Taint (Formerly Claimed) Dark Midnight 1

Chapter 4

The twelfth floor was the intensive ward for coma patients.  All of the nurses were stern-faced and moved about the place with a serious air.

 Like a bunch of worker bees in a hive they went about their work with cool efficiency.  Some of the newer nurses gossiped with each other and shared jokes from across the hall—but other than that, the place was almost deathly silent. 

Kind of like the depths of a crypt.  Or a ghostly realm where the inhabitants had no clue they were all really dead.

Out of all the wards in the hospital, this floor was the one she liked the least. 

Every time she caught glimpse of a lifeless patient through the doorway, she couldn’t but think of herself.

Was that how she looked to everyone else in the throes of her seizure? 

Lifeless?  

Dead?

A living breathing empty body?

It made her shiver, and a part of her couldn’t help but wonder if there would ever be a time when she never woke up at all…

  If a seizure lasted too long, leaving her a proverbial Snow White trapped within the confines of her mind forever.

The thought made her shudder and clutch her backpack to her chest as she darted through the maze of nurses and family slowing wandering the corridor until she finally reached the last room on the left.

Inside was a large, private room, in the center of which rested a young girl unconscious on a narrow bed.  Her skin was nearly as icy pale as the white sheets beneath her.  Her body was thin enough to almost resemble a corpse with spiky dark hair that stood out starkly like shadow. 

She seemed peaceful almost.  As serene as a real-life sleeping beauty.

If it weren’t for the steady beep, beep, beep of a heart monitor, she could have been dead. 

As she shuffled closer to drop her backpack on a bedside chair, Miriam couldn’t help but wonder what color the girl’s eyes were beneath her pale lids, set in a face as lovely as a statue’s. 

A chilling gray, maybe? 

Or a forest green?

Or…indigo blue?

She tried to picture the girl awake as she moved closer to the bed.  Unconsciously, she reached out to slip a pale hand in her own…and flinched.

The girl was ice cold.  Colder than cold.

As frozen as death.

Automatically her eyes darted to the sign hung above the girl’s bed where someone had scribbled J. Doe 1/7/10 in black marker.  Somehow the sight of those simple words made it sink in.

This girl was an unknown.  Someone found unconscious and brought the hospital with no identification.  

No name.

No nothing.

On paperwork and in reports she would be referred to only as J. Doe 1/7/10 until she either woke up or someone came to identify her.

Until then, this girl was just a number—utterly alone.

“You’re back!”

Miriam turned, still clenching the girl’s cool fingers as a nurse barged into the room with a stack of paperwork. 

“Now, all you have to do is sign here, Mr. Marexsson, and everything will be…oh…”

The nurse, a woman with graying brown hair, stopped dead in her tracks once she noticed Miriam instead of the apparent Mr. Marexsson standing by the bed.