"Dr Mol, your 7:18 is here!"
"Thank you Karen, give me 17 seconds!" Mol spun around in his chair and frantically rummaged in the heavy tool chest in the corner of the room. There it was! He snatched the crowbar out and spun back around to the examination couch.
"So how did you say this happened?"
"Sat on it, doc" said his 7:15.
"Ah yes, of course" Mol tried his best to feign sincerity while positioning the bar to gain good purchase. The cheese slope had been wedged in there pretty well, and unless the man had fallen onto it from the stratosphere, Mol was pretty sure he knew how it'd gone up there. "Right, this might be a little uncomfortable" he said, gripping the rod tightly and leaning on it with as much of his body weight as he could. With a loud 'pop' the triangular prism shot up, hit the ceiling, came back down, bounced off the doctor's head and came to rest on the floor, probably mighty relieved to be freed from its temporary host.
"Cheers doc" said the man, getting up slightly awkwardly.
"Anytime" replied Mol automatically, before he could bite his tongue.
As the patient left the room, the medik glanced at the clock. 7:19:27 - he was only 87 seconds behind! Remarkable even by his standards! Soon, he will have finished his last 96 hour shift of the month - only, he wasn't quite sure whether it was 7 in the morning or at night... he allowed himself an extra 3 seconds to look to the window while taking another swig of Brootal Brew Koffee with one hand and wiping the sweat off his brow with the other, but through the gaps in the blinds he could only see a mid-greyness which didn't give up any hints at the time of day to his whacked out circadian system. He shrugged internally - Karen would tell him once the clinic was done anyway, there was no point musing on such trivialities now.
"Send the 7:18 in, Karen!"
The door opened and a man in rags stumbled in, swaying.
Great, another victim of a drunken brawl. What an appropriate use of the service - Mol thought to himself cynically. That was one of the many issues with being the only professionally trained Medik in town - anything and everything could come through the doors at any time. Two-by-four fall on your head? See Dr Mol. Slipped on banana peel? See Dr Mol. Dragon bit your head off? Axe to the face? Blastershot? Cursed by a witch? Toxic alien slime? Go see Dr Mol! There were hard limits to what he could do, of course - no one can possibly possess the knowledge and skills to treat every single injury and ailment in the universe. It was only going to get worse, of course. First, the government decided it'd be a good idea to announce Linkingrad's existence to the whole cosmos in a press release, inviting in a steady stream of interstellar travelers, tourists, and shady types. And now, there were rumours that some mad loons from space were planning an "Interdimensional Highway", and that sounded like a surefire way to keep him busy with alien superbugs and horrendous battle injuries. On the other hand, he had to admit that new Brootal Brew drink was a galactic godsend...
Mol snapped out of his grim daydream and squinted, trying to focus on the patient at hand.
"Take a seat, sir! How can I help you? One too many Maniak Beers, perhaps? I've got just the thing, here, take a sip of this" the doctor switched on his professionally friendly patter, and offered his Koffee flask to the man, but the latter pushed it aside, and leant forwards, steadying himself by clutching onto the desk between them.
"Augmentin Mol. You-"
"Yes, that's me sir, now, if you'd just like to take a seat as you appear to be in quite a bad w-"
Mol fell silent as the patient waved a hand urgently in front of his face.
"Augmentin Mol. Remember me." The rag-man hissed from between clenched teeth, his eyes fixed on Mol in a desperate effort of focus. "You will... remember. You... must... remember..."
The man collapsed to the floor. Mol leapt around his desk and knelt next to him. Breathing - shallow. Pallor. Unconscious. No visible bleeding. No sign of ray burn. The medik sprung up, grabbed the oxygen mask and opened the tap on the tank to maximum. Hisssss... Strap over head, mask on face. He bounced up again towards the cupboard this time. Poison? Bezoar-charcoal powder was there on the shelf... Unconscious, no swallow. Need to boost vitals first.
"This one's going to take a bit longer, Karen!" he shouted, snatching a syringe, cannula and IV bag.
"Gotcha, doc! I'll keep these lot back here in line!" came the croaky reply.
Mol was already drawing up from the flask. He quickly injected into the bag, hung it, connected up the tubing, then back down to floor level. Cannula - in. Connector - twisted on. Tap - open. He watched the slightly fluorescent liquid dance down the line, as if it had a life of its own. Or maybe it really did? The medik turned to face the patient and observe the effects. Any second now, the man would spring up and thank him for saving his life. Or at least get some colour back, or something. Any moment now. Any. Moment. Now. Any...
Nothing. Not even a twitch. In fact, the mystery man seemed to be fading away even more than before. Mol was sure it had been at least 10 seconds since the Koffee had hit the bloodstream. To his horror, he now realised the breathing had stopped. Shit. Think, THINK! Swaying, confused speech, no external bleeding, collapse, unresponsive, arrest. Intracranial event? Must be! Heart pounding in his throat, with eyes still on the ragged man and one arm rhythmically, desperately attempting compressions, Mol reached back and started blindly feeling around in his equipment chest for the power drill. Trepanation was a long shot, but there really isn't much to lose when someone has already dropped the keys at reception, picked up their bags, and is walking out of the foyer at the Hotel of Life. Just as his moist palm closed around the grip of the tool and lifted it out, a bead of sweat dropped from his chin onto the dirty cloth. It did not splash - rather stopped, gingerly, just above it, as if having hit an invisible membrane. No! They were the rags themselves that it'd reached, but Mol realised the top layer of fabric was now somewhat translucent, and slightly shimmering, as if the light greeting it from the window was unsure what the etiquette was in this chance encounter, and was now refracting in an awkward hello and goodbye at the same time. Likewise the pearl of his sweat was now half sliding off, half seeping slowly through, this seemingly physics-defying film of glistening nothing. The medik glanced to the face - the skin was displaying the same mind-bending effect, and his eyes had trouble focusing on it - the features becoming unsettlingly blurred. Not a brain bleed then. Magik. The sweaty hand released the drill and dived back in the toolbox. After a moment of dancing around, it found its mark. A shaman's rattle now appeared over the unfortunate man, and started passing over him, with Mol trying his best to remember any healing incantations.
"erm... wolololololo...no... hmmm... abracadabragetwellsoon..."
He was lucky the dusty copy of 'Ker-Triage! for Dimmies' on his shelf was inanimate and incapable of cringing to pieces.
The medik continued his ritual mechanically for several minutes, but to no avail. He eventually recognised death had bested him this time. The patient lay with his body fixed still as a waxwork, its surface even more translucent than before. Mol pulled back, and continued to kneel silently now for a moment, listening to the oxygen continue to hiss. He sighed, dropped the rattle, and got slowly to his feet, almost collapsing back down again as fatigue suddenly hit him like a bag of bricks.
"This one's gone unfortunately, Karen" he shouted, straightening his aching spine and turning away to wash his hands in the sink.
"Aww poor sod! Back to The Box for him, Two-by-Two rest his soul! I'll put it in the log!"
Ah, good, old, spiritual Karen. No doubt she was already on the phone to the Boxer monks from her local temple, who would soon come by to whisk away the body.
He switched off the tap and turned back around, planning to start putting away his scattered resuscitation equipment - and then froze, stunned.
There was no body on the floor. In fact, there was not a single trace of his valiant reanimation efforts: the oxygen mask and tubing were neatly hung on the cylinder; the IV line was coiled up next to the koffee machine as usual; the shamanic rattle and trepanation drill were back in the tool chest. It was as if the last appointment had not happened at all. Mol stared around his clinic room incredulously, suddenly aware of his heart pounding through his sternum, and a high pitched ringing noise piercing his eardrums. Inside his brain, the visual cortex and the hippocampus were having a heated argument, which was in serious danger of escalating into a proper punch-up. The higher level executive cortex spotted what was about to happen, got off its high horse and stepped in just in time to prevent full mental breakdown.
It was all just a hallucination. I'm too tired, I've had too much koffee, and no sleep. It happens. It's not uncommon. I'm nearly at the end of the shift, it will all be ok. Breathe - the doctor closed his eyes, and took a deep breath in... and out, slowly counting to 10 in his head. He opened his eyes, stiffened his upper lip, marched over to his chair and sat down.
"Send the next one in, Karen!"
The rest of the shift passed by in a blur, with people in various states of disrepair rotating through the medik's office at speed. Soon enough, Karen had let him know that he was done for the day, and that she would be hopping on home too. The clock hands proudly saluted 9:04:16. Mol slowly got up from his chair, peeked through the window blinds, and confirmed it was indeed nine o'clock in the morning. He tidied up the space around his desk, made sure all his implements were back in their proper places, and stepped out of his room into the reception area.
He was about to leave through the door when he suddenly remembered something and turned back. He walked over to the reception desk, leant over the counter and reached underneath it, straining as he pulled up a very thick, leather-bound book. 'PAN-UNIVERSAL HEALTH CLINIC LOG' was embossed in proud gold lettering on the cover. He opened the book and started leafing through the pages quickly to find the day's entries. Upon finding them, he looked down at the list, frowning to focus his sleep-deprived vision and read Karen's jagged handwriting. He traced his finger down the paper and finally found what he was looking for, just past 7am:
7:15 - Rob Loks, sat on cheese slope
7:18 -
7:21 - Anita Yellowcastle, animal bite (possibly werewolf)
Augmentin Mol screwed his eyes shut and felt a cold shiver hit his spine. His head spun. He took a clumsy step back. Yes, it was possible for him to have hallucinated a patient in exhaustion, and it was far less likely for a real, physical person to vanish without a trace. But if there was one event which was truly impossible in this universe, it was the image currently burned deep into his sleep-deprived retinas - a free, unclaimed appointment slot at Linkin Lane Pan-Universal Health Centre.
