Chapter 3 - CODE BLUE
"Kill you?" I stared at him in utter disbelief. "I just agreed to save your life, and your plan starts with suicide?"
"Not real death, Clara. Clinical death," Nicholas explained calmly, leaning forward as he spoke in a low, sharp tone. "At 03:00 AM, the night shift guards go on a smoke break in the rear alley. Only one guard remains at the door—Marco. The hospital staff on this floor is stripped down to two nurses and an orderly."
He reached over to the bedside tray, his long fingers picking up a small glass vial containing a paralyzing agent—Vecuronium—that I had prepared earlier for his routine spasticity management.
"You inject me with a double dose of this," Nicholas said, looking up at me. "It will paralyze my lungs and drop my heart rate to near zero. The monitors will trigger a flatline alarm. Code Blue."
"Vecuronium without a mechanical ventilator will suffocate you in four minutes!" I protested, shaking my head violently. "Your brain will suffer irreversible damage! You could die for real!"
"Then you had better be fast with the atropine and the crash cart, won't you?" Nicholas countered, his eyes dark and unwavering. "When the Code Blue sounds, Marco will step into the room to verify my death. That is when you strike."
"Me?!" I gasped. "Strike him with what? I'm a nurse, not an assassin!"
"With this," Nicholas reached beneath his mattress, his hand sliding into a tear in the fabric. When he pulled his hand back out, he was holding a compact, black 9mm semi-automatic pistol.
I stumbled back, my breath catching in my throat. "Where... how did you get that?"
"I've been awake for three weeks, Clara," Nicholas said grimly, checking the magazine with practiced ease. "The world thinks a patient in a coma is blind and deaf. They don't notice when he slides a weapon off a guard’s belt while they lean over his bed to adjust his restraints. I’ve been waiting for the right moment. And you are that moment."
He held the gun out to me, butt first.
"Take it."
"No!" I pushed my hands out, refusing to touch the cold metal. "I don't shoot people! I save them!"
"You won't have to shoot him," Nicholas said coldly. "You just need to hand it to me when I wake up from the arrest. When Marco steps up to the bed to confirm my flatline, you hit the crash cart defibrillator, trigger the spark near the oxygen line, and create a distraction. In the chaos, I take Marco down."
It was a suicidal plan. A frantic, terrifying gamble that relied on split-second timing, medical precision, and pure luck. If I messed up the dosage of Vecuronium, Nicholas would suffocate. If I delayed the atropine, his heart would stop permanently. If Marco smelled a trap, he would put a bullet through both of our heads before the crash cart even warmed up.
"It's 02:45 AM," Nicholas murmured, looking up at the digital clock on the wall. "The shift change is almost over. Make your decision, Clara."
I looked at the clock. The red numbers seemed to pulse like a ticking bomb. 02:46 AM.
I thought about my small apartment in Chicago, the mountain of past-due notices sitting on my kitchen counter, and the sleek lawyer with the icy eyes who had forced me to sign away my rights. Nicholas was right. I was already dead the moment I stepped into this room. The only difference was whether I died on my knees or on my feet.
"Give me the syringe," I whispered.
A slow, terrifying smile spread across Nicholas’s face. "That’s my nurse."
I turned to the medical cart, my hands steadying as my training took over. I drew the clear liquid into the syringe, measuring the exact dose. A double dose of Vecuronium. Enough to mimic death, enough to stop his respiratory drive, but just shy of a lethal neurological overdose—if I was fast enough with the reversal agent.
I walked back to the bed. Nicholas lay back down, pulling the white sheet up to his chest. He looked up at me, his eyes dark and calm.
"If I don't wake up, Clara," he whispered, "the hidden safe behind the painting in my office has two million in cash. The combination is 10-24-88. Take it and run."
"Shut up," I snapped nervously, holding the syringe above his IV port. "You're going to wake up. Because if you don't, I'm going to kill you myself."
Nicholas chuckled softly. "Do it."
I inserted the needle into the port and pushed the plunger down.
Within seconds, Nicholas’s body went rigid. His eyes rolled back slightly, his pupils dilating as the paralyzing agent flooded his nervous system. His chest stopped rising. His jaw went slack.
Beside the bed, the heart monitor began to slow down.
Beep...
Beep...
Beep...
Then, a long, continuous, terrifying tone filled the silence of Room 412.
BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP.
FLATLINE.
The red alarm light on top of the door began to flash violently. The screen screamed in bright crimson text: PATIENT CARDIAC ARREST - CODE BLUE.
The door of Room 412 burst open.
Marco rushed in, his gun already drawn in his right hand. He took one look at the flatlining monitor, then stared at Nicholas’s motionless, graying body on the bed.
"What the hell happened?!" Marco roared, striding toward the bed.
"He's in full arrest!" I screamed, forcing tears of horror into my eyes as I grabbed the handles of the crash cart and slammed it against the side of the bed. "No pulse! Respiration zero! Get out of my way!"
Marco stepped closer, leaning over Nicholas’s body to check his neck for a carotid pulse. "Is he dead? Is the bastard finally dead?!"
"I said move!" I shrieked.
I grabbed the defibrillator paddles, charged them to maximum voltage, and instead of pressing them to Nicholas’s chest, I swung the left paddle directly into the exposed oxygen valve on the wall wall unit!
SPARK!
A blinding flash of electric blue fire erupted from the wall, igniting the residual oxygen gas with a loud BANG!
Marco yelled, instinctively flinching and shielding his face from the sudden burst of sparks and flame.
In that fraction of a second, the motionless body on the bed sprang to life like a demon summoned from the deep.
Nicholas’s hand shot out, grabbing Marco’s tactical vest and violently slamming his face down onto the metal edge of the crash cart. Blood splattered across the white linoleum floor. Before Marco could recover, Nicholas snatched the 9mm pistol from his hand, reversed the grip, and slammed the butt of the gun straight into Marco’s temple.
Marco’s eyes rolled back, and he collapsed to the floor like a sack of concrete.
Nicholas was gasping for air, his throat making ragged, wet sounds as the remaining paralysis fought against his breathing. He slumped back against the bed, his knuckles turning white as he held the gun.
"Atropine..." Nicholas choked out, his eyes wide with desperate hypoxia. "Clara... atropine... now!"
I didn't waste a second. I grabbed the pre-loaded syringe of atropine from the cart, shoved it directly into his neck muscle, and pushed the drug in.
Nicholas gasped, his chest expanding with a violent, deep gulp of air. Color slowly returned to his cheeks, his pupils constricting back to normal.
"You... you crazy bastard," I breathed, collapsing onto my knees beside the bed, my body shaking uncontrollably. "It worked."
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Nicholas looked down at the unconscious body of Marco, then reached out, grabbing my blood-stained scrub collar to pull me close to his chest.
"That was step one, Clara," Nicholas whispered, his dark eyes burning with ruthless triumph. "Now... step two: we burn this hospital to the ground."
