20:00 ~ The Doctor

    Jack was on his way. He had left the Theatre just the way he had found it. The cats could carry on just as they had always done.
    He hoped that A&E would be relatively quiet tonight, but he knew that, it being Halloween, people were much more likely to get hurt. Picturing the scene of his latest work kept Jack’s mind off the concerns at hand.

    Jamie saw lights through her eyelids. The lights were moving. She was on some kind of star-ship. She was travelling at light speed. Someone was looking over her and making muffled noises with their mouth. She suddenly remembered what had happened.
    Her eyes opened. Fluorescent strip lights were moving past her. The corridor moved like a waterfall to Jamie in her horizontal position. She was on a stretcher.
    ‘Thank f**k!’ She wanted to scream. ‘Someone found my bloated f*****g carcass and brought me here!’ But she couldn’t. Her eyes looked down, but couldn’t see very far past the oxygen mask on her face. Doors flew open and shut in front and behind her. The fast pace of the hospital was too much. She fainted again.

    Jack forcefully broke one of the windows and slipped himself through. The room was dark and empty, with beds lined up uniformly. Perfect.
    With him, he had brought his own set of scrubs. He hated being dressed up in a costume like this. Wishing that the idiotic “Traveller” could at least half finish his own work. As if Jack wasn’t busy enough tonight. He had other work to do. He had other work to do right in this very hospital.
    As Jack had understood it, the girl may only be slightly concussed. She may even be fully conscious and strong by the time Jack reached her. He would never understand what was so wrong with what he did - that was what made him what he was. It wasn’t like he had some kind of superiority complex like a filthy Nazi. His philosophy was simply that laws were made to be broken, and that morals were for those who cared what others thought. Jack didn’t.
    The gloves snapped on to his wrists. Time to finish this.

    Bonnie was on her rounds. Her thoughts were with her unfortunate husband however. Millions of tiny pills tempted her nightly. If only she could sleep.
    She often thought about taking some. No one would know. No one would care. No one ever did care about her. In the last week, she had slept for a total of ten hours.
    So many pills - so many undeserving ungreatfuls. Maybe she would take one. After this it was her break anyway. She felt dirty even thinking about it. So unprofessional - like a groupie, but groupies didn’t have a serious case of insomnia.
    A doctor was approaching the desk, wheeling a bed. Bonnie acknowledged him. On the bed lay a sleeping girl. The doctor’s gaze remained fixed on Bonnie. Did he need help with something. As he passed and moved down the hall toward the lifts, his eyeballs repositioned themselves pointing toward his destination, the elevators - but very slowly. Bonnie didn’t recognize him.
    The doctor and the bed gradually disappeared behind the doors of the elevator. She hadn’t dared to ask where he was taking her because she knew just how grouchy doctors could be during the night. But after a minute or two, Bonnie began to think that she should have.
    She trotted along the hall to the lifts to see if she could see which floor they had stopped on, but the pointer was upwards by then and the floor it read was above Bonnie’s. She had definitely seen the doctor press the down button on the panel.
    She wondered if she should call security.
    ‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. She was bored anyway. She would find out about the new doctor. It was her break now anyway.

    Jamie came around. She was in a dark room. The only light being emitted was from the machines next to her bed. Where was she? She remembered being wheeled to her room. That was where she had fainted. This place was not her room.
    Here, there were pipes and steam. It was hot. The red machine lights showed a door and a table to her left, nothing more. She squinted, hoping that her pupils would open a bit more if she did.
    The battle she had remained fresh in her head. She could perform the same thing now if she required. She was tense. There was pain in her body, though she still had her strength as an ally.
    In the corner something moved. An arm. It reached for the table. The owner of the arm came forward. He was wearing scrubs. Jamie thanked her stars - it was a doctor.
    ‘Doctor, what am I doing here?’ Quizzed the now at ease Jamie.
    ‘I’m just running some tests. It has to be dark for them to work,’ responded the doctor. He picked up a piece of equipment  from the table. It looked sharp and flashed the red light into Jamie‘s eyes.
    ‘Huh? I’ve never heard of any tests that need to be ca…’
    ‘Shh. You need to rest. You have survived a very serious assault.’ The doctor paused as he moved back the instrument. ‘But you won’t survive this!’
    The blade came hurtling toward Jamie, who screamed and rolled. The pillow was impaled. Jamie rolled back on top of the surgeon’s hand and kicked him in the face. He soared back against the wall, knocking the table over in the process.
    Jamie detached herself from the machines that she was connected to, grabbed one of the blades from the toppled table and darted for the door.
    Questions came pouring into her head. Questions.
    ‘Where are the children?’
    ‘Who was that man?’
    ‘Who was the other man?’
    ‘Where am I?’
    ‘Am I still in the hospital?’
    ‘Why me?’
    The last thing she could remember was fainting in her room. From the look of her surroundings, which were a continuation of the pipes and brickwork, she assumed that she was in the basement of the hospital. She knew that her two attackers, one of which was pursuing her along the pipes, were connected. She didn’t know what had happened to the kids.
    The contempt that she had felt earlier flowered into a maternal bond with the children. Jamie had to make sure they were safe. Jamie would track them down, or no one would ever let her baby-sit again.
    
    Jack was furious. Not at Jamie, but at the Traveller. If he had just been a man, then Jack wouldn’t be in this position now. He would get his revenge for this later, now he had more pressing issues to deal with.
    Jamie’s robes, like her hair, bobbed as she ran. If she reached the end of this narrow hell trail, she’d reach the stairs up to the car park. Jack didn’t need that s**t now. He hurried himself up.
    Jamie saw the change in pace and sprinted, much to Jack‘s annoyance. The door loomed now - more like a solid wall.
    Jack saw and felt the force at which Jamie fractured the door. It broke in two.
    ‘F**k! You get here you f*****g b***h!’ He screamed, waving his cutting tool. Words were rendered useless.
    She’d done it.

    Bonnie needed a smoke. She couldn’t find him or the sleeping patient. The entire emergency department was full of children with candle burns and hyperactivity. The rest of the hospital was dead. She didn’t want to go outside. It was raining and cold.
    Hospitals were very unforgiving when it came to smoking, for obvious reasons. Besides, as far as everyone knew, Bonnie had managed to “kick it” years ago. That was accurate up until a few years ago when “it” happened. She had taken her husband’s experience very hard. After the attack, things had become very awkward between them and tensions were running high, as if they were constantly ready with their knives of criticism when the other fucked up. The nurse and the Detective were ready in waiting for the end. For fall out. And for war.
    Never the less, over the past year, spring had arrived in the wintry wastes that was their marriage, in the form of thin, white tubes. Bonnie had been secretly smoking since last summer, and it was doing the trick. She was relaxed, talkative, understanding and helpful. And happy. In the beginning, she had promised herself no more than one per day, still, the cravings grew and grew - malignant.
    Now, in the back of her mind, a need for something stronger was growing. She was beginning to find it difficult dealing with her own mental state again, not to mention the prickly desert that was the Detective’s outlook - especially during the night shift. The night shift reawakened the fears of finding her husband among “the scraps”, being swept in through the doors of A&E - and her, standing, catching a glimpse of his bleeding face accelerating at the end of the hall. The temptation of the sleeping pills lingered and dangled on a thread from her heavy eyelids. All the other spinning wheels in the kingdom had been thrown on the fire. There was very little left for her. Sleep. Smoke.
    ‘I’m just going to the car park,’ she announced to one of the other nurses. ‘Won’t be long, just need to make a call and I’ve left my bag in the car.’
    ‘Okay. Did you find that new doctor you were on the hunt for earlier?’
    ‘No. I wish I’d seen which floor he’d got to on the damned elevator. Do you want anything while I’m out? I’ll be passing the shop.’
    ‘No, I’m fine. I get off in an hour and Harry’s making me dinner.’
    ‘Oh. Nice!’
    The Detective never made his wife dinner - then again, Bonnie didn’t cook either. But she could handle all that romantic crap if she could only have a smoke once in a while.
    Why a hospital used paint the shade of vomit on the walls, she did not know, but she practically waded through the puke as she walked down them. The concrete and cold of the stationary cars and multiple storeys would contrast this nicely when she got out there.

    The windows were steamy and her breath and the burning cigarette gave her an ethereal, ghostly aura. The smell of petrol and damp was omnipresent.
    As Bonnie lay relaxed in the reclined passenger chair, puffing away with the door wide open, she caught sight of someone walking outside of the car in the rear-view mirror.