The fluorescent lights of St. Jude’s Medical Center hummed with their usual headache-inducing flicker at two in the morning. Nurse Rachel Bennett had learned to ignore them over ten years of graveyard shifts, but tonight something felt different.
The emergency room vibrated with a tension she couldn’t quite name, centered entirely around bed four. Rachel adjusted the IV drip, her eyes scanning the vitals of the unconscious man in the sheets. He’d arrived three hours earlier as a John Doe, found slumped in an alleyway three blocks from the hospital.
No wallet, no phone, just tactical boots worn down at the heels and a faded gray t-shirt clinging to a frame built of solid muscle. He was covered in feverish sweat, his temperature spiking to 104 degrees, murmuring things in his delirium that sounded like military coordinates. “He’s stabilizing, but barely,” Rachel whispered to herself, checking the fresh bandage on his side.
The wound looked like a surgical incision that had become aggressively infected. It wasn’t from a street fight—the cut was too precise, too deliberate. “Nurse Bennett.”
The sharp voice of Dr.
Gregory Alcott cut through the air like a scalpel. Rachel stiffened. Dr.
Alcott was the new chief of surgery, a man who cared more about billing codes and insurance pre-authorizations than patient outcomes. He walked into the trauma bay, wrinkling his nose at the muddy boots sitting in the corner. “Yes, Doctor.”
“Why is this vagrant occupying a trauma bed?” Alcott snapped, flipping through the chart.
“No insurance, no identification. We’re not a homeless shelter, Bennett. Transfer him to the county clinic.”
Rachel finally looked up, her blue eyes tired but fierce.
“Dr. Alcott, he’s septic. His heart rate is erratic.
If we move him now, he goes into cardiac arrest. This infection looks like battlefield staph. He needs aggressive antibiotics and observation, not a bus ride to county.”
Alcott scoffed, stepping closer.
“You’re a nurse, Bennett. You change bedpans and follow orders. You don’t diagnose.
I’m telling you to clear this bed. He’s draining resources we could use for paying patients.”
“He’s a human being,” Rachel shot back. “And I think he’s a veteran.
Look at the scars on his shoulder—that’s shrapnel scarring.”
“I don’t care if he’s the king of England.” Alcott’s voice dropped to a menacing whisper. “You have fifteen minutes to discharge him. If I come back and he’s still here, it won’t be him leaving this hospital.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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