SPOILER ALERT!
“The Call Shift” by N.J. Gallegos won the 2025 Alien Buddha Horror Showdown. It’s a slice-of-life tale from the point of view of a resident doctor dealing with exhaustion and a zombie virus amid a pandemic. Gallegos also won the Showdown in 2022 with her domestic horror story titled “The Fruits of Her Labor,” making her the first two-time winner of the contest. Both stories are available to read for free on the Alien Buddha Press Blog.
(Credit: Alien Buddha Press)
Gallegos is the author of two outstanding horror novels: 2023’s The Broken Heart and 2024’s The Fatal Mind. Her short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies. Gallegos herself is an emergency room doctor in real life, and she captures the details of the hospital setting better than any author I’ve read in recent memory.
“The Call Shift” opens with a female resident doctor getting a cup of coffee and having a flirtatious interaction with the cute barista who gives her an extra shot of expresso and slips her a pastry for free. The resident is in the middle of a long shift at a hospital where five patients have died already. It seems like another tale about a tough day on the job until one phrase — “At least none turned” — stopped my reading in its tracks.
Gallegos writes, “Despite medical advancements, novel pharmaceuticals, and top-notch staff, we couldn’t halt the inevitable march of death. But I sought solace in a thought, finding threadbare comfort within it: At least none turned.”
And just like that, Gallegos subtly transforms a tough day on the job into a tough day on the job … plus something so much more. When the story sends the resident into action with a Code Blue, we see what her job really entails as she rushes to the room where a red-faced tech is pumping up and down on a patient’s chest.
Gallegos excels at describing her character’s cryptic thoughts amid the action: “Seconds were often a deciding factor in life versus death. And a fate even worse than that.” As the reader, I wondered what fate is worse than death.
Gallegos is not afraid to drop in dark humor during tragedy either. As our main character watches the tech administering CPR, she wonders what song the tech’s using to pace his pumping: “Maybe to the beat of the Bee Gees’ ‘Stayin’ Alive.’ You could also use ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ by Queen but I personally feared the bad juju it invoked.” (After reading that, my mind flashed back to the gang in The Office TV series singing and dancing to “Stayin’ Alive” during a CPR training class.)
What happens next in the hospital room answers the questions of what “turned” means, what caused the pandemic (loved the medical explanation), and how doctors handled the death of patients in the aftermath. Our main character even uses the crisis in the room as a teaching moment for a curious medical student. The interaction between the two is brief but is a highlight of the story because it rings so true. After the resident performs a brutally radical procedure on the patient, the student asks, “Do you practice … before?” For some reason, that question hit home to me in a way that elevated the entire story. That question made the whole narrative more authentic because it put me in that student’s shoes. To even ask such a question meant it was real … at least to the student.
Ultimately, it’s that realism injected into an unreal situation that makes “The Call Shift” a top-notch tale. I thought the story would’ve made an ideal opening segment for The Walking Dead TV series because it perfectly encapsulates the new normal in the wake of a worldwide pandemic. When the medical student asks the resident, “Does it ever get … easier?” The resident replies, “I mean … I guess? It’s just a part of life now.”
Yes, there are obvious parallels to the COVID-19 pandemic that hit the United States in 2020, but what I liked most is that the story isn’t about the pandemic or zombies … not really. It’s really about how a small but kind gesture like a free pastry can change your entire outlook even during a tough and tragic day on the job. In fact, when the next Code Blue sounds, our main character has a pep in her step and a smile on her face. She embraces the challenges ahead with a simple (and ironic) motto: “I’d rest when I was dead.”
Hopefully, she’ll be so lucky.
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