No Good Deed
What horrors await beyond the streetlight?
This story mentions substance abuse. If you or someone you love needs help, please go to findtreatment.gov or call the 24/7 National Helpline 1–800–662-HELP (4357).
Forty minutes to the witching hour, the melding of days that occurs at midnight. Aaron’s ER shift officially ended almost five hours ago, but his relief never showed, and the patients just kept coming.
Different versions of Aaron surfaced throughout the day. Caffeinated, agitated, hungry. Currently — well, Aaron can’t describe his current mood. He knows this much: his bloodstream has been clean for far too long, and the fibrous aura that usually clings to all things is shorn off. His voice has a worn, chipped edge, so it comes off dull and tired, but it can still draw blood.
Sounds, lights, and even the congested sniffling of the woman in pink pajamas in the hallway chair have too much substance. Are so nauseatingly…vivid…that they could only come from another plane of reality, the one that exists outside the influence of illicit substances. But, there is no such place, is there? Aaron knows better than to answer that question.
A pale green Formica countertop — its color somewhere between dried booger and dead cactus — runs the length of the nurse’s station, installed during the last facelift the Emergency Room had twenty-five years ago. Aaron kicks his foot against the lower section of the chest-high counter to stretch his calf muscles, a half-eaten granola bar hanging from his mouth, which he eats in slow, savoring bites. The night-shift charge nurse, Shannon, peers at him from behind her computer screen with disbelieving eyes.
“Aaron, you still here? Tsk, aren’t you on overtime?” The way Shannon clicks her teeth sets Aaron’s teeth to grinding. This, along with an incredibly short fuse, is why staff call her ‘the Bomb.’
“Yeah, since noon yesterday,” Aaron mumbles through a granola bite.
Shannon recoils at this. “And, how many hours do you have for the week?”
Budgets are tight the world over, especially here at St. Peter’s Memorial. Here, the margins between working in the red and black are suture-thin, like the line between being alive and dead, that is to say, hardly there at all. Aaron knows Shannon has to justify every 15-minute block of overtime to her director.
“I’ve got 80 hours as of now,” Aaron quips, casting an exaggerated look at his watch. “Why? You got someone else that can take my six patients?”
“Tsk,” Shannon clicks, lips trembling, her face beet-red, and somehow dams back a torrent of obscenities. ‘The Bomb’ is indiscriminate and merciless, adept at dismembering souls and egos, leaving you sulking to the nearest bathroom to sob.
But not tonight. Shannon needs Aaron, even if it means she’ll get her ass chewed out for it in the morning. She shoots him a look of bile and vitriol, making a show of double-checking the bed roster as if the number of patients had been magically reduced.
“Just try and be out of here by 1 AM,” Shannon spits, spinning in her chair to answer an incoming EMS radio transmission.
“You got it,” Aaron says on his way to the supply closet while pleading to the agents of chaos that keep emergency departments over capacity. Keep ’em coming, he thinks. That trip to Cancun won’t pay for itself.
At 2:52 AM, the tides turn, or the spell is broken — something to do with the feral moon for sure — and the influx of patients ceases. Lunch bag in hand, Aaron slumps against the grimy wall opposite the time clock, cortisol from the shift still coursing through him. He pats at his scrub pocket as he takes inventory of his leftovers — what Aaron affectionately terms wasted pain meds.
It was a poor showing to be sure. Belly-pain patients, the patron saint of all Emergency Rooms, didn’t present in their usual numbers, and the sickle cell patient needed complete doses. Aaron resorted to the old standby, two Norco pills, courtesy of Frequent Flyer.
Frequent Flyer insists on using diapers while in the hospital, though there is no impairment, mental or otherwise, preventing them from walking to the commode. Even with gloves on, Aaron felt unclean as the patient giggled and audibly moaned when cleaned of feces for the sixth time that shift.
“Sick prick,” Aaron mutters at the memory.
He feels around his pocket for the other spoils: two half-filled vials of morphine. He’ll readily admit he’s a scavenger. You can’t pull meds from the centralized secure electronic drawers, or you mess up the inventory records. That leads to audits and a slippery slope down the Matterhorn of shit ending with your termination. You can kiss your nursing license and freedom goodbye as you walk out the door. Only junkies resort to that in the throes of withdrawal or mid-bender. No, best to scrounge for bits here and there.
Aaron’s breathing is deep and even, having cracked the pills between his molars 15 minutes prior, his mind rolling in a slow, delicious wave.
“Save the rest for home, just to make sure the itch stays scratched,” he tells himself.
Stepping out into the employee parking lot, winter sets its teeth, cutting through his grey sweatshirt, summoning tears and a filling-rattling shiver. 17 degrees out — unheard of for this part of Texas. Aaron’s heavy coat is stuffed in a box somewhere at home, not worth the effort to dig out for the five-minute walk to and from his car. Hands burrow deep into pockets, hoping to find a vein of warmth if he digs deep enough, and trudges on.
Windshields glimmer diffuse starlight through loosely woven darkness. St. Michael’s is a poor county hospital, and things like parking lot lighting are considered small potatoes to hospital leadership. Nothing like the threat of mugging or bodily harm to keep you awake for the drive home.
Barely a minute in, Aaron sees an elderly man standing under one of the few working lights with his back toward Aaron. A thick fur coat, matted and tattered, hangs limply from his shoulders. Wrinkles canvass the back of the man’s head like an old baseball glove.
“Ol’ Grandad probably invented the game,” Aaron chuckles, watching with mild amusement as the older man fidgets with his keys. Bony fingers ravaged by arthritis shake with a persistent tremor, the keys rattling to the ground as if by destiny. Grandad performs a weird, jerking dance as he bends down to retrieve them, but no sooner does he stand upright before the same act repeats.
Poor drunk bastard, Aaron groans to himself. I’m going to have to get this old fart inside for help. A sigh escapes him.
“Are you okay?”
Grandad’s head whips to Aaron over his left shoulder.
Damn, Aaron thinks, he’s on top-shelf stuff to be tweaking like that, starting towards the old fossil. He stops when he sees one of St. Michael’s finest in their powder blue uniform approach the man first.
It’s Alfredo Gomez — Gomez to most, Freddie to friends, and Freddo to Aaron — one of the hospital security officers. He’s a bit overzealous with the whole ‘law and order’ thing, former marine that he is, but there are few others he would trust to watch his back with psych patients or weirdos. He’s slumming it at St. Michael’s for a few more months, waiting for security clearance before taking on more lucrative work as a military contractor. Freddo makes a beeline toward Grandad, waving Aaron off. Relieved, Aaron turns back toward his faded sedan at the far end of the line of cars.
An electric whimper rises from the starter, but the engine shudders to life, and Aaron steers the old heap towards the access road. Unfortunately, the heater core needs a while to come to temp and won’t crank out hot air until he’s pulled into his driveway. Another round of shivering breaks his resolve.
“G-Gonna dig that coat out before the next sh-shift,” Aaron manages through chattering teeth.
The radio has been dead for months. Aaron is too cheap to fix it and commutes to the musical accompaniment of the muted roar of the wind outside. The yellow dividing line pulses towards him, each blink growing longer than the last until he can no longer distinguish night from the back of his eyelids. He’s floating in the teal waters off Mexico, the past 18-hour shift washing away like sand from the shoreline.
Unholy sounds ripple between Aaron’s ears, the sound of a dream and reality trying to occupy the same physical space. Everything spins, the tires howling for grip beneath him. The night sky appears briefly through the windshield, and Aaron thinks this could still be a dream, his dream self rocketing towards the sky on a paper crane or something. That theory flies out the window, along with the loose filth in his car, as he realizes he’s jettisoned off a curb and careening into a ditch’s open mouth.
“Shit,” Aaron chokes, spitting a mixture of blood and dirt. The tingling caress of unconsciousness gains a foothold, and a black veil obscures his vision. He’d rather be anywhere else than in this hell and has gone to meet it with open arms until he gags, and a searing pain fills his abdomen.
“URGH!” he screams, going rigid in his seat. He’s been holding his breath, afraid to breathe lest the pain return. His head swims, and he inhales through pursed lips.
“Short, shallow breaths, you bastard,” Aaron coaches himself.
The seatbelt won’t release, so he cuts it away with a pair of trauma shears from his center console. His torso aches like an ice cream scoop has been rooting around inside him. Beneath his scrub top is a thick, red band from his left shoulder and across his chest.
“Trauma sign, I’m bleeding internally. Fu-u-ck!” Aaron starts to yell but pulls back when the pain threatens again. He’ll be back at the hospital sooner than anticipated. Per protocol, they’d screen him for narcotics.
“I’m in it now, well and truly,” he whispers as if the truth of it is too delicate for full volume.
Fishing in the center console again, this time for a fresh syringe, he doses himself with the morphine he was saving. The pain is too far gone for the dregs in those ampules, but he welcomes it just the same.
A quick glance at the dashboard reveals the airbags failed to deploy and a small, bloody crater in the windshield from where Aaron’s head kissed it.
“Must have hit something big.”
He tries the door and stumbles into the night, steadying himself with the driver-side door. The hood, what remains of it, is a smoking, twisted wreckage.
“Must have hit something real fuckin’ big.”
Aaron’s car is scattered along a wreckage trail that ends opposite the road. There, beneath a solitary street lamp, is a lifeless, misshapen heap. Something long and slender, a leg maybe, juts out of it but is bent in all the wrong places.
“Jesus,” Aaron whimpers in prayer, forgetting his injuries. He struggles up the waist-high ditch, which might as well be Everest in his current condition. The grading is too steep for his unsteady gait, and he falls to his hands and knees, somehow making it up.
Still no movement from the body. Aaron gets upright, teetering on feet made of Jell-O, barely making it to the dividing line before his knees buckle. Pain springs anew, and he braces his core with his arms before calling out,
“Are you okay?”
Please, Aaron pleads to no one in particular, aware that the agents of chaos he invoked earlier are working overtime around him. Chest rise. Movement. Show me you’re alive, damn it.
There is a guttural response.
“Urrhgewwawwaaaay…”
Icy fingers trace down his spine, and he realizes how vulnerable he is out here, wounded and crawling around in the dark like a half-dead piece of roadkill.
The body quivers and heaves itself off the ground with impossibly thin, scaly legs, little more than skin over bone and sinew. A thick, tangled mass of hair and feathers sprouts a head that stands at the top of the 20-foot light pole. The face is a fever-dream of shapes, two black discs, empty and dead like a doll’s, cover most of the head, separated by a jagged beak protruding from a rough mound of flesh at the base of the skull. The beak clacks open and shut with the flat crack of bone on bone.
Aaron sees his reflection in the space-black mirrors, barely recognizing the bulging eyes looking back at him, his mouth replaced by a circle of teeth frozen in a muted scream.
He takes a step back. The oversized nightmare cocks its head and stabs the beak into its body, removing something suspended on fine, silvery strands — the limp frame of Grandad from the hospital parking lot. Aaron watches, frozen in shock, as the thing’s head jerks about giving life to the shriveled marionette below. Grandad follows the same routine: shaking and dropping keys with that exaggerated, unnatural bow to retrieve them. Grandad faces Aaron this time, and the black, hollow eye sockets are unmistakable. Another refrain synced with Grandad’s flapping jaw,
“A-arg…ye-ewkay”.
Aaron doesn’t so much as breathe. The figure snaps its beak, cocking an ink-drop eye at the street light, then back down to Aaron before stepping back into the dead of night. Another figure twists into the light in a powder blue uniform.
Freddo. His chest has a gaping hole, and his head hangs limply to one side. Instead of waving Aaron off, the powder blue arm beckons him closer. Again comes a call like a wet croak, but the words are clear.
“Are you okay?”
Aaron releases the air out of his lungs, forcing a breathless “No.”
Frigid daggers prick his face, and his throat is raw and tight. Responding to the signals from his brain all at once, his legs hammer him towards the car. Aaron hits the curb for the second time that night and becomes airborne. Aaron sees himself in freefall in the dim light of the car’s remaining headlamp, landing on his stomach, the pain erupting through every nerve, sending a scream to his throat that never materializes.
With the last of his strength, Aaron rolls onto his back, hands groping at his distended, rock-hard abdomen. The world drains, first, of color, then light. He stares into the sky, watching as it turns to TV static, wishing for the pain to end. He is freezing but pleasantly numb. Sleep promises to erase the agony, something the drugs could never do, and he gives himself to it.
Sirens echo in the distance, momentarily drowned out by the question,
“Are you okay?”
