Night Shift

The echo of her four--inch stilettos bounced from wall to wall in the dark corridor, the musky smell of damp trying to overpower her liberal spray of Chanel perfume, her crisp white lab coat displaying her name in blood red embroidery on the left breast pocket. She pushes hard on the double doors and blinks in the bright florescent light shining overhead in the hospital basement. She stops to take in the sight in front of her, ten standard hospital beds all lined up against the far wall looking like white marble dominoes laid flat. The room was an average size operating theatre and held all the equipment you would expect in such. She got to work reading each file slowly to ensure she had all the information needed. Each bed held a male ranging in age from 18 up to 70 and they all looked petrified, as most patients do in hospitals.

She was in her fifth year as a consultant in "life threatening diseases" and loved her job; she even volunteered for the night shift. She had wanted to be a doctor since she was a little girl and at the age of 40 she still felt passionate about her job. Still single and living the TV dinner lifestyle enabled her to pursue her other interests which she'd become involved with five years ago when she was approached by a good friend and co-worker who had the same beliefs and ethics as she did and since then she hadn't looked back.

Her brain digested the information from the files as she started to get the medical instruments ready for the night's work, her OCD ensuring everything was lined up perfectly on the trolley.

Lists of human rights had no place in this environment and only a select few knew of their purpose. She felt she was doing her part in ridding the world of a different kind of parasite: the human kind, and to her mind this was her contribution to stopping innocent people from being destroyed by acts of unthinkable evil. It didn't take her long to decide to join this elite organisation nor did she give a second thought to the "Hippocratic Oath."

As always, she was horrified by the details of the crimes of her subjects: paedophiles, rapists, murderers, the worst of society, with no claim to having the right to be treated with respect or having the liberty to breathe her air. Prison would be a playground for these monsters. It never failed to amaze her that humans were capable of inflicting so much pain and suffering on innocent people. The scale of the sadistic actions of a few sometimes made her stomach contents want to leave her body, and many times she had to swallow her dinner back down after reading the unthinkable contents of her patients' files. As far as she was concerned, the sickos lost their human rights when they committed their crimes.

She will always remember her first day, how the needle she held pierced the tattooed skin of a sixty-year-old white male who had been convicted of the rape and murder of a six-month-old baby girl. It only took about ten seconds before he was straining in horrendous pain against the wrist cuffs, screaming and using all his strength to escape. She had injected him with a sample drug for AIDS which was at the first stage of trial. She couldn’t look at him or speak any words as she contemplated what she was doing, but knew that at least an innocent animal hadn't been used for testing and that this piece of shit would feel a bit of karma. He died ten hours later, bleeding from his eyes and mouth, as well as the total failure of all his organs.

The number of subjects had increased quite a lot over the years. At the start it was one or two a month, but that had risen to over ten a month, which made for a busy schedule, but she embraced this as in her mind it meant less of these uncontrollable psychos being given the chance of parole.

Tonight's trial was for a new drug to replace chemotherapy for cancer, which it was claimed would reduce the evasive action for the patient. She advanced to the first bed and looked the male straight into his terror filled brown eyes.

"You are going to feel your victims' pain and know how helpless you made them feel, you sick bastard," she growled.

He shouted and fought against the restraints but he knew he was indeed helpless in his task. She rammed the needle into his left arm with as much force as she could muster and proceeded to empty the contents into his bulging vein, imagining the burning sensation as it snaked its way through his body. She repeated this with the other nine and didn't hide her pleasure as each one in turn knew what was coming, the fear giving off that unique odour. The last one to die took over four hours. It didn't take long to remove the still warm corpses from the beds, the crumpled and blood stained sheets tossed into the medical disposable bins so that the evidence would be burned. The room looked liked a wartime makeshift hospital with puddles of blood and other bodily fluids on the floor. All present felt the night had gone well and the research material obtained would be very valuable.

After washing her hands she made her way to her office on the second floor of the hospital, loving the silence that a night shift provided she sank exhausted into her chair and switched on her computer to log all the information gained from the night's work. About an hour later, she heard the hoover down the corridor letting her know it was the start of a new work day and that the cleaners had arrived.

"Quiet night again, Dr. Day?" asked the cleaner.

"It's been dead all night, Fred," she replied as she turned her computer off and looked forward to getting into her bed.

Dr. Fiona Day knew she would never get her childhood back but at least she could try and let other children have theirs.