The Night Shift by R.J. Blackmore — Excerpt
At eleven-fifty, the trauma line shrieked. Twice.
First: Male. Twenty-something. GSW to chest. Red Hook parking garage. Unconscious. Blood
pressure crashing. Three minutes out.
Second: Female. Thirties. Pedestrian versus vehicle on icy BQE service road. Conscious but
screaming. Crushed pelvis. Four minutes out.
The clock’s second hand jerked forward with mechanical indifference.
“OR 2 is prepped,” Rachel said, her voice clinical steel. “OR 1 locked up with ortho for twenty
more minutes.”
One room. Two critical patients. Sixty seconds apart. Simple, brutal math.
“Prep OR 2,” Adrian commanded. “Full data on both the moment they land.”
The gunshot victim arrived on a tide of metallic blood-scent and shouted vitals. Twenty-six. No
ID. Shattered phone. The wound gaped — left chest, no exit.
The bullet’s path revealed itself in the body’s desperate language: collapsing lung, shifting
trachea, silence where breath sounds should be. BP 60/nothing and plummeting.
Adrian drove the needle between ribs — hiss of trapped air escaping, pressure gauge jumping,
the man’s oxygen stats climbing three critical points. In that split second, he flicked his tongue
across his gloved fingertip where blood had seeped, back turned to Morgan as she threaded the
IV catheter.
The vision struck him all at once — a single jagged photograph pressed into his mind.
Concrete walls. A bare bulb. A man bolted to a metal chair, hollowed out by fear, then beyond
it. The methodical work of someone without vengeance, without mercy. He saw what remained
of the face.
And then it was gone. He was already moving.
Forty seconds later, they rolled Elena Vasquez in on a stretcher. Nurse, Queens hospital, just
off her shift. A car had smashed over the curb and hurled her eight feet onto frozen concrete.
Her dark hair was plastered to her forehead with blood; frost clung to her lashes. Conscious,
she managed three words through the pain: “My belly’s rigid.” A nurse’s instinct, even now.
Her eyes found his. “Am I going to make it?” Barely a whisper.
Adrian paused between Bay 2 and Bay 3 under the harsh fluorescents. In Bay 3: tension
pneumothorax, a bullet lost somewhere deep in a chest. In Bay 2: Elena’s blood pressure
sinking like a stone, her pelvis threatening to bleed her out. One operating room. Twenty
minutes before the other freed up — time neither of them could afford.
He saw the basement. He heard Elena’s quiet question echo in his mind. He made his choice.
“Ethan,” he said into his radio. “OR 2 — Mrs. Vasquez. I’m on my way.” He turned to Rachel:
“Hold him as long as you can. Everything we’ve got.”
He scrubbed in, letting the cool water sluice over his hands. Christmas Eve. He’d knelt at Mass
on this night once, in another life.
