Moonshifted(7)

People were swarming the stranger—he was draped in blue as doctors tried to do sterile things to close him up. When a doctor moved I could see a wrist restrained with a leather cuff to the bed frame below, and when a nurse left the area near his head, and I could see he had a collar on now, to keep his neck safe. A titanium-tipped endotracheal tube came out of his mouth—we couldn’t use plastic here, our patients would bite them in two—and tubes attached to it went to the ventilator.

There were red medication warning labels on the hanging IV bags. We were giving him a blood pressure through a combination of transfusions and drugs, so while the pressure on the monitor was real for now, it wasn’t something the patient was doing on his own. You couldn’t give drugs forever; nor could you keep pouring blood through a sieve.

At his bedside another nurse had a tranquilizer gun out, aimed at the patient, ready to juice him with a dart of sedatives if he started to change again.

The day-shift charge nurse spotted me as she was coming out. “Are you going to help or just stand there?”

I shook my head hard and fast. “I just—no.”

Her eyes squinted at me. “Charles called it in—you were with him?” I nodded. “What happened?”

“Hit-and-run.” If the cop hadn’t said it, I wouldn’t have thought it—not at first. “He needs to be a No Info. Someone did this to him.” No Info was how we protected patients injured via violence—people who needed to be hidden in case more violence followed them to the hospital door.

There was a muted roar from inside the room, and the gowned doctors and nurses present all jumped back. The patient thrashed in bed, finding all the leather restraints tight in place.

“Clear!” The nurse holding the gun took a step nearer, and the medical team stopped what they were doing to give her a shot. Other nurses went to the pumps and dialed up the sedatives. Everything was quiet for a tense five seconds as staff waited to make sure they were safe to continue.

“You’ll make him a No Info, right?” I said, breaking the silence.

“Sure, fine.” The charge nurse only had eyes for what was happening inside the room, with her team, which was as it should be.

I backed away down the hall. The nurse holding down the fort at the front desk looked up from the monitor and recognized me. “Will he make it?” she asked.

If he was pissed off enough to fight, hopefully he was pissed off enough to live. “We’ll see,” I said.

I jogged out to my car, cold crawling up my shins. Thin cotton scrubs didn’t keep any cold out, or heat in—by the time I made it to my little Chevy I was freezing. I cranked the engine on and dialed the heat up, holding naked hands out to the vents in supplication. When I’d thawed enough to operate my vehicle, I drove home, right past the accident site. Other ignorant cars drove over the stranger’s blood, but not me. I changed lanes.

By the time I made it home I was warm, but I felt disgusting. The birdbath scrubbing I’d given myself in the bathroom sink wasn’t cutting it anymore. I could feel the sweat and grime, not to mention blood, that I was sure was still there, trapped deep in my pores. Screw a bleach bath; if I ever got paid decently, I’d install a chlorhexidine shower.

I parked close to my apartment, ran inside, and locked the door behind me. My Siamese cat Minnie came up to greet me at the door. She sniffed me, then gave a disappointed yowl—she knew I’d been consorting with dogs. “I know, I know.” As I shimmied off my clothing, German started chattering from the vicinity of my kitchen’s countertop bar, from Grandfather’s CD player.

“Not you too.” It’d been a while since he’d last spoken to me, not that I ever knew what he was saying. I’d picked him up from a patient—or rather, he’d picked me out—and he only spoke German, a language I didn’t comprehend. He lived in a CD player that didn’t have a CD in it or batteries. I didn’t want to say he was a ghost … but I didn’t know what else he could be. Mostly I knew how he was feeling by his tone. Today it sounded like I was in trouble.

“I missed you too, Grandfather.” I patted his player. The lid didn’t sit right, but the structural integrity wasn’t important. He said something else that sounded snippy, and his on-light went to yellow.

“I didn’t do anything bad, honest.” I tossed my scrubs and coat into a trash bag. I’d be down one good bra until I laundered everything, dammit—but laundry could wait until after I’d showered.

I went into my bathroom and cranked the shower up to scalding, flicking my hand under it while I waited for the water to heat. Once I was under it, the hot water calmed me down. I concentrated on scrubbing myself clean, each and every part, more so than I usually bothered to, even after taking care of that one patient with active TB.