by Horner, Rob
Then the urge to pee returned, a pressure that walked the line between pain and pleasure, like pushing out a stream of urine right after an orgasm, tearing memory to shreds and dropping him back into this bed. At first, he couldn’t make heads of tails of where he was, other than to note there were rails on both sides of his bed, like you might do for someone who was sick, or maybe for a prisoner.
But Randy wasn’t sick. There was nothing wrong with him that a good shot of whiskey wouldn’t cure.
That and getting to a bathroom.
How did they expect a man to tend to nature when they put rails on a bed?
He’d been thinking of Korea. Maybe he’d been captured?
Randy moved his arms, checking for restraints, and felt a sharp tug on the inside of his left elbow. Something pulled taut around his upper arm.
Holy crap! They had caught him! The commie Koreans had caught him!
They had him strapped to a bed with rails!
He pulled, feeling again that sharp pain in left arm, but it couldn’t stop him. The pain was a minor thing, a small sting, and it faded within seconds.
With his arms free, Randy Sprugg started scooting down the length of the mattress. They hadn’t put a rail at the bottom, so they weren’t as smart as they thought they were.
The door from his room looked onto a brightly lit area of cold tile, a large desk, and more rooms like his, where his fellow soldiers were no doubt undergoing some kind of torture at that very moment.
Name, rank, and serial number. Remember that recruit. All you give them is your name, your rank, and your serial number.
There was a small desk and chair, all made to look like a single piece of furniture, pulled up outside his door. Maybe that’s where his guard sat.
Lazy-ass commies. You’re supposed to stand when you stand guard. Don’t they know that?
He spared a moment wondering where his guard went, then heard a girlish shriek from a room off to the right. None of his fellow soldiers were girls, though he had a vague idea that maybe things had changed. But the present couldn’t coexist with the past in his head.
They’ll never allow women in combat, not in my Army!
If the noise is to the right, then go to the left. He needed to find a weapon and find a hiding place.
And a bathroom, though who could blame him if he pissed in a commie’s trashcan? It might come to that, but he thought he could hold it a little longer.
As quietly and as stealthily as an eighty-six-year-old, six-foot tall man in a hospital gown could manage, Randy eased out of his room and angled to the left. From another torture room with the number 5 stenciled on the door, a short, younger man watched him with a half-smile twisting his pale, skinny face. He had scraggly hair and a face that hadn’t seen a razor since the doctor shaved his mom’s pubes to make a clearing for his landing in the world. A modern man would see that face and assume the man had a drug problem, but all Randy saw was a fellow soldier kept at the point of starvation by his Chinese and Russian-backed captors. Thinking himself the very height of cleverness, a regular Humphrey Bogart—the Across the Pacific version, not the nightclub-owner-Humphrey from Casablanca—Randy moved forward, passing torture chamber 6, which looked a lot like an empty hospital room. But of course, that’s what they wanted him to think. To his right was the long, semi-circular desk, the kind just high enough that all you could see of the people sitting behind it were their heads. An opening led to the space behind the desk, but it continued all the way through to where everyone was gathered, working over some poor bastard with their needles and their knives.
“Don’t worry, brother,” Randy whispered. “I’ll find a way to get you out.”
There were several sets of drawers spaced evenly apart, probably to add stability to the long desk, with spaces between them large enough for a man to tuck his legs while he sat. For just a moment Randy considered hiding out in one of those spaces. A picture flashed in his mind, Bela Lugosi crouched in his wolf costume, ready to pounce. But The Wolf Man had claws and fangs, and all Randy would have was his long legs pulled in close. He’d look more like a pill bug than a crouching tiger. There were bags in some of the spaces, knapsacks and square things with Igloo stamped on the side, another made of tan canvas and black leather with the Coleman logo, both brands he recognized. There was another sack in gray with large white and pink flowers all over it and the incriminating name Vera Wang on a small placard dangling from the single strap. Maybe it belonged to a captain’s wife, or whatever military rank ran an interrogation facility like this.
Sticking out of the side pocket was something Randy was very glad to see.
He wanted to go help his brother-in-arms, but Nature was beginning to be very insistent.
The commie Gooks would love it if they got PFC Sprugg to wet himself.
Backing out of the desk-area-thing, he pivoted back to his left, now passing torture rooms 7 and 8. Room 9’s door was closed and there didn’t seem to be a room 10, but the hall made a right-hand turn and there, on the left, was a sign that read Break Room. Randy studied the sign for a second, wondering why it was legible to him. For a moment, part of his mind…
It’s a hospital, you stupid galoot. You’re 86, not 20; this isn’t Korea, it’s South Carolina…
…tried to offer a reason why, but there were doors opening and closing, footsteps coming, and he realized this must have been an American building that was taken by the North Koreans during one of the many surges they made into Seoul. Maybe he could hide out until the UN-backed forces retook the base, then come out to meet them, killing anyone that got in his way.
Mind made up, he tried the door, but it wouldn’t open. There was a rectangular panel with numbers and symbols on the door, just above the handle. Maybe Break Room was code for Documents Room, so it had a cypher lock. Very modern too. Only the right combination could open it, and Randy didn’t have enough time to try to break it, though he thought about it for a moment, a brief fantasy playing out in one of the only parts of his mind that still worked properly. If he could get into the documents room, he could protect it from the Gooks as they tried to learn the military secrets of the allied nations. They probably hadn’t managed to open it yet. He’d be a hero.
Heroes don’t look good with piss stains on their trousers, soldier. You remember that.
The next door past the Document Room was plain, without the futuristic locking panel, and featured a sign on the wall next to it showing an outline of a body with trousers standing beside an outline wearing a dress. Moving quickly now, voices coming closer, Randy eased open the door, finding himself in a small bathroom. Closing the door behind him, he found the locking dial and gave it a twist to the left. Turning to the commode, Randy reached up to drop trow, freeing his pistol…
This is my rifle; this is my gun. This one’s for fighting and this one’s for fun.
…took aim and let fly.
When the time came, he’d be ready.
Someone needs to answer for not doing their stocking duties, Kenja thought. There weren’t any chucks in the cabinets over the sink in Trauma 1. None under it either.
There should be a handful in every treatment room, but it would take too long to go looking everywhere. Stepping back out of the trauma room, she turned right toward the back of the department, then took a left, passing the bathroom and the break room. Fingers moving fast, she keyed in the code for the storage room right about the time Randy was ducking into the nurses’ station.
There weren’t any packs of chucks in their clear cellophane wrappers sitting out on the shelves, but a conspicuous box sat open in the center of the floor. Inside were almost a dozen of the chuck packs.
That’s just trifling, she thought. Someone came in here, took the time to open the box because they needed something for a room, but couldn’t be bothered with distributing to all the rooms. Sighing, she picked up the box and backed herself out of the room. As the door closed in front of her, she turned to the right, retracing he
r route to the trauma rooms. Stopping outside Trauma 2, she handed a fresh pack of chucks to Brandon, then moved on to Trauma 1. She could take a few minutes to stock the rooms with these chucks. Randy wasn’t going anywhere.
Chapter 10
Despite the drama in the back, life goes on in an emergency department. While Tina worked to get Austin settled, three new patients checked in. The first was a young woman with a two-day history of burning when she urinated. Tiffany escorted her to the nearby bathroom and had her provide a urine sample. While the lab checked the urine for infection, the patient was asked to wait in room 2. The second patient was a young fifteen-year-old who landed badly during a basketball game and now complained of pain and swelling in his left ankle. James assigned him to room 3 and ordered a left ankle X-ray series. The third patient was a known malingerer, always complaining of something to get out of work, rather like the young man in room 5. Today’s complaint was a toothache, which James treated with honey-thick liquid Lidocaine while the patient went through triage. Before Tiffany had his chart complete, James had an antibiotic sent electronically to the man’s pharmacy and had printed off a referral to a free dental clinic and a work excuse. Surprised at how quickly the process was completed, the malingerer was bundled back out into the street before he could think to ask for anything else.
As he followed Buck out of the emergency department, Danny asked “Need me to drive?” The look the big man gave him provided not only an answer to the question, but also an indication of what he thought of Danny. But then, amazingly, the look softened.
“I’m sorry for treating you like crap today, Denny.”
“It’s Danny—”
“See, that’s part of it. A lot of rookies don’t make it, so I don’t try to make friends anymore. When you didn’t want to get the IV, I kind of wrote you off.”
Danny didn’t say anything.
“Maybe if I tried harder, you rookies would too. Josh told me you not only got an IV, but you also got the blood for them. And you got the paperwork completed—”
“Josh helped with that.”
Buck waved that away. “It takes months to get the paperwork right. It’s not the most important part of the job. But don’t tell Trish I said that,” he added in a stage whisper.
Danny laughed. Trish was the Mistress of the Charts, as she called herself, and during orientation she’d stressed that charting was the only way to prove you’d done what you said you did, or that the patient said what you think they said. If you were called to testify, it would be years after the fact. Having something in writing could make or break a lawsuit.
“It’s true that charting proves what we did,” Buck continued. “But you can’t chart anything if you don’t learn to do anything. What we do is more important than what we say we did. You got the jitters with the IV, but you kept your head when I lost mine. Then you took the next steps and got everything wrapped up while Tonya was wrapping me up.” He indicated the broad bands of Kerlix bandage that encircled his head, holding a fat wad of gauze tightly to his right ear. “Right now, you look more like an EMT than I do.”
“It’s not that bad,” Danny offered.
Buck snorted. “Please. I look like a reject from the makeup department of a mummy movie.”
Danny smiled, then offered a joke of his own. “Well, when the budget only pays for enough gauze for three people—”
Buck laughed. “Big head. Point taken.” He reached out his right hand, which Danny accepted. “Let’s start over. I’m Buck.”
“Call me Danny.”
“Good man. But you still can’t drive. You’re not on our auto policy yet.”
Buck opened the ambulance door and climbed in. Danny walked around the front of the vehicle to the passenger side, feeling an uncharacteristic ache in his right hand. He held it out, palm up, looking for any telltale signs of infection. Maybe the tip of his thumb was a little red, but nothing looked swollen. He flexed it experimentally and felt a tightness throughout that progressed to pain the harder he squeezed. Relaxing the hand, he flipped it over and saw the veins standing out in stark relief on the back. It was almost a caricature of a hand really, veins drawn in vivid purple by a sideshow artist. Veins weren’t supposed to reflect the arterial pulse, but these pulsed sickeningly.
Just looking at it made his wrist start aching as well.
“You coming?” Buck asked.
Scared, Danny was suddenly glad he wasn’t driving. On the passenger side, he could keep his right hand out of sight.
Buck shifted uncomfortably as he climbed into the driver’s seat. No matter how necessary it was, nothing made a huge dose of antibiotic shot directly into an ass cheek feel good. Wiggling slightly, he imagined he could feel the thick liquid spreading out through his glute like peanut butter in a squashed Reese’s cup. His ear throbbed too, though it was a dull thing covered over with a heavy veil of numbness. Dr. Patel was right. When the lidocaine wore off, his ear was going to come roaring back to life. Maybe he would fill that pain medicine prescription when he filled the antibiotic.
Speaking of which, Buck thought as he started the engine, no time like the present.
As Danny buckled into the passenger seat, the radio sparked to life.
“Any unit available. Adult male, abdominal pain with bloody vomit.”
Buck grabbed the microphone, pushing the key with his thumb as he held it close to his mouth. “Unit one, back in action leaving GRMC.”
“Buck!” the dispatcher said. Even coming through a radio, there was obviously a smile on his face. His voice got noticeably louder. “I’ll speak up because I know you’re only listening with half an ear.” Beside him, Danny hid a smirk.
“Very funny, Tony. Right now, it hurts like a sore tooth, so I’m not in the best mood.”
“All right, all right. I’ll think of something better for tomorrow.”
“What you got?” Buck asked.
Tony gave Buck the address.
“All right. Show us rolling.”
Danny should be feeling great.
The call was an easy one. Black gentleman, 45, with sudden onset abdominal pain, diarrhea—they left that part out of the call—and one episode of bloody vomit, which the gentleman’s wife thoughtfully scooped out of the toilet in a Tupperware bowl just so they could see it. Danny got the vitals and popped an IV in the guy’s AC on the first try, all under Buck’s critical eye. Buck pushed four milligrams of Zofran as an anti-emetic, which seemed to chill out the man’s nausea, and now they were rolling back to the hospital.
It was a textbook visit. And yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was terribly wrong.
It wasn’t just his hand, though that was bad enough to be a week’s worth of worry all by itself.
What he’d thought might have been an exaggeration of his imagination, the veins on his hand standing out like the tracks of the elevated subway in Chicago, was even worse by the time they arrived at the patient’s house. It wasn’t just his veins any longer; tendons pulled visibly when he tried to flex a finger. It ran higher, providing a distinct outline to the many bones of his wrist. Worse, the whole hand was turning a dusky blue to purple and felt tighter than the skin on a snare drum, making the smallest motions painful. He grabbed a pair of gloves and got them on before getting out of the truck, hiding the hand from Buck.
As bad as it was, or as bad as it was becoming, his hand wasn’t what worried him.
It was hard to define. There was this knowledge that something was very wrong with him and getting worse, an infection or something creeping up his arm, but it didn’t seem to matter. The sight of those veins set his pulse racing when they left the hospital, but now he couldn’t bring himself to care about it, like it didn’t matter anymore.
The patient groaned on the stretcher as the ambulance hit a bump in the road. The wife made comforting noises from her place in the side seat.
And Danny didn’t care.
When Buck offered a quiet “Good job,” a
t the successful IV insertion, Danny smiled, but it was a reflex, an ingrained response that a part of him said would be more likely to occasion comment if he didn’t offer it.
Nothing mattered.
No, that wasn’t quite true.
It mattered that no one suspect he didn’t care anymore.
He wasn’t sure why that should be the case, but it was.
The patient moaned again, trying to double around his stomach but stopped by the safety belts of the stretcher, prompting the attentive wife to ask, “Can you give him something else?”
And Danny found that something did matter after all.
More than he’d ever wanted anything, he wanted to make those two, the patient and his wife, shut the fuck up.
Like an electric shock the surge of fury rocketed through him, unchecked, uncheckable. He went from sitting to standing with the speed of thought, the tiny motions and muscle movements that led from one to another blanked out like they hadn’t happened. He found himself considering ways to end their pitiable mewling with no memory of deciding to hurt them. There were medicines he could load into a syringe like morphine or fentanyl which would send them into respiratory arrest at high doses. No, too slow. There was epinephrine on the crash shelf. A few milliliters of that would cause cardiorespiratory failure, but it was easily identifiable and reversible.
A scalpel. He could grab one of the scalpels they used to relieve tension pneumothoraxes. A slash here and a slice there, and both would be silenced, especially if he cut across the trachea.
Danny’s hands clenched, fisting at his sides and then loosening, as if he felt the handle of the instrument already in his palms. A scalpel would work, but it didn’t feel…personal enough.