Graveyard Shift

The hospital was dead quiet from the moment he sat down. He hadn’t noticed it before now, not when he arrived at that cliff side monolith for the night, back from his vacation. Nobody had told him anything, or said two words to him, as he trudged along crunching gravel toward the base of the cracked stone steps. The hospital, named for some dead man named Wallace, loomed over him like an ancient cathedral of towering spires and grey concrete. When he went inside, save the familiar smell of medical waste and the chemicals sprayed and poured in an attempt to cover said medical waste, there was nothing.

There was none of the usual groaning or chittering or hollering echoing off the cavernous walls as he made his way over to the security office, which was off to the side of the reception area (which was barren save for one heavyset nurse who never spoke to him) and down one of the hallways of solid, sliding steel doors. The silence only registered after he clocked in for the night. He cocked an ear.

Nothing at all.

Not even the rumbling squeak of one of the nurses carts.

His stomach twisted up, just slightly, as he thumbed the switch that would turn on the CCTV cameras. When that wall of artificial light blinked on, and that low electrical hum hit his ears, the knot in his gut untwisted itself as he saw every angle of every place that may require him. Much of the cameras were just hallways, and in those drab hallways were nurses. He saw (could not hear) them milling about, one pushing a cart that he imagined was making a rumbling squeak as she went from room to room, giving out what he assumed was the last of the pills that would put the rowdier patients to sleep. He loved the graveyard shift for that reason. He’d worked day shift before, back when he was younger and the Wallace Psychiatric Hospital was lighter staffed. It was miserable, not just for him. Patients off their meds got creative in the ways they went after the nurses, for a variety of odd reasons. He did not want to think about the amount of human feces he has had to clean out of his uniform, or about what Martin, that big bastard, did to that one tiny nurse named Brenda who he somehow managed to trap alone. She never came back after that. Martin himself was long gone by now, got transferred to a more secure place.

Keeping them medicated was the only way some of them would sleep, and he certainly didn’t enjoy dealing with them alone. Awake. Agitated.

He saw the nurse, who seemed to him even smaller than Brenda, enter a room at the far end of the hall, far enough that she was mostly a blur in the camera feed, and that made him anxious. Like he wasn’t already. He shot his eyes down to the bottom row of cameras and looked across them. They all pointed down from some high corner of a patients room, ostensibly, he was told, to make sure none of them killed themselves. He saw that all of them were awake. All of them were standing. All of them were facing the steel shutter door of their room. In the first of the last three cameras, he saw the small nurse, carrying a little cup in her hands to a patient who wasn’t standing. He didn’t recognize them, so they must be well behaved. Maybe incapable of misbehaving, given the sight of him.

The patient was bedridden, and is covers were kicked off to the floor, so he was given a full view of his trembling form. His skin sagged and was dark with liver spots. The skin itself looked vacuum sealed over his bones and the loose, jiggling muscle that still remained. His hands were gnarled into shaking claws. All of him was shaking as he lay back into his pillow, propped up so he, presumably, didn’t choke on his own saliva. The man was old, exceptionally old. He should be in a hospice, not here. What the hell did he do to deserve being put in a padded cell. The small nurse, by this point in the security guards rumination's, had already started draping the old man’s blanket back over him, and that lessened his trembling. He saw the nurse speak to the patient, but could not discern a word of what they were saying. It seemed not of particular importance, so he allowed his eyes to wander.

Back to the other patients.

It was a motley crew, no two were alike, but all of them were in the same way. Standing stock still, upright, facing their door. He saw one patient, an obese man whose pills had only hastened his weight gain. He recognized that man as one who had broken a nurses nose during his time on day shift. The big bastard had broken another guards arm, just grabbed it in both hands and pulled it backwards at the elbow. He did that all while sitting down.

He was sitting down because he was too heavy to stand.

Ok, maybe that’s changed. He’s been head a while, maybe he lost weight and you never noticed. Never noticed because you work night shift and never actually need to notice. What else are you missing?

Why are they all standing like that?

He looked back to the nurse and the old man, but the nurse is gone. It’s just the old man, clutching his old, woollen blanket to his chest like a man hanging in for dear life. Back up the rows, he sees the nurses conversing, one of them saying something to make the others laugh, before he watched as the small nurse walks around her colleagues and to a desk phone. The phone in his own office rings just once before he picks it up.

“Security.” He says.

“Hi, we have a patient who needs to be taken to the on site morgue, can you go and bring a stretcher up?”

“Yeah, I’ll be right up.”

“Wonderful, thank you.” She hangs up.

He’s up and out of the door without thinking. He’s halfway to the morgue before a thought hits him. That thought being that he had no idea who he’s bringing down to the morgue. Who looked dead on that wall of cameras? Everyone but the old man was standing up, did the poor bastard croak during the nurses visit? He didn’t look dead when he saw him. Maybe he just missed someone. Oh well, play it by ear. He unlocks the morgue with his key, struggles to back the stretcher out for a moment without knocking anything over, cusses loudly when his foot catches the side of a completely separate stretcher he didn’t notice, and then he’s off to the races.

He needs to take an elevator up to the blue unit, where the nurses called from. The elevator is cramped and old, requiring him to close a gate inside of it to get to go up, and he can see the inside of the wall crawl down through it. When he arrives, he meets the small nurse. They do not exchange names.

“Right this way.” She says, and she speaks with a lift in her voice that puts a stab of concern in his heart.

Is she excited by this? Happy? What is she holding in her hand?

Is that a fucking knife?

They stop outside of the padded cell. The old man’s cell. The security guard looks around and is suddenly very aware that all of the nurses on the floor are with him. No, not with him. They’re with the small nurse. She opens the heavy shutter door, which glides, loud and grating, against the floor, and he sees the old man. He is still in his bed. He is trembling violently.

“No, please!” He cries out, his voice weak and quivering. Suddenly they are upon him. They shove past the security guard and he can see tools on their hands. Hammers. Knives. Scissors. A staple gun. He is frozen; incapable of moving out of sheer disbelief at what he was seeing. The small nurse is on the old man first, and right before the wall of other bodies blocks his view, he can see her raising her knife overhead. The old man doesn’t even scream. He gurgles. The nurses are shrieking with laughter. The security guard staggers toward the pack of nurses, tripping over himself as he grabs for the nearest one - a large woman with a claw hammer - and hooks her arms from behind. His demands for them to stop are not heeded. The large nurse just turns around to face him, twisting out his grip, and suddenly his arms are pinned by two more. He is on the ground and the large nurse with the hammer is above him, raising it overhead. The giddy, lifting voice of the small nurse barks out a single word - “Enough!” - and suddenly it is silent again. The security guard suddenly no longer feels any pressure on him, and the nurse with the hammer is gone from his view on the floor, replaced with a circle of bloodied clothes and the toothy, angry smiles that inhabit them. The small nurse stands dead centre. “You won’t tell anyone what we did.” Her voice is a dead monotone. “We’ll all say you did it.” Her tone was frank. She meant it. Dear god she meant it. Oh dear god look at that poor old man.

The old man is a pile. No arterial squirts or spewing of liquid gore. His body is Swiss cheesed with holes of varying sizes, and his head is an uneven crater of red streaked skull. His guts are visible through his stomach, and they are just as visibly steaming with heat not yet lost. He is not bleeding. Not anymore. That would require blood to still be inside of his body. Two nurses take a side of his bed sheet and unfit it from the bed, a corner in each hand as they bring them over the body. They tie it like a bundle and bring it to the morgue stretcher, which someone else had brought into the room. It is set on top of it like a bag of garbage and the nurses wheel it out themselves. They all pile out of the room, chatting and laughing amongst themselves without any worry, any concern. The security guard lays on his back for a very long time before getting up. By that time, there is no sign of anything amiss. He can’t speak. He can’t do anything but get out of blue unit, away from everything in it, back to his office and the wall of CCTV cameras that offer him vigilance and dominion that he is now painfully aware is not real. Never was. They’ll say it was him. They’ll kill him like that if they feel like it. Oh dear god. Dear fucking god.

It hits him all at once when he gets back to the office, when he looks upon his wall of cameras. The exact moment it hits him is when he looks at the bottom row, at the cameras in the patients cells, and sees them all standing guard, facing the doors to their cells.