Schizophrenia

Chapter Four : Glitches

"Doctor, doctor, hurry up! Red! Code Red!" The nurse, stumbles over shortened breaths to speak. Helen scoops up the intercom phone, "Alert! Alert! Code Red! Room Two-Seventy One! All staff on deck! Calling all staff on deck! Doctor Walker comes racing down the hallway. "What's wrong, Helen?" He yells over the alarm and flashing lights. "Just come see!" Nancy yells out, slowly opening the room door. Lily's heart rate is twice the rate of the average human, and her blood sugar was sky high, of five hundred and sixty-three. Her blood pressure was two-hundred over one-twenty. She was flailing her arms around furiously and frantically, growling in agony, seemingly disoriented. Her face was pale. Smoke comes up from the side of the bed...Doctor Walker looks carefully at the monitor. " Smoke before fire..." He gets a flashback....

"Phillip, Phillip, little Phillip, get back over here with the group! Stay with the group! Hurry up! We have to evacuate! Hurry! The scene flashed to a fire that broke out in the other center before the Professor had this center built. Most people didn't' know there was another center. Only two people who were there, had transferred over. That was Doctor Walker and Professor. 

"Doctor?" Phillip snaps out of it. " Oh yes, sorry...I had a flashback...but I don't know where it came from. Yes...smoke before fire. Electrical. We need to get her stabilized. Please slow down the simulators, please. Phillip looks over at the simulator...It's registering .05....Way too high. It should be only about 60-70...He turns the knob way down..." That should help." He looks over, and everything else slows down, and Lily starts to regain her color, however, the monitor is still smoking. "Helen, can you go get me some flour, just in case. I'm going to try a towel, but I would prefer backup, thank you." 

As she rushes out of the room towards the kitchen, Doctor Walker throws a towel over the monitor. He looks over. Lily seems to be stabilized. That's really odd. Good, but very odd. He watches Lily for a minute. "First, Susan, now Lily. Duly noted." He, then, looks back over to the brain scan machine. Lily has wires taped all over her head, and they are connected to the machine. Every patient has to sleep this way every night, for one to two months at a time, in rotating cycles.  There it was..that same dark eerie face started appearing on the monitor. A cold, sinister chill gripped the back of the doctor's spine. " Am I the only one who's seeing this and thinks it's abnormal?" He watches intently. The smoke is out. " Huh? What? Just like that?" He lifts the towel. No smoke. "Hmm..." He watches the face on the monitor. "What in the heck is going on?" he thinks to himself. Just then, the face starts pulling  away and through the glass. "Woah! What the fuck?" He jumps back, stunned. " Holy Shitballs!...but see, if I tell anyone, they won't believe me until it's too late, because no one ever believes the good guy in the story until it's too late," he thinks to himself. " How is this happening?" Just then, the nurse walks in. " Do we still need the flour, sir?"

      "No, but thank you, anyway. Just sit it on the counter over there, please. Thank you. Just in case it starts back up. The patient is stable. Everything is fine with her, I guess. This has never happened before with the machine like this, to my knowledge. Did you see what happened? "

   "No sir, what happened?" 

        "The face....I...saw the face again...but this time, it started coming through the glass."

"Um...are you okay, sir? Do you need some coffee? or maybe some fresh air?"

   "No..no..I'm......I'll be fine." He looks back to the monitor, and the face is gone. He puts his hand over his mouth, and wipes his lips, trying to get a grip on what just happened. " Yeah, actually, I will take you up on that offer. Maybe a cup of coffee would be nice, Thank you. Please, with cream and sugar, too. Thanks." 

    "Yes, sir. Oh, by the way, what was wrong with the girl?"

             " Apparently, she was having a lucid nightmare, and it was so real that it caused her blood sugar, blood pressure and heart rate to spike rapidly. Other than that, I'm unsure of why or how that would happen to that extreme. It definitely needs to be documented."