Several nights later Beulah was sitting in her cubicle.
It was just after midnight. She had completed her rounds of the aged care ward of the Fort Sumter Hospital. After the recent passing of one of the patients there were now ten men under her care.
The youngest was in his fifties but he had lost a leg in the last war. The oldest was in his seventies. There was one bed ridden patient, the rest were able to move around the ward and the adjacent recreation room without her assistance.
There were twenty beds in the ward so every patient had an empty bed next to his own. Each bed had a curtain that could be drawn around the bed to create some privacy for the occupant.
In some ways Beulah had more freedom here than when she was assigned to a private home. The patients actually spoke to her, wanted to know something about her. In a way the patients were prisoners here too. Most of them knew that they would live out their lives in this building. Beulah was kept here by the electronic obedience devices that were permanently attached to her body.
There was a necklace linked to the communication buttons at the bedside tables in the ward. If a patient required assistance he pressed the red button and Beulah received a small dose of pain. When she attended the patient she hit the red button again and the pain stopped. It wasn't severe, about the intensity of a flea bite but it was constant until she hit the button. It was also cumulative. If two or three patients hit the button at the same time the pain increased proportionally.
Beulah also wore a pain bracelet on her ankle. This was controlled by the Matron and could inflict pain by degrees. The minimum was the equivalent of a mosquito bite; the maximum was agony so intense that it was lethal. Beulah instantly obeyed every whim of the Matron.
