Ward D

by Freida McFadden

It’s Mary. Mary Cummings. She’s finally joined her husband.

A male with the frame of a football player, dressed in blue scrubs. And when the beam hits his eyes, they are staring ahead at nothing.

“Cameron,” I whisper. “Cam…” He’s dead too.

The carnage is not over. The first is a woman. I don’t recognize her, but she is just as still as Mary and Cameron. She’s lying face down on the floor, her arms and legs splayed out around her body. She’s dressed in only her underwear. And there’s one final body. This one is a man. He looks like he was in his seventies, with a bushy white beard. Like the woman, he is also in his underwear. I notice a bruise blossoming on his shoulder from where he tried to bash the door down. As I shine my light on his head, I can make out the deep indentation in his skull.

“I thought he was dead the first time,” a voice from behind me speaks up. “But he wasn’t. He got up and he kept trying to get out of the damn room. Fortunately, the second time I hit him in the head, I had better results.”

I don’t know what Nicole was going to say next, but she never gets a chance. Damon removes what appears to be a paperweight from the pocket of his scrubs and bashes it against her skull with incredible force. Nicole stops speaking mid-sentence, and a second later, she crumples to the floor.

“Maybe you should’ve dropped a few more hallucinogens in her peach iced tea.” I feel like Damon just slugged me. For a moment, my entire world is crashing down around me. “What?”

“You are always drinking those iced teas. It was so easy just to drop a little something in there if you went to the bathroom or… you know.”

Damon’s face morphs into a mesh of white lines. He screams and claws at his cheeks. “Go web!” a voice yells out. I stare at the scene unfolding in front of me. It takes me a moment to figure out what just happened, and when I do, I can’t quite believe it. It’s Spider-Dan. He came out of freaking nowhere and dropped a web constructed out of dental floss onto Damon’s face. And now he is tightening the web, cutting off Damon’s airway.

“Whatever else happens,” she says, “it all ends tonight for you, girlie.” And then her hands wrap around my neck.

stopped her once before though. Maybe I can do it one more time. If only I had a weapon. Mary’s knitting needle! It’s still in your pocket—stab her with it!

As hard as I can, I jab the knitting needle right into Jade’s rib cage.

“I told you I would protect you, Amy,” Spider-Dan tells me.

My mouth almost feels too dry to speak. “I think it was Ativan,” I croak. “Is he… what’s going on?” She flashes me a grim look. “He wasn’t breathing.”

Five dead bodies on the unit. And Will down in the ICU, a tube stuck down his throat so he can breathe.

“He’s too good for you, you know.” I jolt slightly at the voice. I drop my eyes, and my heart sinks. A pretty little girl is standing in front of me as if waiting for an iced dirty chai tea latte of her own. Her blond hair curls around her heart-shaped face, and she’s wearing an immaculate and frilly pink dress. Her familiar blue eyes bore into me, an unreadable expression on her face. I hate this little girl. So much.

“Unless you kill him first.”

She’ll never entirely leave me though. I saw her the most when I was drinking those iced teas laced with hallucinogens, but even after Jade left my life, I still saw the little girl from time to time. It’s been nine years, and I have never told a soul aside from Jade. I don’t know if the drugs she slipped me triggered something inside me that couldn’t be turned off, but that little girl is always with me. Always. And she always tells me to do things. Bad things. But I don’t listen. Of course I don’t. Well, most of the time.

did listen at that party when Cameron and I hooked up. I dropped some laxatives from the medicine cabinet into his girlfriend Jess’s drink because I had my eye on Cameron for a while, and the little girl knew how badly I wanted to get him alone. I listened to her when she told me to send a damning letter to the director of that research fellowship Cam applied to because she knew I didn’t want him disappearing across the country for an entire year. I also listened to her when she told me to go back and check Seclusion One instead of making my escape from Ward D. And when she whispered in my ear to stab Jade with Mary’s knitting needle. I never would have thought to do that on my own.

mean, I would never kill anyone just because the little girl told me to. Even though it feels like more and more, that’s what she’s been telling me to do. But I wouldn’t do it. After all, I would have to be insane to do something like that.