- GIRLS ON FILM -

Chapter Six: The Spy

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Joyce Byers' feet hit the linoleum floor of the laboratory with fervor as she ran next to her son's gurney. The nurses sprinting beside the bed attempted to grab blood pressure, heart rate all while trying to find the cause of his burning.

Will had been screaming from the moment he awoke from his seizures in Merrill's pumpkin fields. Though his body still thrashed around in the hospital sheets.

"It's burning! Help, it's killing me!" He would shriek with all the energy his petite body was capable of. He had ripped his own clothes in odd spots where the fabric was weakened only to reveal sweat covered skin.

There were no burns, no incisions, his skin was the same light hue it always was.

Joyce's heart ached as she watched her son writhe in unbearable pain. Jogging with the gurney as it soared down the halls. As a mother she hated more than anything in the world when her kids were in pain.

The first time Jonathan broke his arm almost brought all of her food inching back up her throat. These were her kids. She had made every inch of them and cared for them all of their life.

To see them in pain was just as painful for her. Though in this instance she knew something was wrong. Something in the way her son was writhing wasn't right.

"Mom! It burns!" Her son wailed, his hands reaching out to grab hers, but they were cold to touch. "It burns!" He insisted, big tears streaming down his face, pooling in the bottom of the oxygen mask he tried so desperately to rip off his face.

"Hold on, just hold on. I'm right here." Joyce consoled her son. The mother's eyes darkened in thought while she ran next to the gurney. Nurses began yanking down Will's clothes and sticking EKG stickers across his skin.

"Vitals?" The older nurse barked, her intense eyes snapping up to her younger counterpart.

"Heart rate 220 BPM, temperature 103 degrees."

"His skin is cold!" Joyce yelled in defiance but the nurses paid her no mind.

"Will?" The woman spoke, her hands on his cheeks as he thrashed. "Where does it hurt?"

"Everywhere!" He screamed.

"What do we give him? Morphine?" The younger nurse yelled towards Doctor Owens. The man flipped through different papers on his clipboard before sighing.

"It's burning me!"

"Morphine?" The nurse pressed as they finally secured the gurney into an exam room.

"There's no wounds!" Dr. Owens stressed, pulling five or six different vials from the cabinets.

"Put him under, give me the Haloperidol. Five ML dose, twenty-three gauge!" A different nurse demanded, taking charge because the head doctor was unable to do so.

"It burns! Please, mom." The boy cried out to his mother. His weeping brown eyes made contact with Joyce's, causing her stomach to clench in pain.

"Help him!" She snapped, worried that if her son wasn't soon tended to, that she might vomit. "He says it's burning so help him!"

Doctor Sam Owens looked around flustered between his pack of nurses ordering meds around and a mother screaming in his ear. Not to mention the ear-piercing wailing that was emitting from the petite boy.

It's burning him? He wasn't even close to the flame? How could it be burning him?

Finally springing into action the doctor snagged the scissors from the exam table. Cutting all the way from the hem of Will's long sleeve shirt to the collar. Exposing his sweat ridden skin in full rather than just the awkward patches the nurses peered at as they stuck the monitors to him.