Screw you, Charlie. I stoop and pick up the piece from off the floor where Frankie dropped it. Desert Eagle: I don’t usually kill with guns, but sometimes for a work of art you’ve just gotta make an exception.
“Zeth! Zeth, man, don’t! I’m sorry, okay? I’m—I’m sorry I shot you!”
Begging makes me feel queasy. I do it. I pull the trigger and Frankie’s head kicks back like a rock-em-sock-em robot, except there’s blood. A whole lot of blood and fragments of bone, like little pieces of smashed china.
“Why am I right all the time?”
I turn and Lacey’s standing there in the doorway, the heel of her right palm pressed into her sternum. She’s soaked to the skin and panting.
“Lacey—”
“Don’t worry about it,” she tells me. “I already knew.” She stumbles into the room and looks down on Frankie, eyebrows banked together, mouth drawn down in a confused pout. I’d like to think this is her first dead body, only I know better. She faces me, holds her hand out. “Come on. Let’s get you to the hospital.”
I don’t take her hand.
“No. Not the hospital. I’m not going there.”
I’m not gonna risk seeing Sloane again. Not until I hear the truth come out of Charlie’s mouth. Even if I have to beat it out of him.
I will learn the truth.
"Ten CCs of epinephrine. Call ahead to the O.R, let them know we're coming up."
"Yeah, I…I got it."
I look up and the skinny intern with the bad haircut is still standing there, staring at the guy bleeding out on the gurney in front of him. The guy I'm buried wrist deep inside. "What are you waiting for? RUN!"
The fresh intake of interns is always a nightmare. They're so green they’re absolutely no use to anyone, and yet in between people severing their limbs in car crashes, people getting shot, and the world falling down around our heads, we are supposed to teach them how to fix people. I'm supposed to teach them, which is insane because I've only just learned how to do all of this myself.
"He's crashing, doctor. Adrenaline?" the nurse asks. Adrenaline is the last thing this guy needs. His heart is already near spent as it is. What he needs is the gaping hole in his stomach to be repaired. God knows how many of his internal organs are shredded in there. I'm not going to know until I can open him up properly and clear out all of the blood. Right now, I can't tell a damn thing other than the fact that this guy is going to die unless we do something. And soon.
"Let's just get him in the elevator," I tell the female nurse. She nods, unlocks the gurney wheels, and is barking orders at her team without even blinking. Grace is a pro. She'd probably be able to save this guy all on her own if she had to. Half the nurses in this hospital probably could if push came to shove. They’re all massively undervalued, underpaid, and overworked.
Bodies hustle as we guide the gurney to the elevator, my hands still lodged inside the patient. I'm bouncing on the balls of my feet while we watch the numbers count down. I'm not fazed by elevators anymore; too many trips like this have desensitised me to the cramped space. The hospital's only four storeys high and yet it seems to take an eternity for the damn doors to slide open. Eventually they part and then we’re racing against time again.
"Inside, inside! Move!" The intern I sent to warn the O.R., Mikey, I think he's called, makes it just in time to catch the doors. "They know we’re coming?"
"Yeah."
"He's coding, doctor." Grace tells me this as the heart rate and BP monitors start screaming. I pull my hands out of the guy and grab hold of Mikey.
"Hold him together."
Mikey looks like a rabbit in the headlights when I gesture to the patient's wound. "Wh—what do you mean?"
I take both his hands and place them where I need them. "I mean hold this guy’s fucking intestines inside his body!”
Mikey may or may not obey the command. I don't waste any more time. I lean as far as I can over the patient and start compressing his chest.
One, two, three, four, five…
The powers that be decided a while back that you don't need to give an arresting patient any breaths. Keeping the heart pumping is the number one priority here. Grace is on it, anyway. She starts bagging him, forcing regular gusts of oxygen into his lungs, and I grunt over my work.
The doors open again.
"Okay, let's move." I can't compress and run at the same time, so I hop up onto the foot rail at the bottom of the gurney and hitch a ride to the O.R. I used to see doctors do this back when I was as green as Mikey and I could never picture myself being composed enough to be that person. A lot has changed over the past four years, though.