by Rob Horner
“Tonya,” Kenja hissed, calling over the stout brunette who was assigned the room.
“Can’t help you right now,” Tonya called back, her arms loaded with IV paraphernalia, blood tubes, and a bag of normal saline. She bustled into room fifteen, intent upon fulfilling the orders James put in from triage for the teenager with abdominal pain.
“What d’you need?” Lisa asked, looking up from her computer screen at the nurses’ station.
“Can you come help me for a second?” Kenja asked, aware that she hadn’t answered the nurse’s question but too embarrassed to just announce that her patient was missing.
Lisa, who hadn’t actually been looking at the computer, rose from her chair, surreptitiously flexing and relaxing her right hand. There was a strange tightness in the palm that wasn’t painful, just disconcerting. It looked odd too, but in a way that she was sure no one else would notice. It was like finding a gray in your hair when you looked in the mirror one morning. You noticed it, and you felt suddenly older, but it was all subjective. One gray hair didn’t change your age.
Her thoughts rambled, and that bothered Lisa more. She’d cut her hand on a bar, and maybe some of the patient’s stool got in there, or maybe there was just enough nasty stuff on the bar from the hundred other patients who’d been in that bed since it was last sterilized. Regardless, whether there was a real infection setting in or just a figment of her imagination, her hand was tight, and there might be some redness spreading up the palm. Just in case, she grabbed a pair of nitrile gloves as she rounded the corner of the nurses’ station, heading for room 16.
The automatic sliding doors opened as she passed the ambulance bay, followed immediately by the clatter of wheels as a stretcher came rolling in with Buck at the head and Danny pushing. Jessica and Brandon came out from the nurses’ station behind her, already calling out instructions, directing the EMTs to take the patient to Trauma 1.
Kenja sighed, one of those soft sounds that every woman understands without having to ask. A quick glance to her right, where the young CNA stood staring wistfully at the large paramedic, confirmed her guess. A lot of women pined for Buck, and the more inappropriate the infatuation, the funnier it was to the staff. That Buck was happily married didn’t matter. He’d be teased to no end if it became widely known that Kenja had the hots for him. Lisa filed the nugget of information away, thinking it might be useful later, though she’d never get to use it.
Then her eyes met those of the young EMT at the back of the stretcher, and her breath caught in her throat.
If Kenja tore her gaze away from Buck’s broad shoulders long enough to think of something else, she might have confused Lisa’s stare as something like what she felt for Buck. She’d be wrong, but the misinterpretation would be understandable. Lisa wasn’t thinking about the shape of Danny’s face. Neither was she flushed with a fantasy of his chest suspended above hers. There was something in his eyes that pulled at her in a way wholly unique in her experience. It wasn’t attraction. It was…recognition.
I can’t hurt him, she thought. But that made no sense. She didn’t want to hurt anyone. Well, there were a couple of guys in her experience that could use a little hurting, but those were long in the past, maiden dreams from yesteryear.
Then the moment—or whatever you wanted to call it—was over, and Lisa turned to face Kenja and found that, yes indeed, she might have it in her to hurt someone.
It was a chilling thought that came out of nowhere, accompanied by the flash of an image in her brain, there and gone as quick as a blink of the eyelids. Her hands around Kenja’s throat. For the second time in just a few seconds, Lisa froze in place. It felt so real that a phantom ache spread through her hands, like they’d been clenched and straining and were only just beginning to relax. She looked down reflexively and was shocked to see her right hand curled into a claw. Taking a deep breath, she forced herself to relax.
What the hell was that?
“—only gone for a few minutes,” Kenja said, drawing Lisa’s attention back from her hand.
“What, Kenja? I’m sorry I…must have zoned out.”
“You okay, Lis?” She said it with a long E sound, like “lease,” which was annoying today, though it hadn’t been before. “You look flushed.”
Lisa shook her head and tried on a smile. “Yeah, it’s just been a weird day. What did you need help with?”
“It’s Mr. Sprugg.”
Lisa looked into the room, taking in the sheets at the bottom of the bed, the dripping IV line, and the blood spatter on the floor. “How long?” she asked.
“It wasn’t that long, I swear. He was asleep and Brandon needed help. Then ultrasound called for Ms. Cumberland and I…you know…forgot.”
A part of her wanted to yell at the young black girl…
—the fuck could you be so stupid? You had one fucking job today, to watch that old, ornery bastard and make sure he didn’t pull out his fucking IV before it was time to send him back—
…while another part caused her hands to clench again, bringing with it that tightness which now extended halfway to her right elbow, and suddenly the image from before…
—reaching out, taking that stupid long neck and squeezing it, just squeezing until that soft skin turns purple, the whites of her eyes bulge out like the yolks of eggs cooked sunny-side up, just waiting for a fork to pop them so the jelly can run out over her cheeks—
…tried to form in her mind but the deepest part of her, the part that kept her an emergency room nurse despite all her friends moving on to easier jobs, managed to exert control once again.
“He can’t have gone far, Kenja. Let’s see if we can find him.”
“—be ready,” the voice said, jolting Randy Sprugg out of a nap he hadn’t intended to take.
He almost jerked forward and up, which would have been a mistake since his legs were asleep. All that would have happened is he would have fallen onto his flat, white-boy ass and probably broken a hip. At his age there weren’t many worse things that could happen.
Did I fall asleep on the crapper?
He had, but his briefs were pulled up, and the water was clear. He didn’t remember coming into the bathroom, but that wasn’t unusual. These days it seemed he rarely remembered much of anything.
Most of it was crap anyway. Crappy bed and crappy food. Crappy nurses telling you when to get up, when to eat, when to take your pills, which they dumped into a cup and called “Skittles” whenever they handed them to him.
Time to take your Skittles, Randy.
Slowly, using the handgrips someone had thoughtfully built into the walls to steady himself, Randy rose to his full six-foot height, hissing as the circulation in his legs roared back to life. Clutching the rails, he lifted first one foot, then the other, back and forth, working through the prickling sparks of electric fire that came with every footstep.
There was something lying on the floor by the commode. Sleek and metallic, it must have fallen out of his hands while he dozed.
But where had he gotten it?
Bending down, Randy thought about how long it had been since he’d held something like that. A lifetime ago, at least.
As his hand closed around the grip of the compact .25 semi-automatic, that lifetime ago became yesterday.
It was becoming increasingly difficult to concentrate, Danny thought.
No. That wasn’t right.
It was becoming increasingly difficult to tell the difference between what was real, and what was in his head.
That was more accurate.
Even when he knew what he was doing, like now, helping Buck transfer the old guy from the stretcher to the bed, there was an unreal quality to his thoughts, like his head was a balloon filling up with helium, getting lighter and lighter. His thoughts wanted to drift away, which wasn’t a bad thing really. Every time he caught a glimpse of his hand, with the red and blue lines visible above the glove now, crawling up his arm like an alien worm, a sense of panic set in. And
just as quickly, his worry would vanish in a haze of fiery anger as if one fed the other. Or caused it.
Then his eyes locked with the nurse’s, the one who’d been there when they brought Herr Biter in a couple of hours ago.
There was a flicker, a connection…
Can’t hurt her.
…there and then gone, but it grounded him. Why was she able to do that with a look?
And why, of all the people he’d seen and fantasized about hurting today, was she different?
Once Derek Butler, the gentleman with the loose bowels, was safely deposited on the hospital bed with Brandon already getting vital signs while Buck gave report to Jessica, Danny wandered off. The stretcher came with him, though he made no conscious effort to keep a hand on it. The bed was a prop, as were all the things in life that kept people from acting on their true desires.
And what are my true desires?
He’d ruled out using a scalpel during the ambulance ride, because it just wasn’t a personal enough way to express how he felt. The stretcher rattled behind him and a jolt of pain raced up his arm.
It was a prop, just like he thought. You kept things in your hand to justify having your fist clenched, when what you really wanted to do was walk around with your dukes up, ready to lay into everyone who didn’t share your beliefs with you.
Danny’s heart raced as his last thought took hold, exploding into the kind of understanding that lights up your brain all at once, one of those Eureka! moments they try to depict in the funny pages. There was no logical progression to the comprehension. It just was. And that was all right.
The nurse understood.
He needed to find her.
“He’s not in room five or six,” Kenja said, even as Lisa backed slowly out of room seven.
“When did Sonny Cranston come in?” Lisa asked.
Kenja shrugged. “Same old for him? Looking for a hot and a cot?”
Lisa shook her head. “Seems like he might really be sick. Stomach pain, if the way he’s doubled up is any indication.”
“Probably methamphetitis,” Kenja quipped, using one of Tina’s favorite made-up diagnoses.
Lisa laughed. “Might be. With him, you never know.”
For some reason, going on this little patient-hunt with Kenja had helped clear her mind of the fog she’d been in ever since the accident in the—
Don’t think about it.
—ever since that patient came in. She needed to check his labs; they should be coming back by now.
“I’ll get nine if you’ll check eight,” Kenja said.
“Okay.”
Room eight was empty as well. Just a bed, an IV pole, a sink, and a television mounted high up on the wall.
“Amy’s still in ultrasound, and the bathroom’s empty,” Kenja reported.
It was a shame the old guy’s blood trail stopped at the nurses’ station. He might have noticed it and had the presence of mind to clamp a hand over it, or crook his arm tightly enough to stop the bleeding. It was more likely that his fragile vein just closed off, which was always a risk with the older population.
They were at the ninety-degree turn in the hallway that connected to the other side of the emergency department. The only doors left to check were the break room and the bathroom.
“You don’t think he’d be in the break room, do you?” Kenja asked.
Lisa shrugged. “Could be, if he managed to sneak in behind someone. Or if the door didn’t close all the way.”
“Good point,” Kenja said, keying in the code that unlocked the door with her thumb.
A quick peek inside and a mumbled, “Sorry” from the CNA, then she was closing the door before she’d barely gotten it open.
“Shift huddle,” she said.
“God, is it 6:30 already?” Lisa asked.
“Closing in on 6:45,” Kenja confirmed. “Almost time to go home.”
“Well, if he’s not in the bathroom, we’re going to have to call Security,” Lisa said.
Kenja sighed, her face falling noticeably. “Let’s hope not. I don’t want to have to explain this.”
Reaching out a hand, Kenja gave the handle to the bathroom a quick jerk and tug.
The door was locked.
The two women looked at each other, and Kenja smiled.
“Mr. Sprugg,” she called. “Are you in there?”
They’d found him!
The woman’s voice didn’t fool him. Her command of the English language wasn’t that good. The sergeant always said the Koreans could speak like a real person when they wanted to. Never mind all the “oh yeah, two dollah for you. Two dollah make you hollah.”
Well, they weren’t going to take him.
He could wait them out.
Randy looked around the bathroom, small by anyone’s standards and positively cramped with his big ass inside it.
What good would waiting do?
Eventually they’d just shoot him through the door.
Hadn’t he and his boys done that very thing when they came upon those small fishing villages, slant-eyed, brown skinned villagers hiding inside their hovels? The sergeant said to roust them out, the only good gook’s a dead gook. If you showed them the slightest hint of humanity, they’d take it, bow like you were a god, then shoot you in the back with one of those Russian Kalashnikov rifles. So, they shot through the weeds and reeds, laughed so they didn’t have to hear the wails inside the crude huts and, when they had the jelly to spare, torched the things with flamethrowers so they weren’t wasting ammo.
He couldn’t let them take him out like that.
A hand pounded on the door.
“Mr. Sprugg?” the voice asked.
The doorknob rattled again.
Pistol in his right hand, barrel pointed at the door, he reached out a left hand that didn’t shake for the first time in a decade—not that he remembered ever having a problem with shaking hands—and grasped the thumb latch. He’d unlock it, then grab the knob, push the door open, and give hell to anyone who got in his way.
They were probably going to take him. There’s no way he was getting out of there alive.
So, he might as well make the taking costly for them.
“I’m coming out,” he said.
Steady now. Time to make the sergeant proud.
He took a deep breath. Counted to three.
Randy turned the lock.
“Mr. Sprugg?”
Danny heard the voice coming from the back hall of the department. It sounded like the pretty black girl he’d seen with the nurse.
His hand loosened its grip on the stretcher, leaving it standing half-in and half-out of Trauma 1.
“Are you in there?”
If the nurse wasn’t with her, maybe the black girl could share his beliefs.
He was certain that he could make anyone share what he felt.
In fact, he knew he needed to spread his beliefs to as many people as possible.
It wasn’t a want. Wasn’t even a need, not when you boiled it down to the grit at the bottom.
Every part of him was driven to share.
He reached the crossing hallway and heard a fist rapping on wood.
There she was, standing a little behind the CNA. Both women’s’ attention was focused on the door.
“I’m coming out,” came through the door.
Whoever it was, maybe he was another one to share with.
He was sure the nurse understood. Maybe she’d even help him share.
Neither woman saw him approach. He was only a few feet away when something clicked inside the door, and the black girl reached down for the handle.
He planned to be fast.
In his mind everything happened fast.
He’d turn the latch, drop his hand to the handle, push it down and simultaneously slam his shoulder into the door, pushing it out.
Maybe he’d even knock some of the Commie bastards out of the way with his bold movement, giving him time to line up a shot, maybe locate
some other cover to duck behind.
It was lightning fast in his mind.
No matter what decade it was in his head, Randy Sprugg was still an eighty-six-year-old man, and the devilishness of time is that the more you’ve been given, the longer things take to happen.
He got the latch turned, but before he could reach down for the handle, before he could even begin to set his feet for a lunge forward, the door was yanked open.
There was a black girl standing there.
And 1953 changed to 1966. The mud and green jungles of Korea changed to the smoggy urban sprawl of Chicago. And Randy Sprugg went from a twenty-year-old PFC not old enough to vote but old enough to carry a gun to a jaded man of thirty-three on a drunken road trip up to spread a little Southern hospitality in the Windy City. Just six days before, on July 31st, he’d stood with his fellow God-fearing Democrats as they donned the white hoods and marched against Dr. King in Raleigh. This time they weren’t in robes and hoods, weren’t armed with crosses and torches. They had rocks and bottles, and one of them scored a hit on the head nigger himself.
There was another woman behind the black girl, and a young man approaching both from behind, fire in his eyes like you sometimes saw on a man who’d killed one too many gooks that day and was itching to shoot someone else.
His blood was up. That’s what they called it.
Well, Randy’s blood was up too. For the first time in a long time. His blood was up. He had a nigger bitch to kill.
And he needed to get on with gettin’ on.
He shifted the arm with the pistol, lining it up on the center of the black-as-the-devil’s-ass girl’s face.
A dozen things, phrases, rocketed through his mind, words to express…everything…but nothing would come out.
It didn’t matter. Actions speak louder.
His eyes narrowed in anticipation of the blast as his finger tightened.
He squeezed the trigger.
Lisa might have been ready to believe.
She hadn’t been exposed as long as Danny, so even with the recognition of a shared experience, a common becoming, she might have called him crazy, pushed him away, and gone to Buck for help. Even if he didn’t believe her or couldn’t help, Security or the police would.