Edge of Chaos (12 page)

Same night, two
hours later…

Sometimes,
something happens that is so traumatic, so unbelievably tragic that even those
trained to deal with it, stumble away shaking their heads in disbelief. That is
exactly what happened when Kayla walked out of the second floor nursing lounge
to start her shift at Highland Hospital.

The first
indication that something is truly wrong happens when a code blue announcement
comes over the intercom.

“Code blue Trauma
2 all emergency personal please respond to Trauma 2; code blue Trauma room 2.”

Kayla’s trot turns
into a rapid jog towards the closest stairwell. When the second announcement
goes out over the hospital’s intercom system, she thinks it must be a mistake.

“Code blue Trauma
4 all available emergency personnel please respond to Trauma 4, Code blue
Trauma room 4.”

Kayla steps her
pace up to a sprint and hits the stairwell door at a dead run. She takes the
stairs two at a time, hanging onto the rails to make sure she doesn’t do a
header on the way down. The third emergency announcement just about makes her
completely stop in her tracks.

“Code red
Ambulance Bay. All security personal please respond to the ambulance bay. Code
red Ambulance Bay; STAT.”

Kayla skitters and
just about stops at the bottom of the first flight of stairs.
What the hell
is happening?
she thinks to herself.

She renews her
pace and continues down to the first floor. The hospital has three levels of
security threats, code yellow, code orange, and code red. The most serious is
the code they are running now and that means hospital personal have been
assaulted and injured in the process, and with a weapon. Kayla racks her brain
as she reaches the landing. She’s just about to push the door open when she
hears the first gunshot! Now she does stop. But just for a second; then she
pushes the door open and screams assault her ears. She sprints down the long
hall on the way to the emergency department as more screaming, shouting, and
more gunfire erupts ahead of her. She’s terrified, but nothing will keep her
from doing her duty as a trauma nurse no matter how dangerous that duty might
be. Sirens penetrate the other sounds of battle as Kayla nears the end of the
hall where double doors separate the hall from the ER.

A huge man,
dressed head to toe in leather and tattoos, comes bursting through the doors
with what looks like a machine pistol to her. She can scarcely slow down and
crashes into him. She literally bounces off him and hits the ground so hard
that it knocks the air out of her. He stumbles but quickly finds his balance.
Kayla sees he is a Suicide King when he orients the barrel of his weapon on her
chest.

Kayla is so
shocked, so stunned that barely a thought crosses her mind before the man
depresses the trigger. At first, it doesn’t even register when she hears a
light metallic crack instead of an explosion of gunfire. Surprised, the man
looks at his weapon, and then points it back at Kayla. The gun misfires a
second time. This time he drops it and charges past her down the hall. She’s
still sitting on the floor when two police officers burst through the door. Unable
to say anything, she just points to the direction the biker disappeared a
moment ago. Without a word, one of the officers collects the machine pistol
before they both sprint down the hall after the fleeing biker. Kayla takes a
deep breath, gets up and opens the doors to the Emergency Department.

The first sight is
a lot to handle. There are pools of blood on the floor, great smears of blood
against the walls. The whole place bathed in the eerie blue and red from the
police cars that are pulled up just outside the glass doors of the emergency
landing. Looking down the main hall to the trauma rooms, Kayla nearly faints
from shock. Everywhere she looks there are fallen bikers and hospital personal.
Clusters of hospital workers flit around the victims performing various
emergency procedures. She counts at least two groups in the halls performing CPR.
For the first time in her life as a Nurse Practitioner, she does not know what
to do. Her mind is blank. She’s not sure how long she just stands there staring,
before another announcement over the intercom system sets her to motion.

“Code blue first
floor nursing office, code blue first floor nursing office.”

Kayla sprints down
the hall towards the nursing offices at the very end. But just before she can
get there, one of the ER doctors sticks his head out of Trauma room 3 and calls
to her.

“Kayla, I need you
in her,” he shouts.

She skids to a
halt and changes direction. He disappears back into the room and she follows. She
nearly trips on a body lying on the floor in front of her. She doesn’t
recognize the face, but she certainly recognizes the cut. The dead man on the
floor is another Suicide King. She steps around him taking great care not to
slip in the pools of blood.

When she gets to
the trauma table in the middle of the room, she gasps in spite of herself. It’s
the guy that brought Luke over to her house early this morning. He’s been
intubated and a nurse is using an O2 mask and bag to breath for him. He’s got a
half inch tube sticking into his ribs on his left side and a machine on the
wall is sucking out blood from his lungs. He has two bullet wounds; one to his
ribs on his left side and another dangerously close to his heart. He’s wearing
a pair of Military Anti Shock Trousers and they’re inflated all the way up to
his abdomen.

As she prepares to
start another IV, she glances up at his heart monitor. His pulse is rapid. His
blood pressure is 98 over 53. If she were a betting woman, she’d bet against
this man. Her first attempt to get a line in fails, and so does her second one.
His blood pressure is so low now his veins are collapsing right and left.
Finally, on the third attempt she hits a vein. She connects it and runs it wide
open. She vaguely hears the doctor ordering blood and a sudden thought comes
unbidden into her mind. This is the fallout from Luke shooting his best friend.
It has to be. Unless she sees Harbingers, it has to do with Luke. She’s seen
three bikers…no four bikers and every one of them are Suicide Kings.

Where is Luke?
she screams inside. She feels a sudden
overwhelming urge to leave the room and look for him. She almost does too when
she considers the possibility that one of the people in the trauma rooms might
be Luke.

 “We’re losing him,
Doc,” yells one of the other nurses, making Kayla return to her duty.

Doctor Harris
turns to Kayla. “Go to one of the other trauma rooms and find a crash cart;
we’re gonna need it in here.”

Kayla glances at
the biker’s blood pressure read-out before she runs out of the door; it’s 86
over 43. She sprints down the hall to T2, the nearest room, and bursts in. It’s
empty save for a body on the table. Before retrieving the cart, she takes a look
at the man on the table. Right away, she sees it’s not Luke. She glances around
the room until she finds a ragged black leather motorcycle jacket. It just
identifies him as a fully-patched Suicide King.

She grabs the
crash cart and hurries back to the room she just left. She arrives just in
time. A male nurse is straddling the biker doing chest compressions. As Kayla
readies the defibrillator, the nurse stops the compressions, so they can get a read-out
before applying the paddles. The monitor shows an irregular rhythm. Kayla
applies the paddles.

“Clear!” she
shouts.

Everyone takes a
giant step back away from the table and the fallen biker and the machine works
its magic. After several revolutions of chest compressions, various
medications, and more defibrillating, Doctor Harris glances at his watch and calls
the code. It’s 1:25 am.

Shouting farther
down the hall reminds Kayla that she is still involved in the battle of her
professional life. Having done everything she could for the guy on the table
behind, Kayla steps out into the hall and looks both ways. To her right lies a
fallen paramedic. Another paramedic and a nurse kneel over him. The nurse is
sobbing miserably. Kayla considers going over to them to offer her help, but
just as she is about to say something, the paramedic reaches out to her fallen
co-worker and places her hand on the victim’s forehead for just an instant
before sliding down and closing the fallen medic’s eyes; it is too late. Before
Kayla looks away, the nurse suddenly glances up and sees Kayla.

They lock eyes for
the briefest of time and share the unbearable hurt they are both feeling,
knowing that there is nothing they can do about it. It’s these helpless
feelings that cause Kayla to question whether she is still suited for trauma
nursing. She hasn’t felt this way since her very first days as a trauma nurse
when she was working nights and going to school during the day to become a PA.

Yet another siren
breaks through Kayla’s gloomy thoughts and she walks out onto the landing to
wait for the ambulance. She stands there for a couple of minutes before the
rescue vehicle pulls up and kills the siren. The doors burst open almost before
the ambulance has come to a full stop. The paramedic grabs the gurney and
shouts to Kayla over his shoulders.

“Where to, boss?”

“Uh…T1…Trauma one…
Here, let me give you a hand.”

Together they pull
the gurney out and start wheeling their victim into the emergency department.
The paramedic gives Kayla a brief rundown about their newest patient.

“GSW to right
thigh with an exit wound in the lower buttocks and another one in the lower
right quadrant of the abdomen, no exit wound. BP is 110 over 64, pulse 98,
respirations 17, and a pulse ox of 93%.”

“Got it. This
guy’s another King, right?” she asks.

“That’s right.”

“And have you seen
any Harbingers tonight?” Kayla persists.

“None! This is my
third scoop and run and it’s all been Suicide Kings. You got any Harbingers in
here?”

“No, just the
Kings…weird, right?”

“Very,” he
replies. “Hey, before this guy we took another one to Summit Medical Center for
multiple knife wounds. He was their fourth King so far tonight. What do you
think’s going on?”

“I have no idea,”
Kayla lies. “Whenever there’s a war going on, you always see some of both
sides. We have yet to see a Harbinger or any other of the lesser clubs.”

“That is odd,” the
Paramedic replies, as he helps to transfer their patient from the gurney to the
trauma table. “Well, gotta run. The night’s young, so I’ll probably be seeing
you later.”

“Yeah…be careful
out there.”

“You too,” he replies,
as he wheels out the gurney.

As Kayla and
another nurse go to work on their new patient, he begins to stir and opens his
eyes. He is surprisingly focused, so Kayla decides to try to get some
information from him.

“What happened to
you?” she asks.

“Fell down a
staircase,” he replies.

“Looks like you
ran into a couple bullets on the way down.”

“You know what
they say about walking and chewing gum at the same time,” he replies.

She’s just about
to answer when the Paramedic returns with a plastic bag.

“Here’s his
stuff,” he says, putting the bag in the corner.

Kayla walks over
to the bag and lifts out a leather cut. He’s a King alright, but not the
president. Under his club patch is another smaller one that reads Sergeant at
Arms. That makes him the number three guy in the club hierarchy. She returns
the jacket to the bag and proceeds to examine the man.

“So you’re pretty
high up in the King’s organization…” she says tentatively.

“Who?” he asks.

“Don’t play coy
with me; I just saw your cut.”

“You seem to know
something of bikers,” he replies. “You’re somebody’s old lady?” he asks.

“Not officially,”
Kayla replies, not wishing to disclose anything more.

“Then you’ll know—"

He stops
mid-sentence when another person walks up. It’s Doctor Harris. The conversation
turns purely medical as Kayla gives the doctor her report and they prep him for
surgery. When the crew from upstairs OR come for him, Kayla is in much need of
a break. She glances at the clock and it’s only 2:30 in the morning. She can
scarcely believe it. She has been assaulted from all sides this morning and she
could have sworn it had to be close to sunrise. She collapses behind the triage
desk and rests her head in her hands. Grateful for the lull in action, she
closes her eyes in an effort to recharge her lagging batteries.