The Surgeon Got a Blade and I Got a Clipboard, So I Decided Who Lives novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: Green Only
Pennington walks the healthy staff to the safe zone at the harbor, Shannon keeps the ER open, a paramedic brings news of a glowing line that bounces the sick like glass, and a gang crew pulls into the bay with guns.
Every patient in every bed had heard it too.
The man in Bed Four turned his head on the pillow and looked at me.
"Am I the sick?" he said.
"You're my sick," I said. "Nobody's leaving you anywhere."
The shutters went up at 2:40, when the crabs in the waiting room stopped moving.
Pennington walked out from Trauma One and looked at the thirty-nine people standing in my triage hall.
He looked at the guard on the waiting room floor.
Then he looked at me.
"You opened a sealed area," he said.
"You sealed my son in it."
"I sealed a treatment area during a mass casualty. The system agreed with me."
He held up his wrist so I could see the Rank Two.
I went back to work.
By six the phones were full of videos from the harbor.
A line of white light ran across Pratt Street, bright as a crosswalk, and more of it climbed up around Federal Hill.
The crabs walked up to it and turned away.
People were walking over it with their kids on their shoulders.
In the next video a woman with her arm in a sling walked up to it and bounced back.
She tried three more times before somebody pulled her away.
At seven Pennington called the staff into the break room.
He stood by the coffee maker in a clean white coat.
"Green only," he said. "We all heard it."
"The safest place in this city is a mile and a half from here. I'm walking anyone who can get in."
"Get in how?" a respiratory tech asked.
Pennington turned and looked at me.
The whole room turned with him.
"Well, Shannon?" he said. "You're the one with the clipboard."
I could have told him I didn't know.
I looked around the break room instead and told him the truth, one face at a time.
Twelve of them were green.
Four were yellow, from cuts and a burn and one sprained back.
The night attending was yellow from a gash on his forearm, and he snorted.
"I wasn't going anyway," he said. "Somebody's got to work your beds."
Pennington buttoned his coat.
"Every school nurse in the county got your class last night," he said. "Don't get ideas about it."
"School nurses don't get forty bodies an hour," I said.
"Neither will you. There's nobody left to send them."
He took the twelve green ones and the councilman's son with the sprained wrist.
At the ambulance bay doors, he turned around.
"You'll be the last nurse in a closed hospital."
"We're not closed."
He left anyway.
Gloria came and stood next to me at the board.
Eight nurses, one doctor, a respiratory tech, a clerk and a hospital full of beds.
I took the marker and wrote OPEN across the top of the board in big letters.
"Hon," Gloria said, "I retire Friday."
"I know."
"I'll stay through Friday."
Connor was sitting in the staff lounge with his ankle on a chair and his phone in his face.
"My best friend's whole family is in," he said, without looking up.
"They walked down Eastern at five. He says it's warm and there's food and nobody's screaming."
That boy had been sleeping at our house every other weekend since third grade.
"Good," I said. "I'm glad they're safe."
"So let's go."
"You're yellow."
He looked up.
"What does that mean?"
"Your ankle. It won't let you over the line."
"It's a sprain, Mom."
"I know what it is. The line doesn't care."
He stared at me.
"And you're not going anywhere without me," I said. "I'm working."
"You're always working."
"That's how we pay for skateboards."
He turned back to his phone.
His ears were red, which meant he was crying and would die before he let me see it.
The bay doors banged open at 7:40.
I knew who it was before I looked, because nobody else in Baltimore kicked my doors open with a stretcher.
Lieutenant Calvin Royster of Medic 19 had brought me patients for fifteen years and argued with me about every one.
He was six-three, with a shaved head and gray coming into his beard, and he still wore the reading glasses he swore he didn't need.
A band of light circled his left wrist.
It said Breacher, Rank Two.
On his stretcher lay a teenage boy in a hoodie, with red over him and a dark spot low in his belly.
"Seventeen, crab got him through a car door," Calvin said. "The car door didn't stop it, and neither did I."
"Bay Two."
He pushed the stretcher past me and kept talking.
"They're dumping the sick at the line, Kilbane. Anybody who bounces. Hundreds of them on Pratt Street."
"I know."
"Nobody's picking them up. Dispatch is gone. The voice told my battalion chief to bring his people to the harbor."
"Then bring them here."
He stopped and looked at the OPEN on my board.
"You serious?"
"When have I ever not been serious?"
"Your Christmas sweater."
Tires screamed in the ambulance bay behind him.
A black SUV slid sideways through the doors Calvin had just come in by and stopped against the wall.
Four young men got out with guns.
The one in front had blood all down his shirt that wasn't his.
He pointed his gun at my face.
"We need the pharmacy."
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