The Magnus Archives
RQ Network Feed Drop – Not Quite Dead S1: I:The Girl on the Gurney
Tue, 04 Mar 2025
This month we are featuring a feed drop for an incredible podcast on the RQ Network: 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 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 stranger 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.Introduction and outro by Anusia Battersby. Listen to Not Quite Dead on the Rusty Quill website, on Acast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. To learn more about Not Quite Dead, check out their official website. If you want to support Not Quite Dead and it’s creators, until April 3rd, head to www.rustyquill.com/fundraiserCredits: Written, performed and edited by Eira Major. Transcript: https://hangingslothstudios.com/nqd-1/Content Warnings: Please bear in mind that this show is a work of horror fiction and frequently places characters in situations which jeopardise their psychological and physical health. This episode contains: – mild profanity – references to sex – discussion of the process of dying – medicalised descriptions of death processes and dead people – death, including violent death – references to medical procedures – hospital settings – mentions of blood – mentions of infidelity – descriptions of blood Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Chapter 1: What is 'Not Quite Dead' about?
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 rustiquill.com. If you want to support Not Quite Dead and its creators, until April 3rd, head to www.rustiquill.com forward slash fundraiser. Have fun and enjoy the episode.
Chapter 2: Who is Alfie and what is his predicament?
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? Ah. 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, none of 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, so... 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.
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Chapter 3: What happens on the night the girl arrives at the hospital?
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 becoming 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.
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Chapter 4: How does Alfie cope with the situation at the hospital?
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 drips 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 her. 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-ness 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. Sorry. Um, where was I? Oh, yeah.
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