Chapter 4 - The Dead Wing
I left Noah under the direct guard of two armed state troopers whom I knew personally from my years in the trauma bay. I told them to shoot anyone who walked through that door without Dr. Pierce or Detective Vance.
Then I took the service elevator to the seventh floor.
The seventh floor of St. Mercy was a ghost town. The air smelled of dust, dry wall, and old pharmaceuticals. Yellow plastic tape reading DANGER - NO UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY crisscrossed the double wooden doors leading into the former psychiatric unit.
I used my master staff keycard—the one given to senior charge nurses for utility access. The electronic lock beeped twice and clicked open.
I pushed through into the dark corridor.
My penlight beam cut through the thick dust hanging in the air. The walls were painted a dull institutional green, peeling away in long strips. Old patient rooms lined both sides, their doors standing half-open like hollow eye sockets.
At the end of the hall sat the old head nurse’s station.
On the counter, illuminated by the beam of my light, was a pristine silver laptop, plugged into a portable lithium battery pack. It was running, its screen glowing bright blue in the pitch blackness.
I approached slowly, my boots crunching on broken plaster.
On the screen was a live video feed.
Four split windows.
Window 1: A camera angled down at my house on Elm Street. Two black SUVs were parked in my driveway.
Window 2: A camera inside the ICU room where Noah lay in bed.
Window 3: A live data stream from St. Mercy’s pharmacy automation system, showing real-time dispensing logs for high-potency narcotics.
Window 4: A document file open to a spreadsheet titled: PHASE IV TRIAL - SUBJECT LISTING (DENVER METRO).
I leaned over the keyboard, scrolling through the spreadsheet.
My heart stopped.
There were forty names on that list. Every single one of them was a patient who had passed through St. Mercy’s ICU over the past eighteen months.
Next to eight of the names was a red line drawn through the entry, with a single date and a dose notation: Fentanyl / Xylazine cocktail - Terminal.
And in the column labeled Authorized Attending Nurse, listed next to every single deceased patient... was my employee identification number. E. WALKER - RN #4092.
"It's a very clean system, Ethan," a voice spoke from the shadows behind the nurse's desk.
I spun around, shining my penlight into the corner.
Dr. Marcus Pierce stepped out into the light. He wasn't wearing his blue scrubs anymore. He wore a dark wool coat, holding a small leather case in his left hand and a heavy black automatic pistol in his right.
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"Marcus?" my voice was a raspy whisper. "What is this?"
"This," Pierce said calmly, pointing the gun directly at my chest, "is a three-hundred-million-dollar pharmaceutical trial for a new neuro-inhibitor. The board needed a clinical setting with high mortality cover. And we needed an ICU charge nurse whose file was clean enough that no regulatory agency would ever look twice at his shift logs."
