Chapter Text
IF ANYONE ASKED, Dennis would tell them it was the phone call that woke him up at that ungodly hour that morning. The night shift change nurse, Lena, had certainly assumed so; an apology interspersed every other word, turning a five-second question into a five minute mea culpa.
“I wouldn’t have called—sorry again, hun—if we didn’t really need the extra hands,” she kept saying.
Someone was shouting in the background. Machines beeped. Alarms blared. Gurney wheels rattled. The noises blurred into a hazy approximation of the Emergency Department in his mind’s eye, a mess of faceless figures fluttering across the sterile white floors. A sense-memory, the sharp stench of sanitizer rubbing into his palms, burnt his nostrils. His knuckles itched faintly, suddenly too dry.
Dennis sighed. He didn’t want to go in early. He didn’t want to go in at all. Not today, not tomorrow, maybe not ever again.
But Lena sounded so frazzled, even over Dennis’ tinny phone speakers, one of which hardly worked after incurring a bit of water damage.
(He’d dropped his cell in the toilet last week. It had been the tail end of a messy shift, his ninth in a row without a day off, when his mounting exhaustion and an unmarked puddle turned a bathroom break into an Olympic gymnastics routine as he tried in vain not to collapse directly into the urinal.
Fortunately, he’d managed to avoid chipping a tooth on the porcelain. Unfortunately, in the process of protecting his face, the hand holding his phone punched straight into the bowl, and the other, scrambling for any kind of purchase, caught the flush handle.
Despite Trinity’s knowing laughter, neither she nor anyone else questioned why Dennis had emerged from the men’s room miserable and soaked up to the elbow. His cell resided in a bag of rice on the staff room counter for the remainder of the evening.)
“Yeah.” Dennis scrubbed a hand across his face. “Yeah, I’ll be right in, Lena.” Before she could resume her tired apologies, he added, “No worries.”
Lena thanked him profusely. The commotion in the background crescendoed. An ECG monitor screeched. Before Dennis could inquire, Lena grumbled something that sounded vaguely like a profanity and hung up without saying goodbye.
For a full minute, Dennis laid in his bed, staring blankly up at the pitch black ceiling. Everything was fine. Everything was just peachy fucking keen.
He should have expected this. Night shift had lost Doctor Shen to a particularly nasty case of the stomach flu the night before. He’d tried valiantly to push through the pain, but no amount of fluids or ginger chews could prevent him from spewing on a patient’s boots before very long. Doctor Abbot had sent Shen home with anti-nausea tablets and a promise that they could make do without him for a few days.
Probably.
Dennis rolled over and groaned into his pillow. Every bone in his body ached. He tried to stretch, but his limbs protested, stiff and heavy from fatigue.
God, he just wanted to sleep.
Dennis didn’t blame Lena for calling him in. He certainly didn’t blame Shen for falling ill, nor Abbot for dismissing him. All of Dennis’ frustrations fell squarely on only one person’s shoulders: his own.
If he were being honest, Lena’s call hadn’t woken him. He kept his ringer perpetually switched off—a lesson hard-learnt and not readily forgotten. Plus, in the rare instances he could squeeze in a few hours of shut-eye, he slept like the dead. Trinity had threatened, on multiple occasions, to take a Louisville slugger to his neglected alarm clock if he didn’t start shutting it off more promptly. She’d even taken to breaking into his room, privacy be damned, to drag him out of bed on the days he slept so deep that he nearly made them late to work. His phone could have vibrated so violently it buzzed right off the bedside table, and he still probably would have snored straight through.
So, no, that call hadn’t woken him. The act of waking someone up implied the prerequisite of that someone being asleep. And Dennis…
Dennis needed coffee. Desperately.
HITS THE SPOT CAFÉ, like any emergency facility, operated twenty-four-seven. Dennis mumbled his order to the dead-eyed barista. She took his crumbled dollar bills without counting. He didn’t dare ask for the change.
As far as frontline workers went, Dennis ranked early morning baristas somewhere between police and EMTs, and well above firefighters in terms of baseline stress levels. His scale might be skewed, he knew; he’d never met a firefighter who didn’t seem perpetually chilled out enough to warrant a drug test.
The barista didn’t speak as she prepped his order. She was the only one behind the counter, save for the baker hidden in the back. Dennis knew the barista’s name, Marley, without checking the name tag pinned to her apron.
Hits the Spot didn’t make good coffee but any stretch of the imagination. It only barely beat out the disgusting experiment in microbiology the hospital cafeteria called its coffee machine. However, it was the only café in a ten mile radius of the Pitt that operated twenty-four-seven. Everyone who worked at the hospital frequented it. The constant turnover of scrubs in all colors of the rainbow was probably the only reason Hits stayed in business.
Still, the owner refused to hire anything more than a skeleton crew, so poor Marley handled the graveyard all by herself most nights.
Dennis could sympathize. He knew a thing or two about cheap bosses and staffing shortages.
Dennis and Trinity stopped by Hits every sixth shift. Residents at the Pitt were supposed to work six on, two off, though many of them picked up extra days if a lack of hands necessitated it. Trinity consider sixth shift coffee a moral boost, a little treat to propel them through their final hours until a blissful two day break. While they braced for their seven a.m. start, Marley prepared to shed her apron. Dennis and Trinity were often her last order before she jumped ship. They knew each other’s faces by now, though they never exchanged more than pleasantries.
The frother sputtered, splashing hot milk on Marley’s forearms. She barely blinked. She transferred it to a paper to-go cup, poured his espresso shot in, plunked a lid on top, gave it a halfhearted shake, then slid the drink across the counter to him. The world’s least reverential latte. Dennis took it gratefully. Warmth immediately seeped into his palms, not quite scalding but certainly on the sharper side of hot. The familiar shock of fresh coffee flooded his nostrils. He inhaled deeply.
Behind him, the door chimed. A train of construction workers chugged in, pinging raucous complaints and insults off one another’s neon hard hats.
Marley shared a blank look with Dennis. The purple crescents stamped under her eyes matched his own. He dumped all his loose coins in the tip jar and got out of the way.
As he crossed the threshold into the bitterly cold morning air, his phone buzzed. He shifted his coffee cup into one hand and pulled his cell out of his back pocket. An unflatteringly cropped photo of Abbot’s face splashed across the screen, illuminating Dennis in a faint peach glow. Sighing, Dennis answered.
“Hey, Doctor Abbot. I’m almost there,” he swore, tugging his jacket tighter around his shoulders. “I’m just—”
“Stopping at Hits, I bet,” Abbot cut him off. Like Lena, he sounded a bit fried, but that ever-present teasing tilt softened his tone. “That’s why I’m calling. This shift has been hell. If I promise to spot you back, will you grab me an Americano?”
Dennis glanced down at his coffee, then back through the café windows. The construction workers crowded the counter, behind which Marley swayed on her feet, looking just as drained as Dennis felt. He turned. A mile ahead, the Pitt, ever-lit, rose from the treeline, looming above surrounding buildings like a giant creature with a million eyes glowing white.
As for their rings, they were so high that they were dreadful; and their rings were full of eyes.
The Bible verse popped into Dennis’ head unbidden. That description of God’s angels had always unsettled him. After reading it in Wednesday Bible study somewhere between middle and high school, he’d never looked at the ceramic cherubs lined across his grandmother’s television cabinet the same way.
“Whitaker?” Abbot asked, muffled through the busted phone speaker. “Did I lose ya?”
Shaking himself, Dennis closed his eyes, blocking out the building in the distance.
“Will a latte work?”