norris and the Plague Doctors" (Patreon)

Post related to this story: https://www.patreon.com/posts/52-project-16-39436782

Plague doctors are really, really cool. I think we all can agree on this.

Bubonic plague is not particularly cool, nor is the 13th century in my opinion, and of course, real plague doctors weren't as cool looking as the modern artistic concept of them. So I thought about, what justification would modern people have for having to dress up as plague doctors? And this brought me to a zombie apocalypse, where the CDC or other medical personnel need hazmat suits they can make themselves after industry and shipping basically collapse. There are a lot of plans for plague doctor suits on the Internet (which would stick around longer than a lot of society, as it was designed to handle nuclear war, originally), and leather is easy to source if you're willing to loot clothing stores and dead people.

But a cool image isn't enough for a story; you need relatable people. And I thought that the mystique of plague doctors would be better preserved if the main character was not one of them, and let the story be told and the scientists be seen through that character's eyes. Thus, Norris, a precociously smart preteen boy who's probably got some kind of neurodivergence going on, desperate to save his mom, who's been bitten by zombies. Obviously medical personnel dealing with a disaster do not want to babysit a kid, so the story becomes all about Norris more or less trying to force his help onto the plague doctors.

The story never outright says, but it takes place in Baltimore. The plague doctors' home base is Sheppard Pratt, a hospital for mental illness that, unlike most hospitals, has a gothic insane asylum design that's a lot easier to maintain securely. (Most hospitals have glass doors. Glass doors will not stop zombies.) The area where they go to catch more zombies is Roland Park, a wealthy neighborhood in North Baltimore.