The Encounter

Prologue

A doctor huffed as his feet rushed him back to the nurses station. His turquoise colored eyes were wide and pupils blown. It was his state of rushing and disheveled chocolate locks that was the most alarming to the nurses sat there. He grasped the white marble of the counter to ground himself and doubled over wheezing from the exertion of running.

“What's going on, are you okay?” a petite nurse asked. Her thin blonde eyebrows were raised worry that was clear in the lines creasing her aged face. The doctor could only wheeze as he brought a hand up to explain for her to wait a minute while he got himself back together. He had to run the length of a whole ward to get here.

“One of the suicide watch patients attempted suicide, we need to issue a code blue. The patient is going to need surgery immediately,” He explained words breathless. There was a stabbing pain in his side from running, but he stretched his upper body around the rib area to disperse the feeling as much as he could. He didn’t have time for pain at this moment, he had to get back to the patient’s room with the coding cart. Though it was with relief that a nurse with running back with him, towing the coding cart along for the ride.

Arriving at the door after the lights in the hallway had become a blur while running filled him with a sense of growing anticipation and dread. What if they couldn’t save the patient, was there family that would even care? As of yet there had been no one that had stepped forward for being related to the patient. He had seen too many cases of people dying and the family never caring enough to give a shit unless the police got involved.

He pushed away these thoughts and flung the doors open, hearing the flatline on the heart monitor. The song seemed to sing with a sense of melancholy as she fiddled with the coding cart while nurses and more doctor’s started streaming into the room after him. He did this while noticing the mass of scarred flesh in front of him. It looked to be a girl who had once had brown hair, her skin now marred completely with burn scars. Skin from her face connecting to her chest her neck almost completely hidden behind the horrendously healed skin.

He remembered in the back of his mind that she had been in a house fire and gotten trapped under a beam. She had been barely alive when the firemen had found her  and pulled her burned body from the wreckage. She had been trapped next to the body of a boy, but he had literally melted into floor and they knew without a shadow of a doubt he had been dead from the start. He wondered how badly it would hurt to be burned alive, it was obviously traumatic for the girl who laid dead before him.

“Clear,” he yelled out and brought down the defibrillator for the third time when he was sure nobody was touching the body. He knew though that it was hopeless, and the girl was dead. He wondered if there was anyone who would be affected by her death, because as of now it seemed unlikely.