Chapter 2 - The Red Triage
The descent down four flights of echoing concrete stairs was an exercise in living hell. With every hop on my right foot, shockwaves battered my left ankle, causing my vision to flicker with bursts of static. Sweat poured into my eyes, stinging like acid. By the time I tumbled out the heavy steel fire door into the rainy alleyway, my palms were bloody from scraping against the brick masonry.
A silver sedan idle at the curb, its hazard lights blinking rhythmically against the slick asphalt.
I hauled open the rear door and collapsed across the vinyl seat, gasping for air like a landed fish. The driver, an older man with gray hair and a heavy winter coat, turned around in shock.
"Ma'am? Hey, are you okay? What happened to you?"
"Hospital," I managed to choke out, clutching the back of his headrest with bloodstained fingernails. "Northwestern... emergency entrance... please. Just drive. Don't stop for anyone."
He glanced past me toward the alley door, where the tall, imposing figure of Tristan suddenly burst through into the rain, his phone held to his ear, his eyes scanning the darkness with feral intensity.
"Go!" I screamed.
The driver slammed his foot on the accelerator. The car surged forward, tires screeching against wet pavement. I collapsed onto the floorboards, curling into a ball, my shivering body bathed in the red glow of the taillights.
My phone vibrated violently against the rubber floor mat. Tristan's name flashed on the screen. One call. Two calls. Three. Then, a banner notification slid down, chilling me far more than the freezing Chicago rain.
*“Do not tell them anything about the cream until I get there. Reese, I swear to God, keep your mouth shut.”*
The letters danced across my fever-blinded eyes. Why would he say that? Why the cream? If it was an herbal salve, why would an emergency room doctor care? Unless... unless it was never meant to heal.
Ten minutes later, the sedan lurched to a halt beneath the fluorescent canopy of the Northwestern Memorial Emergency Department. The driver threw the door open, rushing around to help me. "Help! Somebody get a chair out here! She’s burning up!"
Two triage nurses in dark blue scrubs sprinted through the automatic sliding doors pushing a high-wheeled gurney. Hands hooked under my armpits, lifting me effortlessly from the car floor. The momentary brush of a nurse’s hand against my lower left pant leg elicited a shriek so raw and piercing it echoed off the concrete ambulance bay.
"Look at this leg," the first nurse said, her voice dropping all administrative calm. She produced trauma shears from her pocket, slicing through the fabric of my pajama bottoms up to the knee.
The surrounding air fell dead silent.
My calf was swollen to twice its normal circumference, shining with an unnatural, taut sheen. Near the heel, the skin was black, wet, and bubbling with purulent fluid. Crimson tracking lines climbed past my knee toward my groin like lightning bolts etched into my pale flesh.
"Code Sepsis," the nurse barked, waving toward the doors. "Get Dr. Mensah into Trauma Bay Two immediately. Start two large-bore IVs, grab a central line kit, and page the on-call surgical team for a necrotizing fasciitis consult! Move, move, move!"
The gurney crashed through the double swinging doors into a world of blinding overhead lights, shouted orders, and the incessant, high-pitched chirping of vital monitors.
"Blood pressure is 74 over 40 and dropping!" a voice shouted from my left. "Heart rate 158. Temp is 104.6. She's in septic shock!"
A cold plastic mask was pressed over my face, flooding my lungs with 100% oxygen. A woman with sharp, intelligent dark eyes and silver-streaked hair stepped into my field of vision, donning sterile blue gloves. Her badge read: *Dr. Maya Mensah, Chief of Emergency Medicine.*
She leaned down, her hands moving over my abdomen, then hovering directly over the rotting crater on my heel. She didn't touch the blackened tissue—she examined the margins where the purple flesh met the red, inflamed border. She leaned down closer, sniffing the wound once, twice.
Her eyes snapped wide.
"Hold the broad-spectrum antibiotics for thirty seconds," Dr. Mensah commanded, her voice slicing through the chaos of the room like a scalpel. "Draw blood cultures, wound swabs from the deep margins, and prepare an immediate bedside tissue biopsy."
She turned sharply to the charge nurse standing beside the telemetry cart.
"Call the Chicago Police Department," Dr. Mensah said, her voice chillingly quiet.
The room seemed to freeze. A young resident paused with a syringe half-raised. "Dr. Mensah? Police? Isn't this an aggressive Group A Strep or Clostridium infection?"
"Look at the margin discoloration, look at the cellular lysis pattern, and look at the crystalline residue on the epidermis," Dr. Mensah replied, her gaze boring into the resident with terrifying intensity. "This isn't an environmental bacterial infection. This is a deliberate, chemical-biological assault. Somebody poured a synthetic proteolytic agent laced with a hyper-accelerant directly into this woman’s vascular system."
Dr. Mensah then placed both hands firmly on my trembling shoulders. Her voice was remarkably gentle amidst the clinical storm. "Reese. You are in septic shock, and your leg is deteriorating at a rate I have only seen in biological weapon research. Who did this to you?"
With my last ounce of consciousness, I lifted my trembling hand, holding up my phone with Tristan’s text message glowing on the screen: *“Do not tell them anything about the cream until I get there.”*
"My husband," I whispered behind the plastic oxygen mask. "He made the cream."
Dr. Mensah glanced at the phone, and a terrifying fury ignited in her eyes. She handed the phone directly to the charge nurse. "Take a photo of this screen for evidentiary preservation. And tell security that if a man named Tristan Vance steps through those front doors, he is not to be allowed within fifty feet of this unit."
Just as the fentanyl hit my IV line, plunging my agony into a thick, velvety numbness, the exterior doors of the trauma wing hissed open.
Through the frosted glass partition, I saw him.
May you like
Tristan was standing at the security desk, dry and composed despite the torrential rain outside, holding an expensive leather briefcase, flashing an apologetic, charismatic smile at the guard as he explained that his hysterical wife had wandered off in the night.
***
