With another jaunty wave Raine disappeared. Elizabeth stared at the door for a long moment after she left. That young woman had a beautiful spirit. Hopefully it would rub off on the patients, she thought with a sigh.
She glanced at her office. These walls really were nasty.
* * *
Raine couldn’t believe how easy that had gone. She’d thought she would have to sneak stuff in to get a room decorated, but the doctor, Elizabeth, seemed as excited about the holiday room as she was. The thought of even getting just a few smiles from the patients… or a moment of clarity.
When she arrived back on her floor she immediately checked in with Paul, the other nurse on the floor, and Mary, the occupational therapist, but it appeared to have been quiet. She looked for call buttons on the room board, but nothing was lit. If one had gone off it would have forwarded to her cell phone anyway. She was a little neurotic about taking care of the men. They hadn’t had thoughtful, real care in too long.
When she’d been hired on here she’d been told the details of what had happened, but as she looked into each man’s eyes she knew there was so much more to be told. The details were the tip of the iceberg. They had been tortured and starved, most of them, and they were fighting infections from open wounds. They’d also been tested upon with some kind of drug in a protocol called the Spartan program, using a plant called Ayahuasca. She’d been warned when she’d been hired that she may see or hear or even feel her patients do things that would seem impossible, and she most definitely had. It had taken some time to get used to the things she saw.
She was responsible for dorm 4C. There were eight men here, all with devastating injuries and illnesses, though these were actually some of the men that were showing signs of recovery. All of the dorms on second floor and third floor were hospital dorms, staffed with several doctors and nurses each. Fourth floor was more of a recovery floor. She didn’t have to do any procedures more invasive than blood pressures and pulses and minor bandage work. She could, if she needed to, do more, but these men were on the road to recovery Elizabeth believed. And the medical team concurred. Raine thought they needed more love than actual medical care now.
It had taken some of the men a while to open up to her. They had been treated so horribly. It was easy to read the scars on their bodies and see exactly what had been done to them. Surgery scars were very evident, as well as some of the most devastating injuries, like bullet wounds. One of her guys had surgery scars around certain muscle groups, and the muscles themselves were gone, leaving the skin flaccid. Raine could not even imagine what the supposed doctors had been thinking, what they’d been trying to prove by taking the muscles, but she was thankful that it was growing back. Just the fact that it was growing back was miraculous and she didn’t know that she would believe it herself if she hadn’t seen the skin filling in over the past couple of months. Titus, the patient, was one of her harder cases because it didn’t seem like there was anyone home inside his beautiful blue eyes. She talked to him all the time, but he never responded, just stared out the plate glass window toward the sky. Maybe when he was whole again he would realize it and come out of the abyss he was in. For right now, though, he was bed-bound and required regular care to do basic things. The biceps on his right side and the quadriceps on the left side had both been excised, very carefully leaving him enough mobility he could get around but not be an escape risk.
Nathan, the patient in the next room down, had begun to come around, even though there was no way he would ever get his sight back. His eyes were glazed over with a white film. He wasn’t sure what the men in the jungle had put in them but it had burned like coals from a furnace, he’d said, more than anything else they’d done to him before.
If she thought about it too long it would make her really, really mad. Like, mad as a wet hen, as her mama used to say.
Force the anger to serve you, she could hear her saying now. Don’t let it eat you up. It was so hard, though.
“So, how did it go?” Paul asked her, leaning on the nurse station counter in front of her.
Raine cocked her head. “So much smoother than I expected,” she admitted. “She gave me permission to do it.”
“That’s wonderful,” he breathed, his chocolate colored eyes going wide. “She just said yes?”
“Well, when I let her talk,” she made a face at him. “I kind of rushed to get all my words in, if you know what I mean. But eventually I laid it all out and she agreed.”
“Well done,” he told her, grinning.
“And she’s not letting me pay for it. I have to stop down when my shift is over and pick up a business expense card.”
“Even better,” Paul laughed. “You going tomorrow?”
Raine nodded. “Yeah. I guess. It’s my day off. Where’s the best place to shop for stuff like that around here?”
Paul reeled off several places that were within a five mile distance. “I’ll see what I can pack in my little car, then. I might have to order a Christmas tree to be delivered or something.” She frowned, wishing she drove something bigger than a Matchbox car. It was economical for driving but definitely not big enough for certain things.
“Some places might deliver, too, if you have a big enough order.”
“True,” she said
