Book Synopsis
Book Tags
Donation Rankings
Comment
0 Comments
You May Also Like
墨書 Inktalez
As I burst into the surveillance room clutching the keychain for the Nurse Station, my wrist was sliced by metal, leaving three bloody marks. The blue light from the screen flickered in the darkness of two in the morning, reminiscent of the phosphorescence I had seen in the Bridge Tunnel on my eighteenth birthday.
"Room 207, retrieve footage from nine to eleven last night." I heard my voice scratch like sandpaper in my throat. The security guard yawned as he entered the password, and suddenly, the surveillance footage tore through my retina—Director Zhang's white coat wriggled like maggots at the door of the patient room. In his hand was not a stethoscope, but half a bottle of unopened saline solution.
My nails dug deeply into my palm, reopening old wounds. In the video, a hand adorned with a wedding ring twisted open the infusion tube connector, pouring the entire bottle of clear liquid into the IV bag. I stared at the dark red stain on his cuff; it was blood from three days ago when I had coughed on his sleeve.
"Copy it." I yanked out a USB drive and turned to collide with a chest that smelled of disinfectant. Director Zhang's gold-rimmed glasses glinted coldly under the emergency lights in the corridor, flanked by three security guards whose shadows twisted into nooses on the floor tiles.
"Nurse Xia has been caught stealing controlled substances." He raised his phone, and there I was, clearly captured in the act of prying open the medicine cabinet at dawn. I felt for the empty Anxi pill box in my pocket; last night, when rescuing a girl from bed 16 who had attempted suicide by swallowing pills, the lock on the ICU door had jammed.
As a rubber baton pressed against my neck, the computer in the surveillance room suddenly went black. Old Li limped out from the power distribution room, his work uniform smeared with grease. "The main switch tripped," he said, winking with his burnt eyelid—a reminder of when I had handed him gauze during a boiler room accident eighteen years ago.
Director Zhang's laughter scraped against the tiles like a rusty scalpel. "Falsifying video evidence is a criminal offense." He tapped on my phone screen with his fingertip as the surveillance footage bizarrely transformed into an image of me tearing at a patient's infusion tube. I recognized that nurse's uniform—it was the one that had gone missing from the laundry last week.
Suddenly, Old Li's wrench smashed against the glass of a fire hydrant. Amidst flying shards, he pulled out an old mobile phone and played a recording: "...replace the sedative with potassium chloride; if a vegetative patient dies, it's just a medical accident..." His screams from last year demanding he alter boiler pressure data mixed with steam's roar.
I grabbed a fire axe and smashed open the nurse station's computer case. Sparks erupted from the motherboard, illuminating a tiny camera hidden inside; a maintenance order signed by Director Zhang last week fluttered to the ground. His well-maintained facade finally cracked like silicone prosthetics sliced open by a scalpel.
"The medical accident investigation report should have been delivered to the health bureau this morning." I shoved the bloodied USB drive into Old Li's hands. His son had died last year on Director Zhang's surgical table; an extra zero had been added to the dosage in his medical record.
I heard a crisp snap as a baton struck my collarbone. Director Zhang’s crocodile leather shoes crushed my fingers beneath them: "Patients with mental illness are unfit to continue working." The diagnosis he tossed at me bore a bright red stamp made from labels of medication I had secretly used to treat my depression.
Old Li hobbled after me to the entrance of the Emergency Building and handed me an envelope smelling of grease. Inside were eighteen testimonies marked with red fingerprints, topped with satellite maps of Director Zhang’s villa. As I touched the bruise on my ribcage, I recalled how he had invited me for "academic exchange" last month; right across from those floor-to-ceiling windows lay an artificial lake.
As the sound of the siren mingled with the morning fog and drifted into the hospital entrance, I took one last glance at the seventh floor of the inpatient department. The window of bed sixteen suddenly swung open, and the girl with her hand wrapped in bandages reached out toward the pale horizon, reminiscent of the moment I leaped from the third floor of the orphanage years ago.
Comment 0 Comment Count