IDEA - 9-25-2020
by
Patrick Ryan
1,558 Words
Some people become nurses to help the sick, others like the job security and the health plan; there’s only one who became a nurse because she likes to see people die. At first, Michelle Connors enjoyed the exhilaration of watching the instruments expire. But as time passed, there were not enough deaths at the hospital to feed her addiction. While nurses take a pledge not to harm, Michelle had created another pledge, only for her. She would only kill people who were close to death, she would never kill someone under her care, and she would never let anyone else take the blame for her murder. Michelle works the graveyard shift, where most of the patients asleep. All that can be heard are the beeping and pulsing of machines providing care and life. It had been a while since someone died, and Michelle was getting the itch. She knew the graveyard nurse on the 5th-floor nurse dozed off here and there throughout the night. When it was time for her break, she made her way down to the 5th floor and started to go room to room—eventually winding up in Parker Morrieson’s room, an 87-year-old with pancreatic cancer. As he began to struggle under the pillow she was applying pressure with, she saw the heart rate spike and then drop, the flatline, that’s her money shot. No time to wait around, she replaced the pillow under his head and ran out of the room. As she was making her way back to the ward on the 7th floor, the code was called, and on-call doctors and nurses ran past her on their way to pronounce what she knew was death. That night, Michelle had discovered a new method for getting her fix, and she could do anytime she wanted. Over several months, the death rates at the hospital were slightly elevated. It was a big hospital, but with a serial killer executing patients every so often, her actions would affect the aggregate. It was a data scientist employed at the hospital that first became suspicious of the elevation. Instead of reporting the anomaly, Allen Tinker decided to launch an investigation. He had cried wolf before, so he wanted to confirm his theory before taking it to security or the police. He had a list of 100 names of potential suspects; Michelle was number 64. What ensues is a game of cat and mouse, where first, Michelle becomes aware of the investigation when she sees him snooping around at night. However, then she becomes suspect number one when he almost catches her in the act. He knows it’s her; he just has to prove it. He better prove it quick before he becomes a suspect himself.
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