Chapter 22
CHANEY’S AT THE TRIAGE DESK WHEN I COME IN. I’VE changed into scrubs, better to go unnoticed around the hospital, but I still feel like everyone’s staring at me.
“You’re on tonight, Karsten?” Her eyes dart from side to side, appraising me.
“Covering for another floor,” I lie. The sliding doors gasp open, letting in a torrent of wind and the turpentine smell of fresh asphalt.
Don’t turn around. Don’t hope that it’s Veer. But I do, I can’t help it, and the medic is a stranger who’s somewhere between a linebacker and a Labrador retriever. Ying is right behind him, stone faced as always.
“Hey, Chaney,” the linebacker calls as they slip on through. He looks back over his shoulder, and again I recognize the up-and-down look of inspection. Then he turns back and mutters something to Ying.
When it hits me, my stomach twists up around the rest of my organs. Veer didn’t tell me where they took Joanne, but Sunrise is our local trauma center.
I watch the medic’s back until he turns the corner. I want to scream, I want to snarl, I want to curl up and disappear. I’m not a monster, you motherfucker. Neither is my mom.
I can’t bring myself to look at Chaney. I rear back from the desk and head for the safety of the elevator. Hunger sets hooks into the soft flesh of my gums, and I count heartbeats in between the hollow dings of each new floor we ascend. The doors draw open like curtains before the last act.
My joints whimper. My curse salivates.
Through two doors and into a waiting room, where an older woman in flip-flops and a blue dress turns to me with a smile that asks if I’ve come for her. Past a window where a nurse buries her face in a computer screen, through another door and down a hall, navigating more by smell than sight.
I find an empty room and a tray of blood samples on the bottom shelf of a rolling cart. My knees lock at the smell of the samples, the sour tang of plastic tubing dissolving into iron richness. I could do it now. I could pop off the cap and pour it into my mouth.
Too late. There are already footsteps behind me.
I tuck the entire tray under my arm and start walking. I don’t know where I’m headed, but in a hospital, people always pay you less attention if you’re moving.
“Excuse me?” The nurse’s voice is raspy. She smells like cheap jewelry and wilted spinach. “Where are you taking those?”
Deep breath. Keep moving. “I can take them down to the lab.”
“The lab sent you?” She’s young. She looks exhausted. I remember how that was, the terror of authority over patients, and the worse terror of having to take all the other nurses’ shit and grin through it.
“Yeah. Yes.” How have I bled away every instinct I had for lying?
The nurse leans in and eases the tray of samples out of my grasp. I smell espresso and aspartame. “Usually we have someone take them, not the other way around. Who sent you up here?”
I could grab one of the vials right now and clench my fist so tight it shatters. I could sink my teeth into this woman. I could tear her apart.
“Let me just call down and check.” She squints at the ID card clipped to my belt. “What’s your name?” I choke on the antiseptic smell, the slither of recycled air down my throat.
Ellis Karsten to the emergency department.
At first I think I’m hallucinating. Then the PA crackles again and repeats my name. Ellis Karsten.
They don’t call people like me over the PA. I’m just another nurse at the triage desk, faceless, unmemorable. I’ve made it that way for our protection.
Unless it’s Veer. Unless she needs me. No, there’s nothing left there. That was clear enough when she hung up on me.
I mumble something about needing to get back to my floor, but the nurse has already turned her back on me, pushing the cart away, her mind moved on to other things.
No one else stops me on the way out. I slip past the old woman, still waiting in her blue dress.
I take the stairs all the way down, concrete echoing my footsteps into a wall of noise, and pause before the heavy door marked “G” for “Ground.”
There are two ways out from here: through the sliding glass maw of the ED, or through the revolving doors of the south entrance, pushing against the stream of patients filing in for checkups and clinic visits.
South entrance will be emptied out, this time of night. ED’s better.
I peek through the plexiglass window built into the door. I don’t see anyone coming. When I shift to press my ear to the alien-smooth pane, I don’t hear anything either. But the doors are heavy, and hunger’s playing tug-of-war with my attention.
I wait for the PA to command me again, but it’s fallen silent.
Back through the hallways. Don’t flinch when someone passes. Don’t let them know your veins are deserts.
I make it to the waiting room, and there’s the door and the empty desk and Chaney standing in front of it, talking to a man with his hands on his belt and a stance that tells me he’s with law enforcement before the khakis or the badge or the haircut even register.
He stands looking down on her like his disdain is a gift, and Chaney smiles and twists a piece of hair that’s escaped her bun because she’s a good girl, she does what she’s told, she wants to help.
And what am I?
It doesn’t matter what I am, only that if this cop and his contempt lock me in a back seat with no handle, I will lose my mom and I will lose myself and I will become the thing I’m most afraid of. Chaney raises a hand like she’s going to point, but not at me, she hasn’t seen me yet.
Backtrack. South entrance.
The ceiling soars as the hallways open into the patient foyer, making space for plate-glass windows and two enormous indoor palms that flank the revolving doors.
The floor is the same bile-yellow vinyl speckled with black flakes like bits of ash, but the chairs are nicer.
A young man sits nearby, fidgeting with his phone.
He keeps glancing at the bathroom door. I smell sweat-soaked shirt collars and the rancid floral desiccation of bacteria caught between flaps of aging skin.
I wish I’d brought the pig’s blood with me.
Placebos are good for something, aren’t they?
A flash of gold and my heart’s in my throat. Another cop, same khakis, same posture, looming against the front desk. His scowl makes the monstera leaves on the receptionist’s shirt look like they’re wilting.
A woman waiting near the door tears at her cuticles.
The cough drop scent of her denial and the blood dribbling from the cracks she’s opening in herself, like too many painkillers and not enough sleep.
My mouth floods with saliva, imagining the taste.
If I’m detained, it’ll prove one more time, the worst time, the truest time, that I’m the failure my mom’s always accused me of being. If I’m detained, I’ll lose her.
There has to be another exit.
There’s not. I know there’s not. What there is is another way out, one that means brutality in plain sight.
The cop at the desk is busy talking to the receptionist, and a gurney partially blocks me from view.
I’m in scrubs. Just another nurse. Maybe all I have to do is stroll through the doors while his back is turned.
Maybe, for once, I’ll be lucky. Only after I take a step toward the door do I remember that hope is useless and I’ve never been lucky in my life.
My sneakers squeak on the vomit-colored vinyl and I smell the receptionist’s aftershave, a hint at the movement that’s coming before he’s made it, and then he’s pointing at me and the cop turns and they both see me.
“Excuse me,” the cop calls. I skitter back toward the ED and another chance, but the hall fills with the slap of heavy boots as his partner closes in behind me. I’m afraid of them and for them, and for a second I’m outside myself, wondering how all of this happened, if any of it can be real.
“Excuse me, miss,” he repeats, and it’s all real and panic works its claws into the back of my neck. I can’t remember how to breathe.
A nurse pushes through the space between us. Blood lingers in the hems of her scrubs. Hunger drives into my joints like screws twisting tight.
“You don’t mind if we ask you a couple questions, do you?” It’s the first cop, the one behind me. He smells like leather polish and plastic sunglasses warped in a hot car.
The beast in my chest growls. I need prey, I need carnage, I need somewhere to run. No, I need to get out. I need safety, and safety will never be around people. They’re not like me. They’re only meat.
“I can’t,” I choke out. Like they would understand. Like they care for explanations.
“Don’t worry, it won’t take you away from work for more than a few minutes.” The second cop. He smells like sweat and Tootsie Rolls. He smells like a liar. I can feel his partner circling me.
My teeth jostle in the curve of my jaw. My wrists loose from their moorings. Their backs are so straight, necks thick under beige collars. They smell like certainty, like violence. They have holsters on their hips. Can I survive a gunshot? Can they survive me?
It’s not a choice, it’s an inevitability, to reach between my splintering ribs and throw the lock.
My kneecaps crack, my snout warps long and wicked.
I smell the second cop’s surprise as I lunge for him, sharp like a firecracker let off at close quarters, and then he’s down and my jaws are wedged in his shoulder.
My incisors scrape his collarbone. His artery is so close.
I am single-minded and ravenous but his partner’s drawn his gun and there’s so much screaming.
“Step back!” I think he shouts, but I smell the twitch of his finger before the words leave him and spring away.
My claws shred khaki shirtsleeve and the arm beneath and he’s crawling too slow to catch me and blood is leaking from the other cop, more than there should be.
Someone shot him. His partner fucking shot him.
My curse batters itself against my ruined rib cage and I careen forward. Hands in blood. Blood in mouth. It tastes like gas fumes and gunpowder. It tastes like heaven.
For a second, there’s nothing but me and the blood that is paradise. Then I look up to see the woman who was tearing strips off her own cuticles with her eyes huge, scared pools of blue and her phone pressed to her ear.
Oh, right. I’m a monster.
Then the PA explodes with commands and I know I need to run.