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Two
“Hey, you’ve reached Ben Major. I can’t take your call right now, so leave a message and I’ll get back to you.”
Bunny sighed with frustration, going through to her brother’s voicemail as she guided Morticia into the underground parking garage of the hospital. It was one of many messages from her that Ben would discover when he plugged his cell back in to charge it.
“You need to get back to me,” she complained gruffly. “I’m really freaked out, Ben—I have no idea who this guy was or what he wanted. He knows what car I drive—for all I know, he took a pic of my license plate.” Bunny pulled into a free space and cut the engine before snatching her purse from the passenger seat. She held her smartwatch up to her lips for emphasis. “Call. Me. Back.”
She ended the call, grabbed her purse, and glanced in her rearview and side mirrors. It was like she could feel her heartbeat kick up a gear. The darkness of the parking garage could easily hide a lurker dressed all in black. Bunny sucked in a breath and clutched her keys in her fist, letting each key form a jagged metal spike between her fingers.
Now she felt like a slightly less-confident version of Wolverine, without the mutton-chops. But only because she had an excellent beauty therapist.
Her shoes were made for formal events, not for creeping stealthily through deserted underground areas that had the kind of acoustics Eric Clapton dreamed of. The ugly blocky heels she had thrown on for the funeral sounded like the flat, measured beats of a drum as she quickly marched for the elevator. Bunny focused on her breathing. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Repeat. Her ears were pricked for any indication she was still being followed, but she couldn’t hear anything other than the tinny hum of the elevator doing its job. She reached it and pressed the button, turning back to face the garage while she waited for it to open.
Her watch buzzed against her wrist. Her shift started in fifteen minutes, and the parking garage reflected the number of people who were preparing to either start or finish work. Bunny watched like a guard dog for any movement between the shiny vehicles, the way the shadows and light played on their mirror-like surfaces, giving off a kind of fun-house maze vibe.
The elevator dinged behind her, making her jump. She turned as soon as she heard the door open, and then felt her breath catch in the back of her throat when she noticed a man in a black coat start out of the elevator towards her, arm outstretched.
“Bunny, long time no see!” The arm kept coming, and Max, her colleague from the emergency department, wrapped her into a quick hug. Her heart rate was really up now, and she flinched as the hug enveloped her, resisting the urge to pull away.
“Max, hey,” she responded, pushing the words out. “Just starting shift.”
“I just finished,” he told her, pulling out of the hug and walking backwards toward the garage. “Wanna get home and sleep. But let’s catch up soon, okay?”
“Sure.” She heard the word come out of her mouth, but she didn’t really mean it. Bunny wasn’t the type to socialize off shift. She was more of a Netflix-and-pizza-binge lone wolf. She jammed her finger onto the button that would take her to the ER floor, praying it would close sooner rather than later.
“Hey,” Max said, pausing and squinting at her as the elevator doors started to close. “Are you oka—”
Ding.
She wasn’t okay. She wasn’t even close to being okay. As soon as she hit the floor, she made a beeline for the nurses’ locker room so she could get changed, trying to pull her head back into the game. And even though she knew it was fruitless, she checked her watch to see that Ben hadn’t returned any of her messages.
* * *
The city airwas warmer than the subtle chill in Mosswood. Bunny paced across the ambulance arrival bay towards the two newly arrived vehicles, her square jaw set in stone as she approached Allison, one of her colleagues. An EMT had jumped out of the first ambulance and was opening the rear doors of the cargo hold to remove a gurney. She peered into the space eagerly, desperate to let work overtake her brain.
“What’ve we got?”
“Car accident—husband and wife.” Allison stepped to one side as the EMT got the gurney onto the bitumen. She took a look at the patient, who had been covered with a white hospital sheet from head to toe. “He’s DOA. She’s eight months pregnant and unconscious, pressure dropping, heart rate up. Suspected spinal compression at C1, maybe C2.”
Bunny took a big, bolstering breath as they set out for the other ambulance. She wouldn’t have time for breath later. Another EMT had already gotten the gurney out of the back of the second ambulance—and Bunny did a double-take. The heavily pregnant woman lying unconscious on the trolley was exuding a pale pink glow. It frosted the air around her with a shimmering light that made Bunny blink, but when she opened her eyes, the glow was still there.
“She radioactive?”
“What?” Allison asked over her shoulder, leaning into the vehicle to take the notes the EMTs had written up for the patient.
“Nothing,” Bunny replied, shaking herself. She’d seen more than her fair share of patients suffering from hallucinations brought on by grief. That was obviously her deal.
“Sorry. It’s been a long day. Let’s get her inside.”
The gurney rattled over the bitumen as the nurses accompanied it through the ER and into a consult room. As the senior nurse, it was up to Bunny to call the shots until they could get a doctor onboard. Ignoring the strange pink glow as much as possible, she weighed their options.
“Get someone to find Dr. Tolliver. Start a central line, hang a bag of saline and get a fetal heart rate monitor on her. I’ll organize pressors and a blocker—let’s see if we can’t get that heart to relax a little.”
Allison stepped out of the room. Bunny began to prepare the medications, trying to ignore the very present glow. It didn’t look to be letting up anytime soon, and Bunny was feeling more uneasy by the second. Was she losing her mind? She didn’t think that she was overcome with grief. Honestly, she’d been more freaked out by the guy who had chased her than by her mom’s funeral. But seeing glowing people was not within the realm of normalcy.
She hustled, working almost on autopilot. Her years of experience meant she could go through these motions in her sleep; it was just a question of how well the patient would respond to the interim treatments. Allison rejoined her and they worked in tandem, hands fluttering between tasks. Bunny injected the medication she’d prepped into the patient’s IV line just as the monitor beside the gurney began to let off loud, insistent beeps.
“She’s crashing!” Allison gave up on fastening the fetal heart rate monitor to get the resuscitation cart ready.
