The Surgeon Got a Blade and I Got a Clipboard, So I Decided Who Lives novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Walk-Ins Wait
The sky opens at 2:14 a.m., the surgeon draws a blade and Shannon draws Triage, he seals her son out with the monsters, and she reads the dying in order to save the waiting room before a voice tells the whole city the sick can wait.
"You gave my bed to a drunk," Dr. Pennington said, loud enough for the whole ER to hear.
It was 2:05 in the morning, and every bed at Patterson General was full.
The man in Bed Four wasn't drunk.
He was fifty-eight, gray and sweating, and his heart was quitting on him one beat at a time.
"He's sicker than your guy," I said.
"My guy is the councilman's son."
"Your guy has a sprained wrist and a lawyer."
Somebody at the nurses' station laughed and turned it into a cough.
Dr. Bradford Pennington was the chief of trauma surgery, and he had silver hair and a gold watch over his scrub sleeve.
"You're a nurse, Shannon. You read the board. I read the patient."
"I've read this board for nineteen years."
"Then read it slower."
Gloria Pettaway slid a peppermint across the desk to me without looking up.
She'd been our unit clerk for thirty-one years, and she was retiring on Friday.
"Three more shifts, hon," she said. "Then he's all yours."
"I'm going to miss you more than I miss my ex-husband."
"That's not a high bar."
I pushed my reading glasses up into my hair and looked through the glass doors at the waiting room.
Forty people sat out there under the skylight.
One of them was my son.
Connor was fifteen, six feet of elbows in a lacrosse hoodie, with his left ankle propped on a chair in a bag of ice.
He'd gone skating at midnight on a school night, and a friend's brother had dropped him at my door.
He waved at me through the glass and pointed at his ankle.
I opened the door a crack.
"Mom. I've been here two hours."
"Walk-ins wait, Mouse."
Connor sank lower in his chair.
"Don't call me that out here."
"Then don't skate down Eastern Avenue at midnight."
The old security guard at the door laughed so hard he had to sit down.
He was sixty-six and had been telling me about his grandkids every night since spring.
I let the door swing shut.
At 2:14 every light in the building flickered.
A voice spoke inside my head, flat and calm.
[Every person sixteen and over has a class. Look at your left wrist.]
A thin band of light circled the inside of mine.
It said Triage, Rank One.
Across the station, a blade of white light ran down the edge of Pennington's right hand.
He turned it over and read his band out loud.
"Cutter."
Then he looked at mine and started to laugh.
"Triage," he said. "They gave the nurse a clipboard."
Half the room laughed with him.
I didn't have time to answer, because something had happened to my eyes.
There was a color hanging over every person in the ER.
Green over Gloria.
Yellow over the girl with the cut lip in the hall.
Red over the man in Bed Four, and a dark spot in his chest where the red came from.
I'd been reading people like that for nineteen years.
Now I could see it written on them.
Over the waiting room, the skylight broke.
Glass rained down on forty people.
Something gray dropped through it and landed on the coffee machine.
It was the size of a big dog, with a pale shell and six legs, and it walked sideways.
Two smaller ones dropped in behind it.
People screamed and ran for the glass doors.
Pennington stared at nothing for a second.
"It's giving me a quest," he said. "Seal the treatment area. Rank Two."
He slammed his palm on the red lockdown button.
The steel shutters came down behind the glass doors with forty people on the wrong side of them.
My son was one of the forty.
"Gloria, the override."
She jammed her key into the panel.
It wouldn't turn.
I ran for the triage room.
It had one door into the ER and one window into the waiting room, a little sliding window where I took blood pressures.
I climbed through it on my stomach and fell onto the waiting room floor.
The man with the walker was red, from a cut on his leg pumping into his sock.
Connor was yellow, from his ankle.
The big crab on the coffee machine was red.
There was a long shard of skylight stuck under its left side, and the red came from there.
It was dying, and it didn't know it yet.
The two small ones were green.
The security guard was standing between them and the kids in the corner with a fire extinguisher.
Over his head the color was black.
His heart had been going since the glass came down, and nothing in this building was going to start it again.
"Everybody listen to me," I said, in the voice I use on drunks.
They listened.
"The triage room door. One at a time, in the order I say."
"Gloria! Open the triage door!"
Through the window I watched her put her hand flat on the inner door and say, "Open."
The band on her wrist flared, and the lock clicked.
"Walker first. You two, carry him."
They carried him.
"The kids in the corner. Now."
One of the small crabs turned toward the corner.
"Hit the big one under the left side," I told the guard. "Where the glass is."
He swung the extinguisher.
The big crab folded over and didn't get up.
The small one in the corner went for him instead of the kids.
"Mouse. Go."
Connor hopped through the triage room on one foot, and Gloria pulled him in by the hood.
I sent the rest through in the order the colors gave me, yellows behind reds, greens last.
I went through second to last.
The guard was still in the waiting room with the extinguisher, black over his head and two crabs in front of him.
He looked at my face.
"I'm last, ain't I," he said.
"Yes."
He nodded, like I'd told him his ride was here.
"Shut the door, Shannon."
I shut it.
Thirty-nine people stood in the triage hall behind me, and the man with the walker was alive.
On the other side of the shutters, Pennington's band now said Rank Two.
Then the voice spoke again, to every head in Baltimore at once.
[The Green is open at the harbor. Green only. The sick wait.]
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