8.
***
Benjamin had known he wanted to be a nurse since he was eight years old. But he nearly changed his mind some twenty years later.
On his eighth birthday he had been riding his present - a brand new Huffy two wheel bike. He had had a two wheel bike without training wheels for almost two years now, but this was a full sized grownup bike, or at least it had seemed so at the time. Certainly it was too big for him; he had to stand on a curb in order to throw his legs high enough to straddle the crossbar. Starting the bike was a matter of taking a flying leap of faith, jumping forward and then landing hard on one of the pedals, and hoping that he had enough weight behind the action that the pedal would crank hard enough to start the bike. The entire process was wobbly, frightening, eminently unsafe.
And Benjamin loved every second of it.
He was actually getting pretty good by the time his mother came out to announce that it was time for his birthday dinner. The birthday would be a family-only affair that year, since he had opted for the bike in lieu of a party.
"Benjamin!" shouted his mom. "Go get Gina!"
Gina, his little sister, was playing at a friend's house down the street. Benjamin decided he would not only bike down the street to get his sister, but he would set a new all time landspeed record in the process. He hopped on a curb, standing next to his bike, threw his right foot over the crossbar, and then pushed off, jumping heavily on the right pedal in a kickstart motion that sent the bike cruising down the street.
Zero to sixty in no seconds, thought the eight year old.
Soon he was going fast, fast, faster. So fast the wind was blowing across his face, whipping his long blonde hair around his face like a halo.
Then the unthinkable happened. With a sickening thunk, his bike chain slipped off the teeth of the bike sprocket, and suddenly he was pedaling faster than ever before, but felt as though he were pedaling through air as all resistance instantly disappeared.
He was no longer totally in control of his bike. That scared him. What scared him worse was the fact that his brakes - coaster brakes that relied on the chain to stop the bicycle - were no longer functioning.
He panicked. Forgetting the obvious - that he would simply coast to a gentle stop if he stopped pedaling and just let friction and gravity gradually halt his momentum - he looked frantically around for some way to arrest his forward movement.
He saw the chain link fence almost instantly. It was a logical thought: I'll grab the fence, and stop the bike. Easy-peasy.
He reached out. Check.
Grabbed the end post of the fence. Check.
Held on tight. Check.
But the bike didn't stop moving. No check. In fact, it whizzed away from him, riderless, as he stopped his own motion but failed to clamp down and retain control of the bike. The Huffy sped away, wobbling and then falling only a few feet later.
Benjamin, however, did not wobble away. His forward momentum changed to a sharp arc as he grabbed the fence, swinging him around until he came into contact with something that did stop him.
The something was a rock. He hit it face first, and pain exploded through his head. He felt like someone had poured molten lava over him. He popped up instantly, clapped his hands on his face, and ran screaming toward his house.
Halfway there, he felt something strange on his hands, and managed to pry them away from his burning skin long enough to glance down at them.
They were covered in blood.
Benjamin screamed then as the thought came that he might be bleeding to death, right there on the street where he had lived his whole life. Still, he managed to maintain enough rationality to continue running home.
His mother, hearing his screams, ran out of the house when Benjamin was still a good fifty feet away, and that was when he knew he was going to die. Because his mother, an avid churchgoer who would never dream of breaking a commandment, definitely took the Lord's name in vain. Loudly, in fact, screaming "Oh my God" at the top of her lungs and running to him.
She scooped him up into her arms and rushed him to their bathroom, where she took a towel and began wiping what seemed like quarts of blood from off his face. When she had finally taken it all off, she sighed in relief.
Benjamin, crying, managed to say, "What?" in between sobs.
His mother explained that the blood had all come from a cut not even an inch long. Benjamin didn't believe it. All that blood?
"Heads bleed a lot, Benjamin," she said. Then, upon closer inspection, she added, "Still, I think we may need to get you some stitches."
Benjamin started crying that much harder. Stitches were bad news, he knew. They were what you got when you were bleeding so bad that it wouldn't stop. They were what soldiers got right before they Bled Out and Needed Morfeem and Died Horribly. He knew because he had seen a war movie on TV once, and that happened to one of the guys on the show.
In spite of his fears, however, his mother packed him and Gina up in the car and took them to the hospital.
And it was awful. He did get stitches, and though he did not Bleed Out or Need Morfeem or Die Horribly, he was most uncomfortable, especially when the doctor had to inject his face with something called anesthetic which was supposed to take away the pain of putting in the stitches but which itself hurt horribly and what was the point of that then? The doctor didn't seem to even notice when Benjamin screamed loudly as the needle sunk what seemed like about six or seven feet into his face.
But the nurse did. She was a kind-faced, quiet older lady who was helping hold Benjamin steady through the procedure, and at the moment he was at his most panicked, she let go of him and put a calming hand on his. It was like sunshine soared into his soul at that moment, calming him, giving him peace.
The rest of the procedure was no problem, and Benjamin knew it was because of the nurse. His fate was signed, sealed, and delivered from that moment: he would be a nurse.
And never once did he regret the decision...until the night of his twenty eighth birthday. The night he was doing rounds in the NICU. He had several children he was monitoring, checking oxygen saturation levels, watching for the telltale signs of distress that would mean a doctor had to be called, and generally acting like a mother hen in her coop.
Suddenly, the hairs rose on the back of his neck. A strange pressure built up in his mouth and nose, as though he were in an unpressurized airplane that was rapidly rising into the upper reaches of the atmosphere. His ears popped.
He turned around, and, impossibly, there was someone else in the NICU. It was a man, his back turned to Benjamin, standing next to one of the incubators. The baby in the incubator was a preemie, a sweet baby that the hospital staff was calling The Angel. Partly that was because the baby's skin was so translucent it almost glowed, and partly because his middle name was Angel, but mostly it was because the baby just had a certain presence about him. That seemed silly to those who hadn't seen the child - how could any baby, let alone a preemie, have enough of a personality to have such charisma? But it was true. Something about the baby was...powerful. Magnetic.
Now there was someone standing over The Angel, and Benjamin shuddered. The man had his back to him, so all Benjamin could really make out was that the guy was wearing a gray suit coat with matching slacks.
"Excuse me?" said Benjamin in as strong a voice as he could muster. "How did you get in here?"
The man turned to look at the nurse then, and Benjamin stopped moving toward the man. He was old, looking almost like he was in his mid-seventies, and he had the grayest eyes he had ever seen, deep and non-reflective as slate.
"When am I?" asked the man.
Benjamin's mouth dropped open as he realized that the man's face was a mass of scar tissue, the result of massive wounds in the not-too-distant past, and he was sporting what looked like an open bullet wound on his shoulder. "Are you okay?" asked Benjamin.
The man ignored him, simply swinging back to look at The Angel. "The baby," muttered the man, and then said something else, so low that Benjamin couldn't hear him.
"What?" said Benjamin.
The man turned back to him again, and in a calm voice, as though explaining nothing more interesting than the weather, he said, "I've been living in Hell."
Benjamin's open mouth turned into a positively gaping maw of surprise. The man looked back at The Angel, and added, "I have to kill this baby."
Benjamin was hardly a world champion boxer, or a karate expert, or anything even remotely related to violence. But when he heard that, he felt all the muscles in his body bunch up. He realized that, as a nurse, he was not only prepared to minister to the sick, but to harm the healthy if that was what it took to protect his patients. His hands balled into two tight - though unschooled - fists, and he dropped into a pre-lunge position, ready to throw himself at the man.
Before he could finish the movement, however, there was a strange rushing noise. Wind gusted throughout the NICU, though that was impossible since the room was an extremely controlled environment with its own independent heat and air ventilation controls. Benjamin's hair blew about him in a way that was reminiscent of the halo of hair that had surrounded his head on his eighth birthday, on that day when he had ridden out of control and into the harsh embrace of a rock. Pressure built up in his head again, as though he were suddenly suffering from the granddaddy of all sinus infections, so quickly and so badly that he felt one of his eardrums pop and possibly even perforate.
His vision blurred, and when it cleared, he was no longer alone in the room with the gray man.
There was another man present. Very old, but still radiating vigor and energy as much as any newborn that Benjamin had ever met.
The newcomer looked at Benjamin with eyes that were blue, bluer than the deepest ocean, bluer than the clearest sky, and - incredibly - winked at him. As though two geezers appearing out of thin air in the middle of the NICU was not only an everyday event, but a highly desirable one.
Apparently the old man in the gray suit lacked the sense of humor of his counterpart. "You can't keep doing this to me!" shouted the gray man.
"I will as long as I have to," responded Blue Eyes.
"We both know how this ends," retorted Gray.
"Yes, we do. But it doesn't end today."
And with that, the gray man rushed at Blue Eyes with a bestial roar.
That was when Benjamin decided he was definitely in over his head, and no amount of fatherly protective nature could help in this insane moment featuring two old men who thought they were professional fighters in some geriatric mixed martial arts league.
He turned to the nearest wall phone and picked it up, intending to call security. But when he glanced over his shoulder to make sure the stranger was not hurting the babies, he dropped the phone.
The men were gone.
Benjamin was a rational man. A man who had put a great deal of his life into science and rationality. So nothing could have prepared him for that. The men could not have gone through the door to the NICU - it was a good twenty five feet away, and no way could they have gone so far so fast.
Then again, there was no way they could have gotten into the locked NICU in the first place.
Benjamin toyed for a moment with the idea of just hanging up the phone; of not calling security. After all, how would that conversation go? Benjamin: "Hello, security, there were two old guys in the NICU." Security: "Where are they now?" Benjamin: "They disappeared, so I don't know. But one of them winked at me and the other one did mention something about Hell." Security: "Why don't you just lay down on the floor in a spread-eagle position and we'll have someone right down to lock you up."
But after less than a moment's debate, he decided that he was morally obliged to call in what he had just seen - or at least, to call in the fact that there had been a mentally unstable intruder in the NICU.
As expected, the conversation that Benjamin had with security was less than enthusiastic. Things were even cloudier when the hospital's chief of security suggested that the closed-circuit monitors be checked for any men looking like the two that Benjamin described, specifically looking in the hall outside the NICU.
There were none. No one even remotely looking like the two aged fighters passed by the NICU in any of the twenty-four preceding hours.
Benjamin managed to hold onto his job, though he had a helluva time explaining what he saw - or rather not explaining it, since the reality seemed to defy all description - and then ended up taking the rest of the day off "for rest and needed rejuvenation time," as the head nurse very politely put it. The message behind her words was very clear to him, however: get your act together or don't come back.
Benjamin returned in two days, and never again mentioned either of the old men. His one concession to what he believed had happened was that he asked to be taken off the NICU shift.
He pondered whether being a nurse was worth it, and finally decided it was.
He just couldn't give up the healthcare benefits.
But if one more person appeared or disappeared during his shift...he was going to take his mother's advice and get a real estate license.
***