Midnight Sleep

“Hi.” She hastily knocked on the door. “I’m here to take vitals,” her voice tapered off as she heard rustling down the hall. Marcus’s smoke break took him long enough. “Where have you been?” she called . However, instead of nurse scrubs, she saw a patient’s robe retreating down the passageway in the dim lighting.

“Sir?” she called out, but the patient continued to shamble away, his feet dragged loudly across the floor. Lettie Mae speed walked after him. When she was closer, she could see that it was Bernard Tran. Every step for his long legs was three for her. He needed to stop. It wasn’t safe for him to be up. Even so, each turn, each stairwell, he just got further and further away. She knew this hospital very well, but his path made it seem endless. Like a maze, curled into itself with no way out. Where was she? Where were the nurses, doctors, staff?

“Stop!” she yelled after him as he slammed through a door. She was blinded by the sudden light. After a couple blinks, she noticed she was in the ICU. She walked past several gurneys lined along the hallway with patients covered in sheets . The nurse’s station was deserted, and Bernard Tran was nowhere to be seen. Where was he? She walked back into the hall and uncovered several of the people on gurneysonly to be met with vacant eyes, slack jaws, and the depressing smell of death. What was she supposed to do? She walked over the intercom and did the only thing she could think of.

“Code Yellow, Code Yellow in ICU third floor,” she rasped into the mic. A single nurse with sleep-heavy eyes came out of a patient’s room.

“Kid, get off the intercom,” she said as she walked closer.

“It’s—” She tried to form words as the nurse lookedt more and more annoyed with her. “A coma patient,” she started to say before an automatic Code Blue alarm went off.

“Move, kid.” The nurse shoved Lettie Mae as she entered the nurse’s station. “Fuck.” She grabbed a walkie off her belt. “Patient 317 is crashing,” she said with a bored tone and started to assemble a crash cart.

Lettie Mae was about to say something to the nurse, when she heard a heavy shuffle down the hall. “He’s there, the lost patient,” she said. There was a loud bang as the staircase door closed, barely heard over the Code Blue.

“Get out of here,” the nurse said as she wheeled the cart down the hall in the opposite direction of Bernard Tran.

Lettie did several laps of the facility before she walked dejectedly to the coma ward. She was going to be dismissed because she lost a patient.

“Hey dude, you coming from the action?” Marcus’s feet were on the desk as he  flipped through a vintage car magazine.

“What?” she asked as she sat down, steeling herself to admit her mistake.

“Someone in the ICU crashed, ” He shrugged his shoulders as he looked up. “I do not envy those nurses. What’s with the face?”

“I lost a patient,” she said, her tone grim,t. This was going to terribly affect her chance of getting a proper residency. Hospitals talked to each other about students.

“What?” He kind of chuckled, “You can’t lose something you don’t have.”

“I saw Bernard Tran get up and walk off.”

He stared at her for a bit, she closed her eyes and waited.

“No, he didn’t,” he finally said. He ushered her into Bernard Tran’s room. There the patient laid hooked up to all his equipment, his wheezy breathing filled the space.

Read Midnight Sleep here.