Bitter Girl - The Midnight B - Chap 1
The first chapter of Bitter Girl seems to be ready for human consumption. A lot of my RL friends and family want to read it (or, in some instances, I will be forcing it upon them) and I'm not keen on them coming to this journal. I had a hard enough time with all the apologies I had to make from the great iPhone funny catastrophe... which is still REALLY FUNNY.
I can't put the stories up at AO3 since they're originals. That leaves me with creating a new journal.
After reading this, if any of you have any inclination to perhaps create a banner for the new journal, I would be forever indebted. I'm not exactly sure what Bitter Girl looks like... she'd got brown hair but even that is gone by the time Chapter 2 rolls around. Right now, she could look like anyone. Her final costume is pretty much a hoodie with a face mask... at least in my head for right now. A lot has changed since I started writing this. She's morphed from someone I use to moan and complain about my job to a real story idea.
She still fights idiots, though.
Story Title: The Midnight B - The Beginnings of Bitter Girl and her sidekick, Paper Shredder
Author: lar_laughs
Word Count: 4268
Characters: Bridget, Collette, Douglas
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Bridget is a young woman on a cusp of nervous breakdown if she doesn't get a new job soon. A fateful walk through the rain changes everything, not just her propensity for getting shocked when she gets up from the couch. Now, along with her childhood best friend and a woman who thought she lost everything, she's discovering just what it means to make a difference in a world she never knew existed.
Chapter 1: Electrical Outcomes
There was nothing worse than working the tech line of Traxter Computers the day after a new release. From the time that Bridget had put on her headset until the moment she hit END to close out her last call, it had been a hellish day. She’d come to work with a bad attitude, not at all in the “right frame of mind to give proper customer service” as Holly would most likely note in her files, a folder that was rapidly getting larger with each day that she worked without a smile on her face.
Living at home with her parents, in the basement, no less, was turning into a new kind of personal hell. There was nothing in her new price range, not even after she sold her beautiful, silver Range Rover. The kind with the heated seats and all the other bells and whistles. It had been her baby. The first thing she’d bought after getting the news that she was the youngest Vice President to ever serve on the board of Gamma Technologies. Her job had still been secure after the dot com bubble burst but she had quickly learned that being a VP of a business that really had no purpose and so wasn’t bringing in any money wasn’t really a job she wanted to have. The low point was when she stopped getting paid but was still expected to show up for work. Her bosses were the smart ones. They didn’t fire any of their employees because then they would have been able to file for Unemployment. No, they kept them on until they all quit.
Selling her apartment had been easy enough. She’d never been there long enough to grow attached to the place or even spend any time looking out over the view that had forced the price of the rent up and over everything else in the area. It was the antique end table that she had refinished as a senior project that had broken her heart to see go. Her moving expenses back home had equalled exactly $25 over the cost of gas and the small food she would allow herself. Not nearly enough to rent a moving van with. Her father had offered to drive down with the neighbor’s truck but that would have only added to the raw feelings she had about the situation. The less the neighbors knew about her situation, the better. Maybe they would be content to think that she was moving home because she wanted to and not because she was forced to.
Even twenty-two months into the new hell, Bridget still felt as if she’d lost everything just yesterday. Every time she picked up the phone and offered advice on how to open a file on the new Trax 32X desktop or download a song from Jupiter into the revamped entertainmanet section, she felt like the person on the other end of the phone was punching her in the stomach. If she never heard another person complaining about the smell of the packing material when they first opened the box of their brand new computer, it would be too soon.
“Helping stupid people just isn’t my thing,” she repeatedly told Douglas, her next door neighbor. He was a real geek, the kind that had never left his mother’s basement and loved that it had wood paneling and carpet that could work both indoors and out, as if it might start raining from the floor beams over the kitchen. She loved the guy but he was exactly what she hadn’t wanted to become. All those years spent in college had meant to keep her away from the suburbs of _____, not push her back to where she’d grown up.
When Douglas offered his condolences, she never really felt that he thought her life was bad. She had a job, which was more than she could say for a lot of people, even some of the people who had been on the fast track to make something of their lives. Her parents were happy to have her around until she could find a place of her own, not like his mother who was constantly trying to get him to leave but then pouring on the guilt every time he did actually try to leave. The poor guy didn’t know what to think most of the time. His job was the kind that he could do at home, which was far better than hers so at least he had something she didn’t.
“Great. It’s raining. Isn’t that just great,” she muttered as she walked toward the large doors that led to the parking lot and freedom.
“Need an umbrella? I could share mine.” Collette, one of the girls on her team, walked up beside where Bridget was watching the rain come down in bucketfuls through the windows. “I think we parked near each other.”
She was about to decline until she realized that if she spent one more minute in this building, she might just scream. Pulling the hood of her jacket up to help deflect some of the worst of the drops that weren’t deflected by the canvas, Bridget nodded. “I think I’ll take you up on that.”
Collette smiled, her lips still looking as red as they had when the girl had arrived for her shift. Somehow her makeup always stayed in place, an inhuman feat that Bridget always marveled at. She also wore mile-high heels that made her legs look amazing as they stretched out from under short skirts. This was the sort of girl that should have worked as a high-price call girl except for her amazingly bright outlook on life.
“How do you do it?” Bridget asked, not for the first time. “How do you work your eight hours and still have a smile on your lips? I can… I can barely keep a civil tone just thinking about coming to this place. I had a guy who asked where his Start button was today. Expected it to be on the keyboard and had the audacity to get angry at me, like I designed his computer. Me. Just me. No one else. I was the person he decided had done a poor job of making his machine the way he wanted it to be. Heaven help the guy if he wants to use his toaster. Bet he thinks there’s a little gnome inside that toasts the bread with a tiny little blow torch.”
As always, Collette was laughing along with Bridget’s rant. While her trilling laugh helped ease some of Bridget’s frustration, it always fueled the fire. There was obviously something wrong with this girl if she could find humor in everything, even in a soul-sucking job that wasn’t going to help Bridget get back to where she’d been before the fall from the top.
“You’re so funny. Have you thought about doing stand up?”
“What? Stand up in front of drunk people and make them laugh because my life is worse than theirs? No thanks. I just want a decent paying job that doesn’t make me want to commit murder at least four times a night. And it’s not like I’ll be able to get to a decent club before closing, anyway. We work the late shift, remember? Stupid doesn’t appear to sleep.”
Another trilling laugh. Another wide, cherry-red smile. “I like working this late. It keeps my days free.”
“What? You don’t sleep all day long? You don’t live with your parents. They don’t expect you to be up to help with things like dishes. Because heaven forbid that those don’t get done after the sun goes down. Seriously, you live alone. Isn’t that the greatest thing in the world?”
This time, there was no laughter to accuenuate her words. “No. You used to live alone. Wasn’t it just the most horrid thing in the world? I miss being with people. Most of the time, I’m somewhere else. My house is too big without…” When her voice trailed off, Bridget remembered the gossip that had circulated when Collette first started working on the call line. Her husband and little girl had died in a drunk driving accident a little over three years ago. The thought that Bridget had brought up those bad feelings all over again made her feel sick but she couldn’t say anything to make it better before Collette was laughing again. “You should have heard the guy I had tonight. He wanted to figure out where to put his floppy disks. And not even the 3.5 oldies but the kind that still flopped. Can you believe that?”
“Stupid, I tell you.” Bridget gave up the security of the umbrella to break off toward her car. “All of them. Idi-“
The flash of light was so bright that Bridget thought, at first, that she was being photographed with one of those big cameras that the papparazzi used when stalking celebrities. Were they doing an article on technology whiz-kids that were rapidly falling into the Where Are They Now category? Not that she’d ever been anyone special.
Next came the smell of burnt hair, that awful smell that never came out of clothing once it was singed in. Damn, she thought as she tried to turn to see what had happened to make it reek so badly.
But turning was a problem. So was seeing, she realized. Her hearing was okay because she could hear a scream that just wouldn’t stop. And then… nothing.
***
It was the beeping that woke her up. All the annoying sounds were conflicting with each other so that the caucaphony was getting on her nerves. Had she left the TV on? Was her cell phone turned up too high?
While she was at it trying to figure things out, why was she laying flat on her back? She slept on her side with a pile of pillows behind her. It was the only way she’d ever been able to get any decent sleep. The grogginess she attributed to the supply of Ambien that stayed in the drawer of her bedside table where she could keep them within reach even if she never used them because of the horrible dreams they gave her. Maybe she’d finally had too much to deal with and so felt the need to take one. Or two, considering that she didn’t think she could lift her head if she tried at this point. She was really out of it.
“I think she’s awake. Well, more than she had been.”
What was Douglas doing in her room? That wasn’t right. She went over to his house. He didn’t come to hers. The last thing she wanted was to encourage her mother in the never-ending hunt for a husband for her daughter. Any time Douglas came over, it was followed for days by a volley of “So, what is Douglas up to these days” questions that normally ended in one of them stomping out of the room.
“Dougie?” she whispered, trying to get her vocal chords to work correctly. She understood what people talked about when they mentioned that they thought they’d swallowed sand because she was pretty sure that she had nearly a full terririum in her stomach the way her throat felt.
“Yep. She’s awake.”
A girl laughed. Collette. Hadn’t she just been… this was getting odd. It took some doing but she finally pried her eyes open to see what exactly was going on. The light was dim, something she realized was very nice because she was reacting to the little bit of light with trouble.
“Hey, slugger,” Douglas replied as he loomed over her. His hair was suitably messed the way it was when he was working. Normally he tried to comb it into some semblence of straight when he went out. Did this mean she was at his house and fell asleep listening to him drone on about his newest attempts to get the city council to approve the new recycling bins at the local grocery stores.
“Hey, yourself. Where am I?”
“Do you remember anything?”
“Nothing.” The word could barely be heard as she struggled to get her voice to cooperate.
“Give her some water, Douglas. Her throat’s probably on fire.” Collette leaned over the bed at Douglas’ side, her hand on his shoulder. For the first time since they were six years old and Grady had picked Douglas before her for dodge ball, Bridget felt a white hot surge of jealousy streak through her stomach.
“Yeah,” she started to say as the lightbulb above her bed popped and fizzled.
Collette jumped back as Douglas threw himself onto the bed to cover up Bridget’s prone body. “What was that?” he shrieked. But the beeping began to give his yells some competition for loud noises. All the machines in the room began to turn on and grow louder until Bridget would have put her fingers in her ears if she could have. Douglas was keeping them firmly beside her body, as was a series of tubing and cords.
“Is this a hospital?” she asked, the strain of the answer she already knew making her voice come out like a strangled cry. Everything was falling into place except for the why. This was unmistakable County General, a place she’d only been twice in her life, neither of them good experiences.
There was another pop and hiss of a light across the room exploding. Collette was screaming and her own voice may have joined her except that everything was growing gray and faint around the edges of her vision as she struggled to find where her next breath was coming from.
***
Miriam Banford had been a hospital pharmacist for a little over six years. It was better than working in the retail sector, she reminded herself every night as she pulled out the set of keys that had been given her on her first day and proceeded to unlock everything that Stanley, the day pharmacist, had just locked up. It was just one of the many procedures that colored her day, a continuing list of things to do or not do, depending on the law and how the administrators were feeling that day.
Nothing ever changed, not even with an ever-changing list of patients that came to County General for help. Tonight, Room 12 needed a dose of Vicodin instead of Room 32 but that didn’t matter. The who and where never mattered. It was always the same what.
Still, she was making a difference. People got better because of the medication she dispensed and that had to mean something in the grand scheme of things. Didn’t it? Most days it didn’t feel like she was doing anything but running in circles, answering the same questions that had nothing to do with what she’d gone to school for.
Just as she sighed, the building shook. It was as if the hospital was sighing along with her. As she waited for the alarms to go off to tell her if she was needed anywhere specific, Miriam ran through emergency protocols in her head. Her tech would close down the pharmacy, locking everything down and turning off the computers until they were given the all-clear.
But nothing happened. In fact, as the building shivered again, Miriam wondered if this was an earthquake. It felt different than the few she had been in as a child. This really like the building was reacting to something inside than the foundation quivering and quaking.
She turned to look behind her as she heard feet pounding along the shiny tiles of the corridor. No matter the emergency, hospital staff were constantly being told not to run. The new tile was so slippery that even a fast walk was sometimes trecherous. If someone was running, that couldn’t mean anything good.
“Slow down,” she called out, a reminder to the person that they should think about their safety even if this was an earthquake.
“I need help,” came the frantic reply.
Just as she turned to help, a man rounded the corner. He was young, maybe mid-twenties, and quite tall. Not well-built as most people these days would think since he didn’t have the deep muscle tone of someone who spent a lot of time concentrating on their body but enough that he didn’t look weak. A shock of dark hair was standing straight up as if he’d spent a lot of time tugging at it and there were worry lines around his eyes and mouth. That wasn’t completely out of character for anyone that was at a hospital, but added up with the inappropriate running made Miriam’s pulse quicken.
“What do you need?” Miriam went into hyper-helpful mode, already thinking of the doctors on call tonight and who might be around if this really was an emergency. “I work here. I can help.”
“My friend. She’s seizing but we can’t call for help because all the equipment kind of… blew up.”
“Blew up?” Could that be why the building moved the way it did? She hadn’t heard an explosion and surely the machines going off-line would set the alarms off before anything else. “What do you mean? Like smoking?”
“Well, that too. But they stopped working. Like they shorted out. Like… I don’t know. They aren’t working. And then the building shook and she began shaking all over and I couldn’t keep her still and then she stopped moving and-“
“Okay, okay. I can help you. I just need to get some information. What’s your friend’s name and what room is she in?”
“Bridget Hebert. Room 47.”
After some mental tallying of the night’s dose orders, Miriam put two and two together and came up with five. “The girl who got hit by lightning? She’s awake?”
“Awake and talking. We were told that she wouldn’t wake up for a few more hours but she opened her eyes and talked to me. To us.”
The girl had come in with some pretty interesting burns, not to mention that she’d been struck in the right shoulder which should have shorted out her brain a lot more than it did. In fact, they should have been shipping her off to the morgue but the girl’s pulse was stil strong and she was breathing. The dose of sedative they’d mixed up into the IV should have kept her out like a light for the night. Miriam had mixed bag herself. The thought that she might have done it wrong made her stomach turn over and knot. She remembered double checking everything before doing the actual mixing. It had been the right dosage, something she had double checked with the doctor before starting.
“And then you say the machines stopped working? Was that after the earthquake?”
“No, after. Well, maybe the same time, actually. No, it was after. Everything went kind of… staticy. Like,” his adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed, his face screwing up in thought as he tried to get this description correct, “she’d caused it. I know how that sounds. Like we’re inside a comic book and my best friend can suddenly make machines go crazy and then make them stop working altogether. Crazy.”
“Not so-“ Another rumble, this one bigger, cut off her words. The lights flickered a few times before finally popping completely off. Still, no alarm sounded. As if… as if the machines in the hospital really had been damaged. By someone with the ability to control electricity. But that was crazy. Like the guy had said, it sounded like something straight out of a comic book. “Let’s head back to the room and see if we can help her.”
It was the middle of the night and no lights illuminated the hallway to give them any indication where they were going or what they might run into along the way. The last thing Miriam needed was for one of them to run into a cart and take a nasty spill. Her first aid course was something she’d barely passed. She was a pharmacist for a reason. If she’d wanted to deal with blood, she would have become a doctor or, even better, an EMT. Now that was an interesting career choice, especially in this city.
“Take my hand,” she called out, searching for the arm that had only recently been right in front of her. Her fingers met up with the soft wool of the man’s sweater. “What’s your name?”
“Douglas. Douglas Hanley.”
“Okay, Douglas. Let’s go help your friend.”
They’d made it several feet in the right direction when the rumbling started again in earnest. There was more popping and snapping and smoke began to leak into the hallway. “Let’s stop here,” Miriam choked out. “There’s a fire alarm somewhere right through here. I don’t know why the sprinklers haven’t come on if there’s a fire in the electrical system. This storm must have overloaded the system.”
“Right. The storm.” But Douglas didn’t sound convinced. He did sound freaked out, as if he was believing his own words about his friend being a little more supernatural than normal. “Why don’t I-“
“No, don’t wander off or I’ll be looking for you instead of helping Bridget. Why don’t you walk a little to your left and see if there’s a door there. It’s a supply closet and there’s bound to be a fire extinguisher there. We might need one of those if the sprinklers don’t start up soon.”
She heard the door click open as she located the glass panel that she would need to break in order to get to the alarm. The little metal tool was still hanging at the side like it should and she took a breath as she worked up the courage to set this set of events in motion. All she could think about was the hours of paperwork that she’d have to fill out.
The air became charged with electricity, as if all the atoms were suddenly excited about something. She didn’t have time to think about it as she heard the glass cracking. Another hit and she’d be able to get to the button that would start the audible alarm and alert the fire department that they needed help. Smoke was never a good thing in a hospital where there were already bodies struggling to stay ahead of various diseases and decay.
With only half her attention, she had heard Douglas find the door and get it open. She stopped paying attention then but her attention was rivetted once again at the clattering sound of a metal container falling. “Watch out in there. I forgot about that sharps container. That’s the central barrel where all the nurses go to-“
The ground under her feet rolled, nearly upsetting her. It was only her wide stance that kept her feet under her but she had to laugh or otherwise she would start crying and this wasn’t the place to start falling apart. There was still too much to do before she could find a corner and let out the tears that were threatening. A scream split the air just as she completely broke the glass. She was still so intent on getting to the button that she didn’t give it much thought until the alarm was sounding, strangely loud in the quiet that the lack of electricity brought over this place. “Douglas? What’s happening?”
As Miriam turned to follow in the direction he’d gone, she found she’d lost her sense of direction. In the dark with the smoke clogging her lungs and the sound of the alarm piercing her brain, she forgot exactly where she was and where she needed to go. “Focus,” she muttered, fighting against the rising panic that wanted to send her to her knees. “Do what you need to do. Quit panicing.”
It was Douglas’ next scream that got her moving again. The sound was full of panic and pain, two things that helped her fall back into work-mode. No matter what happened, she needed to help where she could. All her training fell into line and she found that she remembered where she was once again. Five steps over and two steps forward. The door was open. She could tell from the way the air flow changed. There was bound to be a flashlight somewhere near the door, always in place for emergencies just like this one.
When she stepped forward, her right foot hit something odd. She almost tripped but was able to right herself again with a hand on the door frame. Right at her fingertips was the flashlight.
“Finally. Something is working in my favor. About time.” She snapped it on, thankful to see the weak light pointing toward the ceiling. “Okay, Douglas. Now let’s see what you’ve gotten yourself into.” The beam of light fell on the overturned sharp’s container, a pile of needles and syringes already spilled out. There was a dark shape in the shadow of the barrel, just out of the beam of light.
“Oh, no,” she whispered, her hand covering her mouth as she realized that Douglas was laying on a bed of used needles. The container was due to be emptied at the end of the month, three days from now. It had been full. There was no way that Douglas hadn’t gotten stuck by at least a few of the needles. On any other day, this would have been bad. In the shape the hospital was at the moment, this was a complete disaster.
I can't put the stories up at AO3 since they're originals. That leaves me with creating a new journal.
After reading this, if any of you have any inclination to perhaps create a banner for the new journal, I would be forever indebted. I'm not exactly sure what Bitter Girl looks like... she'd got brown hair but even that is gone by the time Chapter 2 rolls around. Right now, she could look like anyone. Her final costume is pretty much a hoodie with a face mask... at least in my head for right now. A lot has changed since I started writing this. She's morphed from someone I use to moan and complain about my job to a real story idea.
She still fights idiots, though.
Story Title: The Midnight B - The Beginnings of Bitter Girl and her sidekick, Paper Shredder
Author: lar_laughs
Word Count: 4268
Characters: Bridget, Collette, Douglas
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Bridget is a young woman on a cusp of nervous breakdown if she doesn't get a new job soon. A fateful walk through the rain changes everything, not just her propensity for getting shocked when she gets up from the couch. Now, along with her childhood best friend and a woman who thought she lost everything, she's discovering just what it means to make a difference in a world she never knew existed.
Chapter 1: Electrical Outcomes
There was nothing worse than working the tech line of Traxter Computers the day after a new release. From the time that Bridget had put on her headset until the moment she hit END to close out her last call, it had been a hellish day. She’d come to work with a bad attitude, not at all in the “right frame of mind to give proper customer service” as Holly would most likely note in her files, a folder that was rapidly getting larger with each day that she worked without a smile on her face.
Living at home with her parents, in the basement, no less, was turning into a new kind of personal hell. There was nothing in her new price range, not even after she sold her beautiful, silver Range Rover. The kind with the heated seats and all the other bells and whistles. It had been her baby. The first thing she’d bought after getting the news that she was the youngest Vice President to ever serve on the board of Gamma Technologies. Her job had still been secure after the dot com bubble burst but she had quickly learned that being a VP of a business that really had no purpose and so wasn’t bringing in any money wasn’t really a job she wanted to have. The low point was when she stopped getting paid but was still expected to show up for work. Her bosses were the smart ones. They didn’t fire any of their employees because then they would have been able to file for Unemployment. No, they kept them on until they all quit.
Selling her apartment had been easy enough. She’d never been there long enough to grow attached to the place or even spend any time looking out over the view that had forced the price of the rent up and over everything else in the area. It was the antique end table that she had refinished as a senior project that had broken her heart to see go. Her moving expenses back home had equalled exactly $25 over the cost of gas and the small food she would allow herself. Not nearly enough to rent a moving van with. Her father had offered to drive down with the neighbor’s truck but that would have only added to the raw feelings she had about the situation. The less the neighbors knew about her situation, the better. Maybe they would be content to think that she was moving home because she wanted to and not because she was forced to.
Even twenty-two months into the new hell, Bridget still felt as if she’d lost everything just yesterday. Every time she picked up the phone and offered advice on how to open a file on the new Trax 32X desktop or download a song from Jupiter into the revamped entertainmanet section, she felt like the person on the other end of the phone was punching her in the stomach. If she never heard another person complaining about the smell of the packing material when they first opened the box of their brand new computer, it would be too soon.
“Helping stupid people just isn’t my thing,” she repeatedly told Douglas, her next door neighbor. He was a real geek, the kind that had never left his mother’s basement and loved that it had wood paneling and carpet that could work both indoors and out, as if it might start raining from the floor beams over the kitchen. She loved the guy but he was exactly what she hadn’t wanted to become. All those years spent in college had meant to keep her away from the suburbs of _____, not push her back to where she’d grown up.
When Douglas offered his condolences, she never really felt that he thought her life was bad. She had a job, which was more than she could say for a lot of people, even some of the people who had been on the fast track to make something of their lives. Her parents were happy to have her around until she could find a place of her own, not like his mother who was constantly trying to get him to leave but then pouring on the guilt every time he did actually try to leave. The poor guy didn’t know what to think most of the time. His job was the kind that he could do at home, which was far better than hers so at least he had something she didn’t.
“Great. It’s raining. Isn’t that just great,” she muttered as she walked toward the large doors that led to the parking lot and freedom.
“Need an umbrella? I could share mine.” Collette, one of the girls on her team, walked up beside where Bridget was watching the rain come down in bucketfuls through the windows. “I think we parked near each other.”
She was about to decline until she realized that if she spent one more minute in this building, she might just scream. Pulling the hood of her jacket up to help deflect some of the worst of the drops that weren’t deflected by the canvas, Bridget nodded. “I think I’ll take you up on that.”
Collette smiled, her lips still looking as red as they had when the girl had arrived for her shift. Somehow her makeup always stayed in place, an inhuman feat that Bridget always marveled at. She also wore mile-high heels that made her legs look amazing as they stretched out from under short skirts. This was the sort of girl that should have worked as a high-price call girl except for her amazingly bright outlook on life.
“How do you do it?” Bridget asked, not for the first time. “How do you work your eight hours and still have a smile on your lips? I can… I can barely keep a civil tone just thinking about coming to this place. I had a guy who asked where his Start button was today. Expected it to be on the keyboard and had the audacity to get angry at me, like I designed his computer. Me. Just me. No one else. I was the person he decided had done a poor job of making his machine the way he wanted it to be. Heaven help the guy if he wants to use his toaster. Bet he thinks there’s a little gnome inside that toasts the bread with a tiny little blow torch.”
As always, Collette was laughing along with Bridget’s rant. While her trilling laugh helped ease some of Bridget’s frustration, it always fueled the fire. There was obviously something wrong with this girl if she could find humor in everything, even in a soul-sucking job that wasn’t going to help Bridget get back to where she’d been before the fall from the top.
“You’re so funny. Have you thought about doing stand up?”
“What? Stand up in front of drunk people and make them laugh because my life is worse than theirs? No thanks. I just want a decent paying job that doesn’t make me want to commit murder at least four times a night. And it’s not like I’ll be able to get to a decent club before closing, anyway. We work the late shift, remember? Stupid doesn’t appear to sleep.”
Another trilling laugh. Another wide, cherry-red smile. “I like working this late. It keeps my days free.”
“What? You don’t sleep all day long? You don’t live with your parents. They don’t expect you to be up to help with things like dishes. Because heaven forbid that those don’t get done after the sun goes down. Seriously, you live alone. Isn’t that the greatest thing in the world?”
This time, there was no laughter to accuenuate her words. “No. You used to live alone. Wasn’t it just the most horrid thing in the world? I miss being with people. Most of the time, I’m somewhere else. My house is too big without…” When her voice trailed off, Bridget remembered the gossip that had circulated when Collette first started working on the call line. Her husband and little girl had died in a drunk driving accident a little over three years ago. The thought that Bridget had brought up those bad feelings all over again made her feel sick but she couldn’t say anything to make it better before Collette was laughing again. “You should have heard the guy I had tonight. He wanted to figure out where to put his floppy disks. And not even the 3.5 oldies but the kind that still flopped. Can you believe that?”
“Stupid, I tell you.” Bridget gave up the security of the umbrella to break off toward her car. “All of them. Idi-“
The flash of light was so bright that Bridget thought, at first, that she was being photographed with one of those big cameras that the papparazzi used when stalking celebrities. Were they doing an article on technology whiz-kids that were rapidly falling into the Where Are They Now category? Not that she’d ever been anyone special.
Next came the smell of burnt hair, that awful smell that never came out of clothing once it was singed in. Damn, she thought as she tried to turn to see what had happened to make it reek so badly.
But turning was a problem. So was seeing, she realized. Her hearing was okay because she could hear a scream that just wouldn’t stop. And then… nothing.
***
It was the beeping that woke her up. All the annoying sounds were conflicting with each other so that the caucaphony was getting on her nerves. Had she left the TV on? Was her cell phone turned up too high?
While she was at it trying to figure things out, why was she laying flat on her back? She slept on her side with a pile of pillows behind her. It was the only way she’d ever been able to get any decent sleep. The grogginess she attributed to the supply of Ambien that stayed in the drawer of her bedside table where she could keep them within reach even if she never used them because of the horrible dreams they gave her. Maybe she’d finally had too much to deal with and so felt the need to take one. Or two, considering that she didn’t think she could lift her head if she tried at this point. She was really out of it.
“I think she’s awake. Well, more than she had been.”
What was Douglas doing in her room? That wasn’t right. She went over to his house. He didn’t come to hers. The last thing she wanted was to encourage her mother in the never-ending hunt for a husband for her daughter. Any time Douglas came over, it was followed for days by a volley of “So, what is Douglas up to these days” questions that normally ended in one of them stomping out of the room.
“Dougie?” she whispered, trying to get her vocal chords to work correctly. She understood what people talked about when they mentioned that they thought they’d swallowed sand because she was pretty sure that she had nearly a full terririum in her stomach the way her throat felt.
“Yep. She’s awake.”
A girl laughed. Collette. Hadn’t she just been… this was getting odd. It took some doing but she finally pried her eyes open to see what exactly was going on. The light was dim, something she realized was very nice because she was reacting to the little bit of light with trouble.
“Hey, slugger,” Douglas replied as he loomed over her. His hair was suitably messed the way it was when he was working. Normally he tried to comb it into some semblence of straight when he went out. Did this mean she was at his house and fell asleep listening to him drone on about his newest attempts to get the city council to approve the new recycling bins at the local grocery stores.
“Hey, yourself. Where am I?”
“Do you remember anything?”
“Nothing.” The word could barely be heard as she struggled to get her voice to cooperate.
“Give her some water, Douglas. Her throat’s probably on fire.” Collette leaned over the bed at Douglas’ side, her hand on his shoulder. For the first time since they were six years old and Grady had picked Douglas before her for dodge ball, Bridget felt a white hot surge of jealousy streak through her stomach.
“Yeah,” she started to say as the lightbulb above her bed popped and fizzled.
Collette jumped back as Douglas threw himself onto the bed to cover up Bridget’s prone body. “What was that?” he shrieked. But the beeping began to give his yells some competition for loud noises. All the machines in the room began to turn on and grow louder until Bridget would have put her fingers in her ears if she could have. Douglas was keeping them firmly beside her body, as was a series of tubing and cords.
“Is this a hospital?” she asked, the strain of the answer she already knew making her voice come out like a strangled cry. Everything was falling into place except for the why. This was unmistakable County General, a place she’d only been twice in her life, neither of them good experiences.
There was another pop and hiss of a light across the room exploding. Collette was screaming and her own voice may have joined her except that everything was growing gray and faint around the edges of her vision as she struggled to find where her next breath was coming from.
***
Miriam Banford had been a hospital pharmacist for a little over six years. It was better than working in the retail sector, she reminded herself every night as she pulled out the set of keys that had been given her on her first day and proceeded to unlock everything that Stanley, the day pharmacist, had just locked up. It was just one of the many procedures that colored her day, a continuing list of things to do or not do, depending on the law and how the administrators were feeling that day.
Nothing ever changed, not even with an ever-changing list of patients that came to County General for help. Tonight, Room 12 needed a dose of Vicodin instead of Room 32 but that didn’t matter. The who and where never mattered. It was always the same what.
Still, she was making a difference. People got better because of the medication she dispensed and that had to mean something in the grand scheme of things. Didn’t it? Most days it didn’t feel like she was doing anything but running in circles, answering the same questions that had nothing to do with what she’d gone to school for.
Just as she sighed, the building shook. It was as if the hospital was sighing along with her. As she waited for the alarms to go off to tell her if she was needed anywhere specific, Miriam ran through emergency protocols in her head. Her tech would close down the pharmacy, locking everything down and turning off the computers until they were given the all-clear.
But nothing happened. In fact, as the building shivered again, Miriam wondered if this was an earthquake. It felt different than the few she had been in as a child. This really like the building was reacting to something inside than the foundation quivering and quaking.
She turned to look behind her as she heard feet pounding along the shiny tiles of the corridor. No matter the emergency, hospital staff were constantly being told not to run. The new tile was so slippery that even a fast walk was sometimes trecherous. If someone was running, that couldn’t mean anything good.
“Slow down,” she called out, a reminder to the person that they should think about their safety even if this was an earthquake.
“I need help,” came the frantic reply.
Just as she turned to help, a man rounded the corner. He was young, maybe mid-twenties, and quite tall. Not well-built as most people these days would think since he didn’t have the deep muscle tone of someone who spent a lot of time concentrating on their body but enough that he didn’t look weak. A shock of dark hair was standing straight up as if he’d spent a lot of time tugging at it and there were worry lines around his eyes and mouth. That wasn’t completely out of character for anyone that was at a hospital, but added up with the inappropriate running made Miriam’s pulse quicken.
“What do you need?” Miriam went into hyper-helpful mode, already thinking of the doctors on call tonight and who might be around if this really was an emergency. “I work here. I can help.”
“My friend. She’s seizing but we can’t call for help because all the equipment kind of… blew up.”
“Blew up?” Could that be why the building moved the way it did? She hadn’t heard an explosion and surely the machines going off-line would set the alarms off before anything else. “What do you mean? Like smoking?”
“Well, that too. But they stopped working. Like they shorted out. Like… I don’t know. They aren’t working. And then the building shook and she began shaking all over and I couldn’t keep her still and then she stopped moving and-“
“Okay, okay. I can help you. I just need to get some information. What’s your friend’s name and what room is she in?”
“Bridget Hebert. Room 47.”
After some mental tallying of the night’s dose orders, Miriam put two and two together and came up with five. “The girl who got hit by lightning? She’s awake?”
“Awake and talking. We were told that she wouldn’t wake up for a few more hours but she opened her eyes and talked to me. To us.”
The girl had come in with some pretty interesting burns, not to mention that she’d been struck in the right shoulder which should have shorted out her brain a lot more than it did. In fact, they should have been shipping her off to the morgue but the girl’s pulse was stil strong and she was breathing. The dose of sedative they’d mixed up into the IV should have kept her out like a light for the night. Miriam had mixed bag herself. The thought that she might have done it wrong made her stomach turn over and knot. She remembered double checking everything before doing the actual mixing. It had been the right dosage, something she had double checked with the doctor before starting.
“And then you say the machines stopped working? Was that after the earthquake?”
“No, after. Well, maybe the same time, actually. No, it was after. Everything went kind of… staticy. Like,” his adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed, his face screwing up in thought as he tried to get this description correct, “she’d caused it. I know how that sounds. Like we’re inside a comic book and my best friend can suddenly make machines go crazy and then make them stop working altogether. Crazy.”
“Not so-“ Another rumble, this one bigger, cut off her words. The lights flickered a few times before finally popping completely off. Still, no alarm sounded. As if… as if the machines in the hospital really had been damaged. By someone with the ability to control electricity. But that was crazy. Like the guy had said, it sounded like something straight out of a comic book. “Let’s head back to the room and see if we can help her.”
It was the middle of the night and no lights illuminated the hallway to give them any indication where they were going or what they might run into along the way. The last thing Miriam needed was for one of them to run into a cart and take a nasty spill. Her first aid course was something she’d barely passed. She was a pharmacist for a reason. If she’d wanted to deal with blood, she would have become a doctor or, even better, an EMT. Now that was an interesting career choice, especially in this city.
“Take my hand,” she called out, searching for the arm that had only recently been right in front of her. Her fingers met up with the soft wool of the man’s sweater. “What’s your name?”
“Douglas. Douglas Hanley.”
“Okay, Douglas. Let’s go help your friend.”
They’d made it several feet in the right direction when the rumbling started again in earnest. There was more popping and snapping and smoke began to leak into the hallway. “Let’s stop here,” Miriam choked out. “There’s a fire alarm somewhere right through here. I don’t know why the sprinklers haven’t come on if there’s a fire in the electrical system. This storm must have overloaded the system.”
“Right. The storm.” But Douglas didn’t sound convinced. He did sound freaked out, as if he was believing his own words about his friend being a little more supernatural than normal. “Why don’t I-“
“No, don’t wander off or I’ll be looking for you instead of helping Bridget. Why don’t you walk a little to your left and see if there’s a door there. It’s a supply closet and there’s bound to be a fire extinguisher there. We might need one of those if the sprinklers don’t start up soon.”
She heard the door click open as she located the glass panel that she would need to break in order to get to the alarm. The little metal tool was still hanging at the side like it should and she took a breath as she worked up the courage to set this set of events in motion. All she could think about was the hours of paperwork that she’d have to fill out.
The air became charged with electricity, as if all the atoms were suddenly excited about something. She didn’t have time to think about it as she heard the glass cracking. Another hit and she’d be able to get to the button that would start the audible alarm and alert the fire department that they needed help. Smoke was never a good thing in a hospital where there were already bodies struggling to stay ahead of various diseases and decay.
With only half her attention, she had heard Douglas find the door and get it open. She stopped paying attention then but her attention was rivetted once again at the clattering sound of a metal container falling. “Watch out in there. I forgot about that sharps container. That’s the central barrel where all the nurses go to-“
The ground under her feet rolled, nearly upsetting her. It was only her wide stance that kept her feet under her but she had to laugh or otherwise she would start crying and this wasn’t the place to start falling apart. There was still too much to do before she could find a corner and let out the tears that were threatening. A scream split the air just as she completely broke the glass. She was still so intent on getting to the button that she didn’t give it much thought until the alarm was sounding, strangely loud in the quiet that the lack of electricity brought over this place. “Douglas? What’s happening?”
As Miriam turned to follow in the direction he’d gone, she found she’d lost her sense of direction. In the dark with the smoke clogging her lungs and the sound of the alarm piercing her brain, she forgot exactly where she was and where she needed to go. “Focus,” she muttered, fighting against the rising panic that wanted to send her to her knees. “Do what you need to do. Quit panicing.”
It was Douglas’ next scream that got her moving again. The sound was full of panic and pain, two things that helped her fall back into work-mode. No matter what happened, she needed to help where she could. All her training fell into line and she found that she remembered where she was once again. Five steps over and two steps forward. The door was open. She could tell from the way the air flow changed. There was bound to be a flashlight somewhere near the door, always in place for emergencies just like this one.
When she stepped forward, her right foot hit something odd. She almost tripped but was able to right herself again with a hand on the door frame. Right at her fingertips was the flashlight.
“Finally. Something is working in my favor. About time.” She snapped it on, thankful to see the weak light pointing toward the ceiling. “Okay, Douglas. Now let’s see what you’ve gotten yourself into.” The beam of light fell on the overturned sharp’s container, a pile of needles and syringes already spilled out. There was a dark shape in the shadow of the barrel, just out of the beam of light.
“Oh, no,” she whispered, her hand covering her mouth as she realized that Douglas was laying on a bed of used needles. The container was due to be emptied at the end of the month, three days from now. It had been full. There was no way that Douglas hadn’t gotten stuck by at least a few of the needles. On any other day, this would have been bad. In the shape the hospital was at the moment, this was a complete disaster.