Chapter 6 - An Eruption of Green Scrubs
The corridor exploded into an ocean of rapid, frantic motion.
The pneumatic doors at the south end flew open with a concussive bang, bouncing off their rubber wall guards. Six medical professionals—two attending obstetricians, a neonatal respiratory specialist, two trauma nurses, and an anesthesiologist dragging a portable emergency airway kit—charged into the hallway like a military extraction unit. Their scrub tops were a blur of teal and royal blue, their faces masks of hyper-focused adrenaline.
“Get that gurney in here! Clear the center!” one of the attending physicians, Dr. Wallace, barked as she ran, her stethoscope swinging wildly against her chest.
Behind them came two male orderlies sprinting with a heavy, hydraulic surgical transport gurney. The heavy rubber wheels rumbled across the floor like thunder, weaving past the abandoned yellow mop bucket, scattering the maintenance workers who had finally scrambled out of the way.
Grant Wexler found himself physically shoved aside.
The anesthesiologist, a wiry man with gray hair who didn't know Grant from a vagrant on the street, struck Grant’s broad shoulder with the edge of his steel tackle-box kit, knocking the towering mob boss against the wall. “Out of the way! Move! Move!” the doctor screamed, not even looking back as he dropped down beside Hannah’s head.
Grant’s back hit the drywall. He pressed himself against the framed botanical prints, his hands flat against the plaster, his chest heaving inside his bespoke navy suit. For the first time in twenty years, he was completely invisible. His money, his connections with the mayor’s office, his armed soldiers waiting in black sedans down in the hospital’s circular drive—none of it possessed the slightest currency in this space. He watched, trapped in a nightmare of his own engineering, as the medical team swarmed the woman he had just threatened to destroy.
“She’s hypotensive! BP is seventy over forty and dropping!” Dr. Mercer shouted from the floor, his hands coated in saline and amniotic fluid as he helped position Hannah’s pelvis. “Uterus is board-like! We have an acute abruption! We’re losing fetal heart tones!”
“Get her onto the board! One, two, three, lift!”
Four sets of hands grabbed the draw sheet beneath Hannah’s limp, shuddering frame. With a coordinated grunt, they hoisted her off the cold linoleum and onto the firm, padded mattress of the gurney.
May you like
Hannah let out a high, keening whimper—a sound so thin and broken that it tore through the mechanical roar of the alarms. Her head rolled to the side, her hazel eyes fluttering half-open, tracking the terrifying blur of faces leaning over her. Her hands were still clawing at her belly, her fingers digging through the green cotton, trying with every dying reserve of her strength to physically hold her daughter inside the sanctuary of her body.
“She’s... she’s thirty-two weeks...” Hannah gasped through the plastic oxygen mask an orderly had just strapped over her nose and mouth. The clear plastic fogged instantly with each ragged, desperate exhalation. “Her name is... Grace... please... don't let her... don't let her die like David...”
