#Chapter 114: Emergency Room

I’m hastily ushered from the packed Emergency Room lobby to a smaller waiting area - stationing me in a kind of alcove within a long hallway. Although the hall is a separate wing in the ER and isolated from all the patient rooms and nursing stations, none of the bustling activity is fully dampened, leaving me exposed to its sights and sounds. I hug my head in anguish and listen as beeps echo, phones ring, sneakers squeak across tiles, voices fill the air with overhead paging, and carts trundle down the hallways. An unpleasant stench of bleach, blood and sickness assaults my senses. My own shirt smells of vomit. It's stained brown and it's still wet. A baby cries nearby, evoking a twinge of sorrow within me. With trembling hands, I reach for my phone. No signal. Good thing I was in my right mind to call Hannah and Kadeem right away. Two people sit nearby in this space of suffering with me: an ashen-faced woman clad in blood-splattered jeans and a bandaged arm - her eyes fixed