I closed the doors to my rooms, per fire safety protocols. Most fire alarms were drills. But hospital protocols weren’t set up to take care of dragons. Fire-breathing dragons. Fire-breathing insane dragons.
And … syphilis? Really? Like Al Capone? I paced around from one room to the other. Sure, nurses were all trained on STDs. That hadn’t stopped me from having unwise and unprotected sex with a British stranger two nights ago, though. Shit.
I looked from Shawn to the baby. Both of them were technically virgins. And both of them needed oxygen to survive. There were mobile tanks for times like these. I went out to the charge’s desk.
“Shouldn’t we move them down the hall?”
“It’s probably burning popcorn on the Med-Surg wing,” she said coolly.
“Are you sure?”
She sat straighter before responding to me. I could tell I was close to getting yelled at. Maybe afterward, one of the Betty Boops would offer me a lolly. “Just stay in there till it’s over.”
I walked back and looked like I was doing patient care for the baby, closing the curtains to give myself time to think. Where should I go? What should I do?
Surely the Shadows would take care of things, quickly. They would, right? Which actually was my second problem. If the dragon did come here—was coming right past here, according to Gina’s implications—I couldn’t react ahead of time. If the Shadows were coming, and they were going to fix things, they might not erase everyone’s memory about how that float nurse panicked and covered herself and her patients in water before pushing them up the hall without O. If I panicked now over nothing I’d never get to work in PICU again, or any other floor, for that matter. Hospital gossip travels faster than stat drugs down an IV line. And really, where could you go to hide from a dragon, anyhow?
A fresh string of German startled me. I looked over and saw the small light on the CD player glowing yellow. I walked toward it and noticed that as I did so the temperature in the room shifted, becoming warmer. I paced back—cooler. Toward Shawn? Warmer. Downright hot. We didn’t have radiant heaters overhead here to malfunction, and there were no air vents nearby jetting out warm air. The scent of burning plastic began to permeate the room. If the dragon were just in the stairwell, we’d be fine. If it wasn’t, though—I ran to both sides of the room and hauled the curtains closed.
“Everything all right in there?” my charge yelled through the door. I barely heard her.
“Fine!” I shouted back. “Just have to clean him up is all!” How close was the dragon? I poured water into a plastic tub, then splashed it onto the floor. It went everywhere—and at the metal seams where the floor met the wall behind Shawn’s bed, it hissed into steam.
“Fuck.” I leaned over. “Shawn. Wake up. Shawn.” I touched his shoulder, then realized my mistake, and began tapping at his cheek. “Shawn!” I hissed, whispering as loud as I could.
“Wha?” One eye blinked open.
“I’ve got to move you.”
He closed his eye again. “Then move me already.”
“No, not like that. Like off the bed.”
Now both eyes opened. “Why?”
“I can’t really explain it. But you and I and the baby—we’ve gotta get into the bathroom over there.”
Confusion crowded his features together. “Is it a tornado?”
That was a more plausible reason than any other I had. “Yes. It’s coming fast.”
I grabbed the pediatric ambu bag off the wall, and assembled it, swallowing hard. Last time I’d done this … but this time would be different. It had to be. I put the bed on max inflate, and shoved a side rail down.
“I can’t breathe for you while I move you,” I said while popping the vent off his trach and replacing it with the ambu bag. “So I’m going to hyperventilate you now.”
His eyes were large and frightened. The German rose around us as the temperature did, encouraging me to quicker action.
“Okay. On the count of three, here we go!”
I put the ambu bag down and leaned backward.
Shawn wasn’t thin for his age. And he couldn’t help me move him at all—he was the proverbial sack of potatoes. I hauled him out of bed like a rag doll, and lurched into a squat under his new weight.
“Come on!” I said as much to myself as to him. I staggered back till the curtain ended, and then went quickly toward the bathroom on the baby’s side of the room, as far away from his wall as I could get, dragging him in a duck walk, my calves screaming in pain. When we got there I pulled him through the door, and dropped him on the ground, panting. I gave him two long puffs of air before hauling him until his legs were inside and I could close the door.
“I’ve gotta go get the baby now, okay?” I told him.
“I thought you were kidding,” he whispered around his trach.
“I wish.”
Two more puffs from the ambu bag, and then I went outside. The CD player’s light was shining a furious red behind the curtain in Shawn’s corner. I grabbed the baby and turned the oxygen and her monitor off, carrying her quickly into the bathroom, locking and closing the door behind me. We waited.
I alternated between breathing for Shawn and the baby, and all the while it was getting hotter.
There was a thump from outside the bathroom. I flinched, and Shawn’s eyes went wide. The handle started to turn.
“Float nurse? Are you in here?” The locked handle shook. “You’d better be in here!”
“Shit.” I heard a scraping at the outside of the lock. There was nothing in a hospital that couldn’t be unlocked. Except for the were-corrals on Y4.
“I can’t explain right now. Just go away!” I shouted, but I heard the jingle of keys. I reached up and held the handle.
“Look, lady—Enid! Esther! Whatever the hell your name is! Open up!”
I strained back but I couldn’t reach Shawn’s trach and hold on to the door. I let it go, and it opened forcefully, thudding into Shawn’s immobile calf.
“What are you doing in here?” the charge nurse yelled through the crack in the door as she tried to force it wider.
I looked up at her. The Betty Boops on her scrubs were shuddering in rage. Pediatric nurse anger combined the best elements of maternal wrath and the worst elements of wronged woman. “I’m sorry.” I knew she couldn’t go away. If I were in her shoes, I knew I wouldn’t.
The heat radiating in from behind her was tremendous, like an oven heating to broil. She leaned down to shove Shawn’s leg out of the way of the door. “What the hell did you do to the thermostat?”
“It’s the fire—” I sputtered. “It’s below us.”
“Then why the hell didn’t you have me wheel you out of the room?”
“Popcorn, remember!” I shouted at her.
“Not the patients. You. I would have gladly wheeled you out if I’d known you were going to do this. Do you know what kind of incident reports I’ll have to write now?” She glared at me.
“That’s the least of my concerns,” I said, still alternating breaths for Shawn and the baby, taking the ambu bag and squeezing it over the baby’s face and attaching it to Shawn’s trach in turns. She was sweating, I was sweating, Shawn was sweating. It was time to go for broke. “Look—there’s a fucking pissed-off dragon coming up the stairs. We need to hide until the Shadows get here.”
“You need to hide till security gets here—that’s for damn sure,” she muttered. She took a step back, and I knew she was going for the phone to call me in.
Then the room was filled with an unholy roar, like a hundred cars crashing into one another at high speed, so loud it hurt. The charge nurse’s jaw dropped open and I knew she’d heard and felt it too.
I reached down and yanked Shawn’s legs up. “Get in here.” She did so without question, without turning around, closed the door, and I heard her flip the lock.
The lights in the bathroom flickered and went out. We sat there in the dark with only the sound of the ambu bag exhaling sweet air into Shawn’s trach, which I held with one hand, and then at the baby, whom I trusted to remain in the general vicinity. I prayed that this last door would buy the Shadows enough time.
“What is that?” the charge hissed.
“I told you.” How could I expect her to believe me? I’d never even seen a were in person because Gina was always the were-vet-RN.
“Not that. That.” I felt her hand at my chest and looked down. My badge was glowing faintly, a warm gold. Huh.
“My penlight,” I lied. I could see the fear on her face from its dull glow. Shawn’s eyes were still wide, and the baby, not smart enough to be scared, reached out for my hand as I held the ambu bag above her face.
I couldn’t let them down. I couldn’t lose anyone else. I couldn’t be that person again.
“Here—” I grabbed the charge nurse’s hand and put the ambu bag into it.
“Why? Where are you—”
“Just stay here.” The baby cooed. I stroked her soft hair with my free hand. “Keep everyone quiet.”
I stood and tapped the door’s handle, to see if it was hot. It was, but not so much that I couldn’t grab it. I beat on the door to get the dragon’s attention. “I’m coming out!”
I’d only been on Y4 for a month, and one week of that had been watching lame training videos, some of which had involved puppets. And not good Jim Henson puppets, but hand-up-the-ass puppets, especially the videos about weres. I was completely unprepared for this, but goddammit, there had to be something I could do.
“My name is Edie Spence! I’m a noncombatant! You can’t hurt me! I’m coming out!” That much I remembered from training. I stepped swiftly out and closed the door behind me. I heard the charge nurse quickly relock the door.
I only had a second to take the room in. The dragon had slagged a hole into the room from the stairwell outside. It was still clawing its way through, using Shawn’s bed frame for traction. The fire-alarm light above made everything strobe red, like a haunted house.
And then it saw me. Its sleek green head lunged out, whip-fast, teeth clashing in midair. I screamed and jumped backward, my back slamming against the bathroom door.
“I’m a noncombatant!” I shouted, as I made myself small. I tried holding my badge up again. “You’re not allowed to hurt me!”
The dragon hadn’t gotten the memo. Maybe there weren’t noncombatants in Europe. It began scrabbling faster now, writhing its muscular body to snake inside.
I crawled around the perimeter of the room. Maybe I could draw its attention away, buy some time for the Shadows to hurry their mythical asses up.
It leveraged itself up by half a foot, scales scraping on the broken wall. I could see its round belly now, where an emberous glow was taking hold. It stretched its head out again, snapping at me, then went for the bathroom’s door.