One-shot Wonders

“An old man fell over.”

I sighed. “Another one?” The disused wheelchair in front of me bumped in the scuffed and filthy skirting board of the hospital. I cursed and righted it, turning back to my co-worker.

“That’s three this week. What happened this time?” I asked.

“Well, he was a really old one, in his 80’s or some such, and he fell in the shower.” My companion supplied, and began to strip off her surgical gloves.

“Damn, was it a hip? Hips are the worst.” I muttered despairingly, eyes flicking right and left in an attempt to dodge the bustling nurses and doctors around me.

“I’m not sure, he’s not in my department. He was over at his sister’s for her birthday, her 74th apparently, and she was too frail to help him up. She called 999 at about nine this morning.”
We turned into a new corridor, heading toward the dementia section. The bright lights shone off the freshly washed floors, the blinding white burning my eyes just as the disinfectant was burning my hands and nostrils.

“I’m so sick of this place. It’s awful.” I gave the wheelchair in front of me a particularly vicious shove. “When’s your shift over?”

The nurse beside me grimaced. “I’m working the graveyard. You?”

“I’m off in two hours.” I allowed myself a small smile. “Looking forward to a whole lot of sleep. I’ll see you around, yeah? I gotta drop this off at Ward 31.” I took a sharp left, waving vaguely behind me. Another left, and I was alone in the hospital.

The bland walls of the deserted hallways seemed to stretch on for miles, endless lengths of pale plaster and shining tiles. Grumbling quietly to myself, I counted the faint outlines of passcode encrypted doors dotted regularly along the passage. The soles of my sneakers squeaked in time with the wheels on the chair. Other than that, there was no noise at all.

“31.” I muttered triumphantly, and dug into a pocket of my hospital issue scrubs for the key card to open the ward. As was my habit to do, I dropped it, just narrowly preventing the card from slipping underneath the door. I knelt down and grabbed it before roughly swiping it through the access control system. Shoving the heavy door open with one hand, I yanked the wheelchair after me with the other. I glanced around the room, and stopped dead.

“Oh, shit.” The cleaners hadn’t got ‘round to this room yet, and the puddles of blood were half dry on the floor, and covering the sheets in splatters of crimson. The log books of the injury were still splayed open by the bedside, and a shattered pair of thick rimmed white glasses rested forlornly atop the pages. I stepped quietly over to the logs and gently turned the bound book towards me with my index finger.

My breath rattled in my lungs, and my chest had begun to ache within the short amount of time it took me to sort out the short passage of text.

This was a suicide.

I hadn’t worked as a transporter at the hospital for long, hadn’t had an actual death on my shift before. My ears were ringing and the blood stains stood out in bright red in the corner of my eye.

This was a suicide.

“Sometimes you can just see it in their eyes, you know? That they’re going to do it.”

I whirled around with a choked shriek and gazed at the pale, lank-haired girl standing behind me, dressed in a blue floral nightdress and staring morosely at the hospital bed.

“Wha- What? What do you mean?” I stuttered. My heart was racing. “Jeez, don’t sneak up on people.” I rocked back on my heels and my attention shifted back to the gurney. The air was hazy, and I still couldn’t seem to get enough air. My voice was strained. “If you’re a relative come to offer condolences, you’re not supposed to be in here.”

The girl spoke then in her dull monotone, “You could tell he was going to off himself, you could see it in his face. That tired expression all suicides have.”

It was silent in the ward for about four seconds before I even processed what she had said. Then I turned back to face the girl.

“Do you mean to say, that you knew he was going to do this to himself? Before it happened?” My voice was quiet, I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. The girl continued staring at the cot, motionless.

“Who are you anyway? Did you even know this kid?” I demanded while my tone became increasingly incredulous. I was angry, this weirdo girl knew something, but said nothing, as the dying boy was wheeled into the emergency department probably just after having been found in his own home with his wrists sliced open to the elbow.

Ignoring the last two questions in favour of my first, she stated simply, “If I had of told, that would have made me an awful hypocrite, wouldn't it? After all, he never told on me.”

Her empty words echoed around the empty ward.

Her gaze left the bed and focused on me, and I copped my first glimpse of her eyes. Full of sadness and longing, it made one feel as if they were drowning in a raging storm, far out to sea. Could hear for themselves the violent rushing, suffocate in the endless, pressing water and feel every single second of panic and pain as they died. This insight was made all the more disturbing by the sudden presence of bruises blooming around her neck, fully encircling her pale throat. The stink of sulphur permeated the air as the girl slowly smiled, her neck tilting on an awkward, unnatural angle. “He never told on me.”

A split second later and before I could even scream, a man appeared over her shoulder; and he had huge, heavy, skeletal black wings. He glared at the girl.

“Can we hurry this up? Thorn will be arriving in ten min-” His tirade cut off abruptly as he noticed my presence. Scrambling backwards, I grabbed the safety rails of the cot and swung it in front of me, ripping the bolts from the walls. The wheels screeched as they skidded through the pools of blood, creating arcs of scarlet that ran in rivulets between the tiles.

At the beginning of my movement, the male had made two faltering steps in my direction, wings half unfurled. The girl remained fixed in places, the creepy half-smile still lingering about her mouth. I shoved the mobile bed in the male’s direction, and decided not to hang around to witness the resulting collision. A sharp cry followed me and echoed down the corridor I barrelled along.

The crack of a door hounded my steps as it ricocheted off a wall, but an unfamiliar hissing or rustling made me stop my headlong rush. As if in a dream, I turned slowly and my eyes focused on the junction between two hallways, the corners of which were virtually invisible in the harsh fluorescent lighting. A faint silhouette rose up one white expanse, a blot of darkness upon the flawless paint job. It reminded me, my brain hazily supplied, of the puppeteer shows children watch, the ones made from shadows thrown up against thin screens.

One delicate claw extended past the corner wall, quickly followed by tar black skin stretched taut across a flimsy webbing of bones and tendons. Not a second later, the man to whom the wings belonged slid into view. He had pointed teeth. His wings were almost entirely unfurled now and extended well over two metres behind him. The trance broke at his feral snarl, and I swung around the next corner and headed for the main thoroughfare of the hospital, my irregular breaths mixing with the desperate slap of my shoes, hearing all the while that strange unsettling hiss.

Notes

Okay, so there are a few different versions of this. I have decided, however, to keep this one. If I get any interest at all I can try to turn this into a chaptered fic?