x-men inspired story! read!
hey there.. did a story inspired by the x-men.. below is an exercpt for e story..
Prologue
Mary-Anne walked into ward number 50, and a shudder of chilled air ambushed her senses immediately.
I gotta remember to ask somebody to adjust the temperature in this ward.
She thought to herself, picking up the clipboard hanging at the foot of the bed.
It’s freaking cold in here.
Scrolling her eyes down the front of the page, Mary-Anne cross-checked the patient’s vital status with the digits flashing upon the machine. The machine that was keeping this comatose patient alive.
She nodded with the details, satisfied.
Placing the clipboard back where it belonged, Mary-Anne found her eyes traveling back to the heavily bandaged young man, lying motionlessly under the pale green hospital sheets.
The sleeping beauty.
That was the informal address the doctors and nurses had referred to this patient affectionately by.
He was indeed good-looking.
Even under a thick head bandage and covered with swelling bruises, Mary-Anne had a pretty strong hunch the patient had with him a breath-taking face.
She wondered if those blue-eyes registered under the ‘patient’s information’ column were as captivating as she’d imagined it to be.
Secretly, she prayed he would open his eyes soon enough to prove her right.
Eighteen year old Matt Peters had been rushed into Salvation City Hospital four days ago, flanked by anxious paramedics all working to sustain the life fleeting dangerously off his badly injured body.
The patch of medical personnel who overtook the paramedics spent hours in the operating theatre, attempting a chained series of complicated procedures to stow the patient past the critical stage, despite obvious odds against them.
They succeeded.
It was a rare miracle, some said.
Matt Peters had fallen into a frozen lake that gave way, suffered a lethal gash to his head amidst other severe injuries, and he had survived.
His heart was believed to have stopped functioning for a total of twenty minutes – being solidified motionless by the sub-zero temperature in the frozen lake.
In those twenty-minutes, Matt Peters had died.
And then, assisted by Salvation City’s surgeons, he had come back to life again.
He was however still unconscious.
It would take more than a miracle this time for him to arouse from the deep slumber.
The police had been informed, but neither the authorities nor the hospital could locate any family or relatives of Matt Peters.
For the four days that he had laid unconscious in the intensive ward, Matt had received neither a single visitor nor a bouquet of get-well flowers.
It was as though nobody knew him.
This made the doctors and nurses on close watch all the more sympathetic towards their young patient.
As she stood in the quiet room, staring at Matt’s unflinchingly form, Mary-Anne had a sudden sensation that she was being watched.
It was a ludicrous thought. Besides her and the comatose patient, there was nobody else in ward number 50. The door behind her was closed.
Feeling the skin on her bare arms rising up into tiny goose pimples, the young nurse walked briskly over to the windows and gazed outside.
There wasn’t much to be seen: it had been snowing heavily since the afternoon, and everything was now marred and concealed under a blanket of white.
Mary-Anne could see her breath form and disappear before her in little white mists, and she wondered for a moment if it was as cold in the room as it was outside.
Drawing the blinds, she turned her head and surveyed the room once more.
The illogical sensation of being scrutinized by a pair of invisible eyes was still nagging at her.
She surveyed the room slowly, determined to prove the uncomfortable thought in her head wrong.
That’s when her sight fell upon the surveillance camera suspending from the right corner of the ceiling.
She knew that a special number of wards in Salvation City had with them security cameras.
She never knew why, though.
Personally, she thought the cameras’ presence infringed upon the privacy of the patients and their visitors, but it was never the position of a new nurse to question the hospital management.
At least now she knew why she felt like she was being under watch.
Turning her heels quickly, Mary-Anne strode back to the door, rubbing her hands back and forth her arms to keep herself warm.
This ward was certainly much colder than the others.
Glancing back one last time to make sure the patient was fine, Mary-Anne exited the freezing cell gladly and closed the door behind her.
A cup of hot coffee and a short break in the restroom sounded really welcoming to her now.
Making her way down the empty hall, Mary-Anne was surprised to see a couple clad in civilians’ clothing hurrying past her. It was definitely way past visiting hours.
‘Excuse me, but visiting hours are…’
The man – tall, dark-haired and dashing – merely glanced up at Mary-Anne for a split second, before bowing his head down once more, never once losing his hastened pace.
The attractive woman beside him didn’t even seem to register Mary-Anne’s protest.
The nurse noticed faint traces of semi-white snow flakes sprinkled across both their coats, and realized that they couldn’t have been in the hospital for too long.
The flakes would have otherwise dissolved into damp patches by then.
The handsome couple rounded a corner and disappeared from the stuttering nurse’s view.
Shaking her head at their incivility, Mary-Anne sighed and continued her way back to the restroom. She still hadn’t quite worked up the courage to being firm with visitors that hanged around past standard visiting hours.
She was just too nice for her own good sometimes.
With a cup of brewing coffee in her hands and her tired legs rested on a couch, Mary-Anne decided she felt much better immediately.
I would learn the ropes to being a good nurse one day.
She comforted herself, closing her eyes for a quick rest.
It had barely been two minutes of shuteye for the exhausted nurse, when the emergency alarm fixated in the restroom wailed into live.
‘Code blue, code blue, ward number 50, code blue,’ the digitally formatted voice repeated over and over again urgently.
At that moment, Mary-Anne’s beeper began making impatient noises as well, awaking her frantically.
It was her patient who was in trouble this time.
It didn’t take her long to realize it was that Matt Peters in ward number 50.
Placing her coffee down hastily, Mary-Anne dashed down the hall way in the direction of the intensive ward.
She wasn’t exactly the first one who responded to code blue – a crowd consisting of doctors and nurses alike were already packed at the entrance to the room.
‘Excuse me… Excuse me…’ Mary-Anne muttered, trying to inch her way through the frenzied medical personnel for a closer look at the situation.
It wasn’t long before she saw what everybody was gaping at.
It was an empty bed, with all the tubes and drips detached and strewn haphazardly across the sheets.
The unconscious patient had disappeared.
*
‘You were the last to see him, Mary-Anne?’ Doctor Weber asked, flipping through the pages in the patient’s clipboard chart.
‘Yes I was,’ Mary-Anne nodded. ‘Barely twenty minutes ago.’
The tall black doctor fell into silence, his eyes traveling back and forth between the papers in his hands and the empty bed.
‘Did the patient show any unusual sign that hinted he might be regaining conscious?’
Mary-Anne shook her head.
The anticipating crowd gathered at the entrance to the ward fell into a unison hush, each clueless to what had, and was going to happen.
‘The way the drips and the monitoring nodes were removed from the patient, it wasn’t done by a medical professional.’
Doctor Weber paused, eyeing the dislocated tubes disapprovingly.
‘I had reason to believe the patient had been taken away hastily by untrained hands.’
Mary-Anne frowned. ‘We have to find him back as soon as possible, Doctor. He could die out there.’
The doctor snapped the clipboard chart shut and eyed the anxious nurse. ‘Don’t you think I know that, Ms. Smith?’
Craning his head towards the top right corner of the ward, the doctor motioned to the camera blinking away at them.
‘Follow me to the security department, Ms. Smith. We shall find out who took our patient away.’
Mary-Anne had never been in the security room before, but then again, her scope as a nurse never required her to.
Until now, that is.
The darkened room twice the size of a small ward was filled with TV screens, each showing a different part of the hospital premises.
The pudgy security guard on duty, Marco, greeted them at the door.
Doctor Weber nodded at him. ‘Good job there. You alerted us of the missing patient pretty quickly.’
Marco scratched his stubbled chin and grinned at the compliment. ‘Thanks,’ he replied.
‘You’re certainly better at the job than some of your predecessors.’
‘Nah, it was nothing.’
‘Could you now show us the footages from that ward, please?’
Marco nodded eagerly and obliged. The man was behaving like he was bursting with admiration for the senior doctor.
‘Ward 50… Here it is,’ he motioned to a particular screen – camera 46.
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