The Fall

by J. L. Wood

  – 6 –

  Stages

  Dr. Sherrie Dressner slowly walked through the rows of cots at Greenwood Elementary, a small brown clipboard tightly clasped against her chest as she looked for any sudden changes in health amongst her new little patients. The school nurse, Amber Pearson, followed closely behind, jotting down notes as Dr. Dressner rattled them off, her hand sore from writing, barely able to keep up. “Bed eight,” Dr. Dressner said, pointing at the pasty boy in the cot. “Please make a note to revisit him in half an hour. We might need to get him on Sim-Six; he’s looking a little feverish.”

  Amber scribbled something on her own clipboard and then looked at her watch. “Yes, Doctor. Also, I believe it’s time for the vitals check on the last row of cots for your report.”

  Dr. Dressner nodded and sifted through the papers on her clipboard, carefully examining them before pulling one out and handing it to Nurse Amber. “For the sake of time, can you document these children while I get the rest?” Amber nodded as she took the sheet of paper and secured it under the metal bar on her clipboard.

  As the hours passed, Dr. Dressner began to trust her more and more, expanding her list of duties. She now gave Amber what she believed was the most important task—documenting the state of the children who would be sent to the CDC for analysis in hopes of creating a cure. Sherrie smiled as she watched Amber study the list of names on the chart. She knew her apprentice was in her zone; she had a genuine heart and only wanted to help.

  Although they had only spent a short amount of time together, Sherrie knew a lot about Amber Pearson. When they first met, Amber introduced herself as if she were applying for a job. She described herself as the only school nurse at Greenwood Elementary for the past fifteen years, and her daily duties included having children lie down when they felt ill, administering their medicines, calling their parents to pick them up, and reading steamy romance novels behind the privacy divider when her infirmary was empty, which it was more often than not.

  The last comment made Sherrie laugh, and she knew immediately that Nurse Amber would be a good working partner. She could see the dedication in her, an ability to use the skills that she was trained for. She was a born healer, and Sherrie planned to put in a good word for Amber at Kinsley Hospital. Although schools always needed nurses, Amber’s aspirations were better suited to a faster environment.

  Sherrie sat on one of the freshly opened cots and swept her hand over the thin mattress. Everyone in the medical profession hated losing patients, but the little ones hurt the most. She started to scribble some notes on her chart and looked up at Amber, who was kneeling next to a cot, her stethoscope placed on a little boy’s chest. Sherrie knew it was a last-ditch effort for the CDC to call her in from hospice. She just hoped she would make it long enough to teach Amber to take over in her absence, if it came to that.

  After writing down a few more notes regarding her new lost patient, Sherrie slowly stood up, her heart heavy and the tiredness inside of her attempting to push her back down. She took in a deep breath and then exhaled, ready to continue her rounds.

  *

  Dr. Dressner walked toward her last patient in her round of vital checks. When she reached the bed, she found a young woman with dirty-blonde hair tied loosely into a ponytail, her back leaning against the bed, her knees pulled in toward her chest and her face buried in her arms across her knees. “Hi, are you Lois’s mother?” Dr. Dressner asked.

  The woman looked up, surprised. “Oh, no, I’m not. I’m her teacher, Missy.” Missy turned around on her knees and looked at Lois, sound asleep with beads of sweat forming on the bridge of her nose. Picking up a cloth that lay on the bed, she dabbed at Lois’s nose.

  “Well, I’m sure Lois is glad that you are here,” the doctor replied. “I heard her parents just left her here. What a shame. She is a beautiful girl.”

  Missy leaned against the bed, still staring at Lois. “That she is,” she replied. “A beauty pageant princess.”

  Dr. Dressner held out her hand to Missy. “I’m Sherrie, by the way. I’m the doctor assigned to this location by the CDC.”

  Missy reached out and softly shook her hand. “Nice to meet you,” she replied, examining the doctor’s thin face. Sherrie grunted as she held her side, and Missy jumped up, ready to react. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes, I’m fine,” Sherrie replied, ignoring Missy’s stares while she lifted Lois’s white unicorn T-shirt and placed the stethoscope to her chest.

  “Hmm,” the doctor whispered as she pulled the girl’s shirt back down.

  “Will Lois be okay?” Missy asked, watching the doctor scribble on her clipboard.

  Sherrie wrapped the stethoscope around her neck and sat at the edge of Lois’s cot near her feet, a large black walkie-talkie peeking out from her front pocket as her lab coat draped to the side. “That’s not a question I can answer at the moment, dear,” she replied as she continued to scribble on one of the sheets affixed to her clipboard. “At this point, I can only send my findings in. There are many centers like this one set up. We are just collecting data at this point and keeping our patients stable. I know that’s not what you want to hear. I wish I had a solution, but the truth is that we do not know what is causing this.”

  “What is the CDC saying?” Missy inquired, nervously playing with the small towel.

  Sherrie sighed. “Not much right now. I’ve been told that all the patients here, and in the other affected locations with ages ranging from five to twelve, have cerebral edemas if they reach the final stage of this illness. In a nutshell, that’s the brain swelling from a buildup of fluid. It could be caused by a variety of things like a head trauma or bacteria, but we have not found anything so far, which is why we are documenting as much as possible for the Centers for Disease Control.

  “The largest issue we are facing is that symptoms sometimes differ between patients. Some never get to that final stage. Some improve beforehand, and some…some don’t make it. That is what makes finding a cure difficult. The somewhat good news is that for patients that do reach that final stage, diuretics can help reduce the swelling, but even that is not a guarantee. And if the children can make it past that final stage, they seem to be in a recovery state.

  “Your student is stable, I can tell you that, but I am not here to sugarcoat things. There have been 248 reported deaths as of two hours ago for Houston alone. These kids are fighting. The best we can do is keep them comfortable until we find out what is causing this. The care that we are giving them today—the glucagon, Insidia, Sim-Six, diuretics, the ice packs, the IVs—is primarily to slow the progression until a cure is found. As I said, some of the children do recover, but that percentage is so low that it’s not a real solution. You’re doing a good thing here.”

  Missy knelt in front of the doctor. “But what about you?” she asked. “Are you okay?”

  Dr. Dressner smiled. “I have some time left. I was on hospice, pancreatic cancer. This is my last good deed, I suppose. Going out while doing what I was brought into this world to do.” She attempted to push herself off the bed while she continued. “Perhaps you could check on some of the other children and let me know if they need me.”

  Missy held out her hand to help Sherrie off the bed, which she gladly accepted. A faint cry a few rows down caught Sherrie’s attention. “Actually, come with me,” Sherrie said. “This is the first thing you can help me with.”

  *

  Dr. Dressner shined a light in Ariel’s eyes but found her pupils unresponsive. There was life inside, but her eyes were dead. “You, in the pink dress, get me some ice packs,” Sherrie directed. Ariel’s mother, Mrs. James, stood wide-eyed, her hands clasped to her face, her body frozen in time. Sherrie snapped her long, thin fingers in the mother’s face. “I said now!” she yelled.

  Mrs. James ran to one of the coolers set up outside of the cot aisles, her pink dress catching the draft of one of the floor fans, nearly exposing her undergarments. “Goodness,” Sherrie muttered, watchi
ng Mrs. James nearly trip on the way back, her thunderous legs wobbling underneath the thin pink garment that showcased the large bulges underneath.

  “Should I fetch Nurse Amber?” one of the parents at a nearby cot asked.

  “No need,” Sherrie replied. “I have Missy.”

  Missy looked up, confused. “No, I can’t help. I don’t know anything.”

  Sherrie grabbed the ice packs from Mrs. James and placed one under Ariel’s neck. “Fantastic. I love working with a blank slate. Now, pinch the back of her ankle. Forcefully.”

  “Wait, what?” Mrs. James yelled. “Why would you do that? No, that’s not going to happen. What kind of doctor are you anyway?”

  Sherrie ignored Ariel’s mother and repeated her order to Missy, this time more sternly. “Pinch her ankle. We need to try to elicit a response.”

  Missy moved toward Ariel’s soft, chubby leg, her right hand shaking.

  Mrs. James pulled Missy’s arm back. “No, Miss Missy. No, that is not going to happen.”

  Dr. Dressner stood up, and with what little strength she had, successfully pulled Mrs. James’s arm back, causing her to lose her balance and fall on the hard vinyl floor, her dress flipping up, giving everyone a view they immediately regretted seeing. “You will sit down, and you will shut up,” Sherrie ordered. “So help me God, I better not hear one more word from you.” Mrs. James scooted backward while fixing her dress, tears pouring down her face. She reached out again for Ariel, but Sherrie shook her head, and she dropped her arm, defeated.

  Gently, Dr. Dressner tapped Missy’s arm, instructing her to continue. Missy nervously pulled the girl’s pink pants leg up, exposing her ankle. Carefully, she grabbed her ankle, gave it a squeeze, and looked up at Dr. Dressner for confirmation. “Again,” Dr. Dressner said, returning her eyes to the girl, and Missy pinched her again, this time more firmly.

  “That’s enough,” Dr. Dressner said. “We need to phone this in. Missy, tell that crazy girl up front to get Dr. Katz from Kinsley Hospital on the line. We have our first coma from Sim-Six, and she needs to be transported to emergency. And Missy…you did well.”

  *

  Dr. Dressner looked up to find Missy hovering over her, a folded piece of paper in her outstretched hand. “Joyce said Dr. Katz sent this message for you,” Missy said. “The phones are down, and the internet is barely working.”

  Sherrie finished administering medicine through Ariel’s IV and accepted the paper. It was a printout of an email with only three words: Lift your mask.

  “Oh…my,” she muttered under her breath after reading the contents. She crumpled the piece of paper into a tight ball. “Ariel isn’t going anywhere.”

  Missy sighed. “Why not? She can’t stay here—she’ll die.”

  Sherrie nodded. “I know. They just can’t take her right now.” She held the ball of paper tightly in her hand as she thought about the message. It was something Dr. Jeremy Katz said to her in her residency, nearly thirty years ago, that she had stored away in a dark locket far in the back of her mind.

  As a young resident at Kinsley, Sherrie Dressner reported to Dr. Jeremy Katz, who oversaw her on a variety of different operations. Only six weeks into her residency, he instructed her to take part in a ventriculostomy. A patient was rushed in with severe brain swelling, and Sherrie was instructed to relieve the pressure immediately. The procedure, as she had seen performed a handful of times, was to drill a hole in the skull, insert a tube, and let the cerebrospinal fluid drain out. There was one problem: brains terrified Sherrie.

  There was something about brains that made her dizzy, and no matter how strong she pretended to be or how much she dehumanized her patient, the brain was still a brain. Sometimes she would pretend it was just a pincushion; she could poke it, and it would pop right back up. It’s nothing, she told herself in the operating room while standing over her patient. You’re just a doll with a pincushion on your head. You can do this. As she cut into the layer of flesh over her patient’s skull, she kept reminding herself not to attach feelings to her pincushion. She had a job to do, and she needed to do it well.

  Unfortunately, the pincushion was not at all a pincushion, and when the drill made contact with the patient’s cranium, Sherrie’s knees buckled and her shoulders began to droop.

  “Keep those hands above the waist, keep applying pressure,” Dr. Katz instructed.

  Sherrie tightened her grip on the drill, and it popped through the thick skull, startling her. No longer able to control her own body, she turned to faint and instead turned and vomited into her mask, a mix of water and cupcakes oozing out, the gasps of those in the operating room immediately bringing shame while she tore at her mask for a breath.

  Dr. Katz pushed her aside and finished the procedure. Tears streaked down Sherrie’s cheeks that mixed with the blood from her gloves where she ripped her mask away. While she wiped frantically at her face with the arm of her gown, two technologists grabbed her by the arms and rushed her away to avoid any further contamination.

  Dr. Katz found her in the privacy room when the operation was over. “Maybe I’m not fit for this,” Sherrie said, her cheeks puffy from crying, her eyes dry and red, unable to produce more tears.

  Dr. Katz patted her knee. “Lift your mask next time.” But there never was a next time. Dr. Katz told her what she needed to hear. When he brought her back to perform the operation again on a new patient weeks later, she was in control. She would always be in control, she promised herself.

  Sherrie whispered the words again. “Lift your mask.” Three words that carried so much meaning. She knew what Dr. Katz was asking of her, and if he could see her working conditions, she wondered if he would rescind those words.

  “What should we do?” Missy asked, her eyes wide with fear.

  Dr. Dressner cleared her thoughts and stared at Ariel. There was no telling that if she performed the surgery, the tube could ever be removed. A few of the children were improving, but the majority were just declining slower than before. The school wasn’t even equipped with the proper tools to perform a ventriculostomy, and it certainly wasn’t a sterile environment. Still, it was risky but worth a try to buy a few days for backup to arrive. She had to try; that was her obligation. The sugar flu was barely over a week old, and with her knowledge of new illnesses, she knew it could be months until a true cure was found. And if she didn’t try at all, Ariel would surely die before help arrived.

  Sherrie looked up at Missy. “Please find Nurse Amber. We’re going to try to save her.”

  – 7 –

  Assailant

  Chris held his breath as he watched one of the floor nurses, Nancy, plead for her life through the thin gap in the bathroom door of Room 761. She was on her knees now, her palms tightly pressed together in the air, her short brown hair stuck to the sweat and tears that dripped down her face and neck, and eventually down her turquoise scrub top.

  “I have a son,” she cried, begging, the assailant towering over her. Chris continued to watch as she slowly pulled a picture out of her front pocket, holding it in the air. “His name is Sean,” she said. “He’s fourteen years old, and I’m Nancy. Please, you don’t have to do this. I didn’t see anything. Please, just let me go home to my son.”

  The assailant snatched the photo from the woman and looked at it, his right hand firmly gripping a Beretta handgun elongated with a silencer.

  Chris’s knee twitched. He wanted to run out and tackle the man, but he knew better. He could see himself getting shot down immediately. A waste of a rescue. The man who tried but failed miserably. Keep working him, he thought watching the interaction. Remind him that you’re a person.

  Nancy rubbed her hands across her cheeks, wiping away the tears. “He’s a good boy,” she continued, her voice cracking. “He’s into music. I play too—the clarinet. I’m pretty decent. We play together on the weekends. He’s waiting for me at home.”

  “Mm-hmm…” the assailant responded, flicking the photo with his middle finger
. The man took a few steps forward, his heavy black boots causing Nancy to tremble with each step. Carelessly, he tossed the photo toward her, and it drifted off to the side out of reach. “I forgive you. Take off,” the man said, his voice low and sullen.

  “Thank you. Thank you,” Nancy cried as she quickly lifted herself onto her feet, her sneakers screeching on the freshly buffed floor. As she took off toward the door, the assailant lifted his gun. Nancy never saw it coming as the bullet tore through her skull, an array of blood and brain tissue hitting the open door and slowly oozing to the vinyl floor. Chris drew in a large breath, terrified that it could be heard beyond the door, the ringing from the gun in his head drowning his thoughts.

  Nancy’s assailant walked toward the photo and pressed it with the tip of his black boot, rubbing the image into the floor. Chris could hear his own heart beating, tearing through his chest as the man turned to the bathroom door. He took a few steps forward and disappeared out of sight. Chris stayed hidden, listening for his heavy footsteps that eventually traveled down the hallway and then out of hearing.

  I’m a coward, he thought, remembering Nancy’s terrified face as she begged for her life.

  As he sat on the bathroom floor, the high shrills of patients and his coworkers echoed through the halls as they ran for their lives, forced out of their hiding spots. He tried to formulate a plan of what to do or where to go. He needed to phone for help. When Chris initially made the call to security, it was for a bereaved parent. He never saw what was behind his zipped jacket or questioned why he was wearing a jacket on such a warm day. He never knew the assailant left the hospital and returned with the intent to kill the hospital staff.

  Officer Bryce was the first to die. He never had a chance to ask why. It was quick. “What’s the problem?” Bryce had asked. Then shots were fired, followed immediately by panic. Everyone started running, pushing toward the stairwells. Chris had no other option than to hide. His hospital attire made him a target. Now, he needed to let someone know there were more people like him, hiding, terrified.