Darcy Claymore thought she had seen everything in her job as an ER nurse. Gunshot wounds to the head, light bulbs shattered in a patient's rectum, drug seekers looking for their next hit of narcotics, stabbing victims, burn victims, diseases, and another laundry list of things she knew that normal people wouldn't want nor need to see. Heck she was only 24 and was relatively sure she had seen it all. For a relatively small town, the 20,000 residents of Springville had a shocking knack for bodily injury. It wasn't pretty, but it was her job, and she was damn good at it. The physicians that worked the night shift at Grant Memorial Medical Center knew they could count on her quick thinking and accurate assessments.
0500, The ambulance crew called with an incoming trauma, female, stab wounds, critical blood loss. "Oh great, there goes the relatively slow night," Darcy mumbled. "Don't say the S-word, you know it will just get worse if you say that," Kurt teased across the nurses desk. Nursing superstition is pretty basic; say the words quiet, slow, easy, or anything like that when referring to your shift and you will end up with a flood of new traumas and admissions. "Yippi they're here," Kurt cheered as he downed his seventh cup of coffee, his sarcasm was palpable.
The next hours flew by in a rush of IVs, units of blood, assessments, and pressure dressings, not to mention tripping over the police officer there to take a statement. The physician ended up doing a couple sutures to close the two small stab wounds to the victim's neck. She was a 24 year old woman, she had been walking home from her job at one of the bars downtown. She was so delirious when she came in that they had to get most of the story from the bar owner who had found her crawling out of the alley, apparently she lost a lot of blood after he had found her. She screamed, "He bit me, that monster bit me!" then promptly fainted. It made no sense but Darcy pushed it out of her mind as she got ready to send the stabilized patient off to the acute care unit for admission, she had to finish the pile of paperwork before her. She needed to get this all taken care of before she could even think of going home to her nice comfy bed. Damn it's already 7:20am, she thought. At least this was the end of her long stretch of shifts, 8 nights in a row can be a bit much but at least she could look forward to 4 days to herself. She signed off the last form as the day nurses finally took over, thank God, because another stabbing victim was rolling in the door with a pressure dressing pressed to her neck.
Hmm a serial stabber, oh great.
She winced and shielded her eyes from the blinding sun as she walked to her car, this night shift thing was getting to her, she yearned for her windowless bedroom as she unlocked her beat-up red Alero. She tossed her bag into the car then reached back to pull the clip from her dark blonde hair, shaking out the wavy mass. Maybe a shower would be nice.
"Hey Darcy!!" Kurt yelled as he ran up to her car. "Want to go down to the Full Moon for night shift happy hour?"
"Shoot, Kurt, I'm so tired right now but maybe I'll take you up on that offer. Maybe just one drink. I'll meet you there."
The engine whirred to life and she sped out of the parking lot, heading for the bar down the street from the hospital. It made good money off the hospital staff, many of the shifts required a stiff drink afterward and the bar was almost always open. Kurt met her inside, beer in hand.
"Thanks, I really needed this, can you believe those day girls? Seriously how long did they need to sit in the break room chugging coffee? And those stabbing victims, what's with that, I've never seen anything like that, its like someone stabbed them with ice picks but neither of the two holes were very deep, it's just so weird." She chugged half of her beer.
"Woah, slow down, first off, the day girls do that all the time, you know that and secondly I don't know, those wounds were really odd. Maybe we're dealing with a vampire, boogiddy boogiddy boo!" He wiggled his fingers in her face, finally pointing two fingers into her neck....
"Haha, very funny, maybe it was a vampire wannabe, but seriously what kind of sick demented loser would do that? Stop poking me!" Darcy laughed as she pinched Kurt's side. She turned back to the bar, chugging the last of her beer.
"Sure you don't want another?" Kurt offered.
"Oh Kurt," she said in her best lusty voice, "Are you trying to get me drunk?" Her serious face twitched and she burst into laughter. "I think I'd rather just go home, I'm really tired."
"Sure you don't want some company?" He said earnestly, "Come on it's been weeks since we hooked up, or are you getting your thrills elsewhere?"
