Lucie Miller worked quickly and efficiently, pinning the woman’s other arm down in front of her and finding a vein within it to insert the syringe. Once she had injected the sedative, the effects of it took hold almost immediately. The woman’s body stopped fighting against them so much, her movements becoming slower and weaker as the drug took hold and calmed her down. She gasped a couple of large, desperate breaths of air, filling her lungs before falling back onto the bed, her body going limp and lifeless.
“What’s happened? Is she okay?”
Doctor Miller pressed two fingers against the woman’s throat, searching for a pulse and looking at her watch at the same time. She was silent for a whole thirty seconds as she counted, Samuel watching with questioning eyes as he waited for a response.
“She’s fine,” the doctor eventually replied, Samuel finding himself exhaling a huge sigh of relief. “Pulse is steady. Come on,” she started to walk across the ward to another bed filled with a seizing patient. “We’re not done yet.”
Doctor Miller wasn’t kidding, they were on a ward of perhaps twenty or twenty-five patients and thankfully – as morbid as that sounded – roughly half of them were still seizing. But seizing, at this stage, was a good thing according to the doctor. If patients were still doing that then it meant they were still breathing, which was more than Samuel could say for some of the men and women in beds he walked past. This was only one ward of the hospital as well; he could only guess at how many more were in a similar state. The hospital had next to no staff and no power and yet, everyone inside the building was doing everything they could to keep the patients alive. By the time he and Doctor Miller reached the fourth or fifth bed, holding individuals down was second nature to Samuel. He wanted to do more; he wanted these people to live.
He was wrestling with keeping a particularly strong man’s legs still while Doctor Miller tried to find a vein in his arm, when the unmistakable sound of gunfire echoed through the hospital corridors. Samuel reacted immediately, letting go of the man’s legs and dropping to the ground in an instant fight or flight reaction, resulting in the man’s right leg kicking outward and catching Doctor Miller in the stomach.
“Ughhh,” the woman groaned and dropped the syringe in her hand, doubling over and holding her stomach instead.
Samuel shuffled along the hospital floor to her, placing a hand on her arm and pulling her down. “Didn’t you hear that?” He whispered, peeking up above the bed with the thrashing man on it and trying to see around the corner to the sound of the gunfire. “Gunshots. What do we do?”
Doctor Miller rubbed her stomach for a second longer, then turned away from Samuel to try and find her syringe in the dim lighting. “There’s nothing we can do,” she spoke in her usual voice, not lowering it out of fear like Samuel was. “I need to save these people and I need your help, Samuel.” Picking the syringe up, she removed the needle and discarded it into the sharps bin. Then she unwrapped a clean one and popped it on the syringe. “Are you still with me?”
Samuel stared at the woman with his mouth wide open as more gunshots sounded further down the corridor. They sounded like they were getting closer but Doctor Miller didn’t even flinch, looking down at Samuel with an expectant gaze. He was in awe of her. It was one thing to have a duty to your patients, but the woman didn’t even seem phased by the potential impending death that was waiting around the corner. She had one task on her mind and that was the wellbeing of her patients; it was incredible to see someone so committed to their work in such a moment of pure danger. Samuel could hardly believe it.
He was terrified of what was approaching them, convinced that the sound was gunfire but at the same time incredibly confused why that would be happening inside a hospital. With Doctor Miller looking at him though, he found purpose flooding through him. He wanted to save the people on the ward just as much as she did and with her encouragement, he felt he could work through his worries.
“Okay,” he nodded, climbing to his feet beside her. “Ready.”
Doctor Miller nodded back, giving Samuel the signal to grab hold of the man’s legs again and trying to keep him steady once more. Laying his torso over the man, he just about managed, though took a knee to the face as he was trying to get into a comfortable position. Samuel lay across him with his eyes on the entrance to the ward, unable to switch off from the approaching sound of footsteps mixed in with occasional gunshots. People were approaching, and there was no way of telling what was going to happen when they arrived.
“Hands in the air!” A commanding shout echoed through the room as five men appeared from around the corner, one of them firing a handgun into the ceiling at the end of the sentence. Anywhere else it was an action that would’ve silenced a room, but with a handful of patients still seizing and Doctor Miller intent on helping them before it was too late, the words of these intruders had no effect.
“I said, everybody stop!”
The lack of response clearly hadn’t impressed the leader of this group of leather-clad men, looking unmistakably like a motorcycle gang that
