Ch. 16 – This Town is Sick

Shouldn’t that old man deserve to die anyway? The rickety old medical IV pole almost tipped over as its wheels stopped and started while Derrick pulled it to the operating table. On top of being hard to roll around, it was also heavy: made of cast iron and mean to support large fluid pumps on its pole. He caught it just in time, righting it and pulling it again before it actually tipped over and crashed to the floor.

The young White Leopard in the suit slapped his thigh and yelled. “Are you retarded? Stop messing around and—”

“Would you please be quie—”

“DERRICK! I need your help,” Tony barked. “Stop getting distracted and listen to me. Get him on the IV right now.”

How many innocent people had the man killed? He was a White Leopard, and all White Leopards killed as part of their initiation. How many families had he ruined? “Okay,” Derrick said, trying to shake the thoughts away. Derrick braced his core and hoisted the pole up and carried it over, bypassing the wheels altogether. The damn thing was ten times as heavy as it was useful.

As Derrick set the pole down by the table and started priming the IV bag, Tony lowered his voice and spoke slowly. “Listen, Derrick. It’s just you, me, and the patient right now. It’s tough; we don’t usually deal with trauma, so I need you to find your razor-sharp focus. Don’t let that punk get to you.” And then he was back to his hospital voice: calm and in control. “We’ve done all we can for his Breathing. Let’s move on to Circulation.”

Derrick shook his head and tried to put those thoughts away. He hung the bag on the pole and grabbed the tourniquet from the tray.

Derrick wrapped the tourniquet around the elderly man’s upper-arm, looking and feeling for a vein while Tony listed off observations about how the elderly man was pretty much fucked. The patient had lost so much blood, it’d be a miracle if he made it, especially since their facilities at Hack Alley weren’t the best equipped. But that’s how it always was in Chinatown, especially after the all the new gangs moved in. The ambulances stopped coming, and the hospitals closed down. And the White Leopards only made the violence worse. Trauma victims would never make it to the big city in time, so they either died on the streets, or took their chances on a mod-doc like Tony and Derrick.

Wouldn’t it be ironic, if this old Leopard died like that? Derrick found a large vein on the patient’s wrinkled forearm and pushed down on it, feeling the bounce of a vein that was thick enough to handle the needle. The Leopard was so weak, and so vulnerable: barely hanging onto life. If he didn’t own a nice suit, and didn’t have a bunch of other Leopards waiting on him in the next room, he would seem like just another fragile old man whose life was close to being snuffed out.

He rubbed alcohol over the insertion site and then spread the skin taut with his fingers, keeping the vein in place, and aligned the catheter before sliding the needle in. Blood flashed into the chamber, meaning that he had stuck the vein properly. With his more dexterous, natural left hand, Derrick screwed on the tubing loop, while keeping pressure on the vein with his right hand, to make sure the patient didn’t start bleeding out of the catheter. After the loop was screwed in, he pushed the saline flush in through a syringe, and then secured the loose catheter to the patient’s forearm with a sterile adhesive strip.

Running across the old man’s forearm were long scars, which had faded with age. Maybe he hadn’t killed someone personally in a while, given that he wasn’t young and strong anymore. He had probably already forgotten the faces of the many innocents he had ended, who just happened to be in the way: innocents like a husband and wife, sitting in their homes, minding their own business, when all of a sudden, they were surrounded by a hellish inferno. There must have been so many like them.

Maybe they would save this one man’s life, but how many lives would be lost because this killer had recovered, and returned to the streets? He wasn’t going to jail; the cops didn’t even respond to calls from Chinatown. Was his life worth the senseless murder of their neighbors?

It would be easy to kill him. Derrick could just introduce air into the line he had just inserted and give him a gas embolism, blocking off the flow of blood through his veins, but—

Something felt off. Derrick finished taping the catheter to the patient’s forearm, and then looked down at his right glove. He flexed his prosthesis open and closed a few times, and the distinctive, staticky sensation of wetness lit up his hand’s touch sensors. It wasn’t sweat, obviously, so something had penetrated his gloves.

“Shit, Tony, my glove broke. I need to swap it out.” Derrick said. It had probably gotten caught on a pinch point when he was moving the patient around. It wasn’t like Derrick’s prosthesis itself could get infected, but any nasty stuff that broke through his glove could travel up to his stump as well, or gunk up the joints on his prosthesis. It was also impossible to sanitize the prosthesis without fully disassembling it, so it needed to be covered with a glove just like any other hand, to avoid infecting the patient.

“Go ahead, safety first; who knows what sorta sick shit this chump has in his system. But move those hands, Derrick. I need your help after you start the IV.”

Derrick sighed. That’s right, safety first. He tugged his right glove off and cleaned his prosthesis with an alcohol wipe, before picking a clean glove off the tray with his left fingers and pulling it carefully over the prosthesis.

Even if he played it off as an accident, the leap of Leopards in the shop was bound to be furious if they failed to save the old man—who was clearly important. Derrick couldn’t risk the chance of them murdering both Tony and himself, in typical Leopard fashion. Tony had risked his life to save Derrick, and give him a new name and face to hide from the Leopards, so the least Derrick could do was to avoid dying by their bite, and getting Tony bitten too. Tony and Derrick had to get these gangsters out of Hack Alley, or risk being their newest victims of the night.

But the shootings had to stop. The murders had to stop. The White Leopards—and other gangs—they were making Derrick sick; they were making Chinatown sick. And as a Hack Alley doctor, Derrick’s only choice was to be the cure. There was no other hope for this town.

“His blood pressure’s falling fast, way too fast. We’ve got our work cut out for us,” Tony said.

Derrick opened the clamp on the IV bag, and started pumping in the oxygen-carrying blood substitute. They had a lot of work to do.