Spare Parts

Part One: The Doctor-4

Sheela sprinted up the stairs and saw flickers of movement. When she reached the second-floor landing, she felt something brush against her, struggling for a tentative hold on her clothes. She heard groans of displeasure as she skirted free of everything.

Reaching the top floor, Sheela let out a gasp of defeat. Through the sweat streaked hair plastered to her face, she saw that where a door should be, none was. It was the same pockmarked brick that had greeted her throughout the stairwell. She cried out and slammed her hands against the wall. She felt immediate pain radiating from her shoulder, followed by a more familiar burn of the skin being sheared away on her palms. She pounded until her hands began to go numb. She stopped as the wall began it's all too familiar outward bulge. She cried out with the force of a trapped animal accepting its fate but vowing to fight til death.

Only, she saw that it wasn’t the wall bulging out, but rather a door being swung open. Silhouetted amid the door frame was The Wahz.

“What on earth are you doing?” The Wahz asked.

Sheela couldn’t answer in words. She collapsed into The Wahz’s arms, crying.

Todd“Ahh, man. Come on. It’s Friday. Besides, it’s not even fifteen minutes past break time.”

“That sounds like an awful lot of excuses,” Todd told Rico. “What I’m not hearing is any remorse.”

“What do you want me to say? Sorry I had to take a s**t?”

“Don’t play dumb. I saw you jawing at the bullshit table when I went by,” Todd checked his watch for posterity, “eleven minutes ago, now.”

Rico screwed up his face. “Okay, so what, I greased my break a bit. Why are you up here banging me on that? There was a couple rooks down there too.”

“I’m banging you because you should know better. You should be setting a better example to the new guys. That’s what seniority is all about, no?”

Todd saw the defiance and anger in Rico. It was plainly written across his face.

“Hussein would never do this.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. But I’m docking you the fifteen minutes either way.”

Todd waited for Rico to say something. To get in his face. It would do wonders for his mood to bust Rico down another peg. Who knows, if Rico really pushed it, he could skip the verbal and go straight to a written warning.

“Fine,” Rico said, stepping past Todd toward his cart parked at the end of the hall.

Todd watched him walk away. When he was sure Rico wouldn’t say anything else, he left, taking the elevator from the tenth floor of the surgical wing to the fourth. His mood was sour because he hated working the evening shift. Hussein didn’t run a tight ship and every time he tried to enforce the rules, he could feel the disdain for him dripping off the employees. Who in their right mind would choose to work until almost midnight everyday anyway? A bunch of freaks and social pariahs, Todd thought. What’s more, he was doing this as a favour for Hussein, a rather large favour now that he’d gotten lip from a lot of the employees. He was going to give the business to Hussein next time they spoke.

The elevator chimed and Todd stepped out and turned toward the Emergency Department. He’d put Giles there this evening and had left the kid alone. He seemed like a good worker, and since Todd hadn’t gotten a call from Bobbie, the head nurse, he assumed everything was good. Still, he wanted to show his face to ensure that they knew he was a caring and proactive supervisor.

He punched in the code, the double doors swung open, and Todd stepped into Emerge.

Minor care, designated for the walking wounded, was one large square with nine rooms along its exterior walls. Seven designated places along the walls throughout the hallway had stretchers placed in them, with patients occupying each. The scant cubby holes scattered about, cramped spaces with little desk space due to the overflow of medical journals and computers from the early 2000s, were for the doctors. In the middle of Minor Care was a room used to store all their equipment and bedding. Todd did the tour and took a mental note that all the garbages were empty. A checkmark for Giles.

He passed by a dimly lit corridor encased in glass on his left. From inside, Todd heard someone yelling about ants on the walls. Off to his right was the one room triage area. It too was encased in glass; a set of double sliding glass doors bookended each side. One set led into the waiting room, and the other set led to where he was standing. Inside the triage area a nurse and two paramedics were assessing a restrained patient on a stretcher. Todd saw that the patient used all the slack the restraints allowed to continuously scratch at his right leg. His head was constantly moving side to side, like he was stuck perpetually answering ‘no’ to any and all questions.

He suppressed a shiver and continued into the epicenter. Acute Care. There was a large wooden counter surrounding the area where nurses and doctors congregated to do research, or relax. Above eye level, many monitors shone down with the vitals for each patient.

Continuing deeper into the bowels of Emerge, he passed the three resuscitation rooms. All three doors were closed.

Around a bend and Todd ended up at the far end of Emerge. It was a dark, closed off space with ten beds. Half were in rooms with three walls and a curtain drawn across the opening. The other half, the back half, were sealed by sliding glass doors. These rooms were reserved for the dangerous isolations like tuberculosis or measles. The smell of sickness and despair hung heavy, a tangible thing.

Giles was in none of the areas so Todd backtracked, listening as he passed the three closed resus rooms. He heard movement in Resus 1. He dipped around the corner and entered it through the utility room. Giles wasn’t there. The only thing there was a corpse in a zipped up body bag. This time, Todd let his shiver show. He hated being around dead people. He was about to turn away when a flicker of movement caught his eye.

Because the operating-room-like lights were on, he twisted his head in time to see the silhouettes of fingers tracing their way down the interior of the bag.

Todd tried to scream, but it caught in his throat. He waited, frozen for several seconds, for some other noise to punctuate the room, for some additional movement to capture his vision. He`d about given up hope, with palpable relief, when he saw those silhouetted fingers reach up and poke through the head of the zipper. Todd saw the index, middle, ring and pinky push through, one by one. They were all black. As black as the blindness coming, tunneling his vision, wanting to pull him down to its oblivion, if he wished to stay around and see.

He did not and beat a hasty retreat, exiting into the main hallway. He spied Giles coming out of the security office with his cart and waved to him with a hand that was steadier than he felt.

By the time Todd had reached the office, he thought that Hussein owed him a damn big favour.

The BodyThe halls of the Emergency Department were quiet. Most patients, and some of the staff, were sleeping; even sickness takes breaks at midnight. The unit coordinator, head nurse, and a P.A.B., all sat behind the central desk. They were waiting for the Porters to come and collect the body for the morgue. The man, now just a body, had been trouble. He died, was resuscitated, died again, was resuscitated again, and was almost stabilized before he crashed a final time. The wife had watched from the hallway as the staff tried to bring the man around for the third time; she’d been escorted away by security when she cried out, ran into the room, and grasped her husband's leg. During and after her removal, the staff continued their fruitless labour.

An hour after she’d called, Bobbi, the head nurse, looked up from her paperwork as the two Porters approached the desk. One was a tall, handsome black man she knew by sight, but couldn’t remember his name, Mario or Melvin or something. She flashed him a quick smile that withered when she saw Dennis standing next to him. He smiled down at her, his stained upper teeth making a brief appearance.

“Hi, Bobbi. What room’s the goner in?” Dennis asked.

“Resus one.”

“Okay. Lead the way.”

Bobbi pulled the manila folder from under her notes and stood up. She handed the folder to Dennis and suppressed a shudder when their hands briefly touched.

The Porters followed her down the hall, pushing the morgue truck ahead of them. It was a stretcher with a metal casing surrounding the mattress. Wrapped around the metal was a black canvas tarp draped over it to shield the visitors from the bodies. The P.A.B. slipped off the cover while Bobbi depressed the switch and dropped the metal casings. The Porters grabbed hold of the body and hoisted it over to the cart.

“Motherfucker’s heavy,” Dennis complained.

“Nah. It’s cause he’s dead weight,” his partner said, a tired tone in his voice. “He’s one fifty at most. Quit your bitching and lift.”

“He weighed one forty-two at time of death, so you were close,” Bobbi said. The handsome Porter shot her a smile as he deposited his end of the body with ease; Dennis was breathing deeply while beads of sweat popped out on his forehead.

Bobbi closed the metal struts and pushed the pin through, locking it in place. The P.A.B. and Porters stretched the canvas out and put it back on. Then, the Porters thanked the ER staff and wheeled the cart out of the Emergency Department and towards the elevators.

“There are so many things I’d do to her,” Dennis said, scratching his crotch thoughtfully, Mario’s scowl going unnoticed.

“Like she’d go for your fat ass.”

“I’ve got something fat for her to have.”

“Fat and disgusting, more like.”

“Keep running your mouth, Somalia, and you’ll get some too.”

The elevator bell chimed as Mario raised an eyebrow, quizzically. “And you accuse me of being gay,” he said without much humour. It was the same tired old routine between them.

“Hey, now. I know you’d like it. No shame in that. I’m just doing my duty. Spreading my love.”

“That ain’t the only thing you’re spreading you skeezy bastard.”

The elevator took them down to the third floor. The doors opened and Dennis exited first. He didn't notice the nurse holding a tray of four coffees; Mario almost hitting her with the stretcher when he pushed it out. She jumped back, spilling hot coffee across her hand.

“s**t. I'm sorry,” Mario said before shooting Dennis a look.

“No one was hurt,” Dennis said with a shrug. He missed the dirty look the nurse gave him as the doors closed. “Besides, it’s a night-shift. Calm down, Somalia.”

They made quite the pair, side by side. One was pale, bloated and with a face boasting burst capillaries. The other was tall and toned with a midnight complexion.

“I'm not from Somalia, you inbred hick,” Mario continued, his tired tone still intact. He mentally cursed Inshan, that Trini prick of a security guard, for shouldering him with the nickname. In truth, he was a third generation Canadian, and no one in his family knew their exact ancestry; they’d been spread across all of Africa, so Somalia was as good a guess as any. It didn’t matter. The nickname still sucked.

They pushed the stretcher across the concrete bridge that connected the main pavilions of St. Agnes to the neurological wing; the bridge was situated high across an access road. Technically, it was just another wing of St. Agnes, but its separate civic address gave it some perks. It ran its own staff and budget, while still being provided money from the overall hospital network.