The Slip

Chapter 5

5

BLOOD LEAKED OUT OF THE patient's eyes, nose, and mouth as Tyrone wheeled him through the emergency room doors as fast as he could. He rushed past the admitting desk to the waiting doctors and other patients brought in earlier in the day. A doctor snatched the gurney from him, and the young man quickly stepped away. Tyrone's first week was making him feel woefully unprepared for the job. All the patients had symptoms he hadn’t seen or studied as best he could recall from medical school.

It was almost 11 AM, and they had already admitted 12 patients with severe conditions. Tyrone had a brief conversation with his senior advisor during a break in the action asking if this was a normal Thursday. She claimed to have seen nothing like it in her 25 years. Thankful that he would not have this much excitement on a normal basis, Tyrone decided to grab a quick sugar fix before the next wave of horrors arrived.

The vending machines lay at the end of a gurney lined corridor. He navigated the patients waiting for doctors, trying not to focus on them for the moment. He needed a mental break.

But he would not get a break today.

A brutal retching sound caused Tyrone to snap his head around to see the gurney of a young man he had just passed. Bloody vomit at various stages of drying covered his chest and face. Convulsions racked his body. Tyrone jumped as the man ejected a torrent of bloody gruel so energetically it hit the wall and splattered back across his body, painting the floor where he had just been walking.

A nurse came rushing to attend, and Tyrone hastened his pace. This was his job, and these were his patients but he couldn’t help feeling removed, like a gawker passing a pileup on the highway. He was on edge and resisted turning his head but his eyes betrayed him swiveling in their sockets to a man with a sickly off-white pallor. He glistened under a layer of sweat but otherwise seemed to be in much better condition than his neighbor. Okay, he looks “normally” sick. Maybe just a fever. His shoulders relaxed a little.

It was the last gurney that finally made Tyrone question his choice of profession. A slurry of moist white and red fat covered the left side of the patient’s face. His eyes were closed, and he did not appear to be breathing. Tyrone stopped and leaned over the still man’s face. Upon closer inspection he could see various depths of exposed tissue where the man’s cheek and eye socket had decomposed. It looked like his face was turning inside out exposing striations of sub-dermal sinew. Suddenly the patient’s eyes snapped open as he loudly gasped a breath into his open mouth. Tyrone froze in shock, locked in the stare of a milky white eyeball staring blindly out of its excavated cavity. He jumped when the patient grasped his arm and stumbled backward shaking off the man’s grip.

Tyrone’s lungs pumped too quickly as panic set in. Frozen in place, he watched the man struggle to sit up. The patient’s good eye locked on Tyrone and a shaky hand reached toward him as he mouthed the word “Help”.

Tyrone blacked out and crumpled to the floor.