Zachary Goode never thought he could hate anything more than hospitals.
He was wrong.
Hospitals were horrible, terrible places. The clean, white walls were just cages where they shelter the sick from the rest of the world. Lined faces of doctors, humans who couldn't un-see the horrors they had witnessed. The cold air and the feeling of death that seemed to ooze from every nook and cranny. He'd seen enough hospitals to last him a lifetime.
Yup, hospitals suck.
But asylums were way worse.
"Right this way, Mr. Goode," the receptionist said, pointing him in the direction of an extremely attractive woman in her thirties, and snapping him out of his thoughts. Zach stood up without a word, handed her the clipboard with his information on it, and began to follow the woman in scrubs down the hallway that seemed to stretch on endlessly, one depressing room after than next. Even without any patients in sight, Zach still felt a deranged aura about the place.
It took him a moment to realize she was talking, "So its says here you are seventeen, Mr. Goode."
"Yes ma'am," Zach replied, ever the gentleman.
"And I take it you aren't very comfortable in places like this?"
He glanced up at her sheepishly, and rubbed the back of his neck, "That obvious, huh?"
Her eyes twinkled with the smallest bit of amusement, and Zach was once again struck by how pretty she was for someone in her thirties, even in pale green scrubs, "Sorry, Sugar, I'm just exceedingly observant," she said, the smallest trace of a southern accent bleeding through.
Zach couldn't help smiling back.
She turned back to her sheet, and led him further down the hallway until they got to an elevator, before she spoke again, "I'm Nurse Michelson, but everyone just calls me Kelly."
They shook hands before Kelly continued speaking, as if silence was unacceptable, "Now what's is an handsome senior like yourself doing, volunteering here?"
Her question sounded like a challenge, but Zach still didn't know how to answer, "I need to do Service Learning for school, so I figured if I have to 'help the community' anywhere it might as well be where my Uncle Steve works," he sighed and looked out the window, and muttered to himself "but I guess I was wrong."
Kelly looked disappointed by his answer, but perked up when the elevator light pinged "Well you're in for a ride," she chirped.
The elevator doors opened and she stepped through, and threw both her arms out in an extravagant gesture, "Welcome to the asylum housing wing"
~C~
Common mistake: that people in mental wards are crazy all the time. As Zach spent more time chatting with Grant, he realized that wasn't true.
Kelly had dropped Zach off for "bonding time" with Grant Newman almost immediately, because her walky-talky type thing she wore around her neck began buzzing about some patient that was having a meltdown and they needed backup. She walked away muttering to herself about teenage hormones making everything twice as bad.
"He's the most normal," she'd said, "Just... turn your cell-phone off before you see him.
Grant had signed up for the Army straight out of high school. Apparently he was some sort of Captain America in disguise because he was sent to Afghanistan after graduating from boot camp in just 3 weeks instead of nine. He became a Lieutenant in less than a year. He was one of the strongest soldiers the U.S. Army had seen in years. Then things took a turn for the worse.
When he was twenty, Grant's entire troop was attacked. Guns were fired, before he knew it, all his men were gone. Grant had been shot three times, two in the chest and one in the leg, and nobody expected him to survive so they just left him there. But he did...mostly.
"So you see, that's why they won't let me out of here," Grant finished his story cheerfully, as if stating reasons for being imprisoned was something you do to any stranger you meet, "Because apparently, my post-traumatic stress is too severe and I'll go crazy and try to kill someone with a pillow or something."
A young male doctor knocked on the door of Grant's 'room' (if you could classify a padded, white room with a single bed and no windows as such) and entered, "Hello Mr. Goode, I hear you joined our crew. I'm Dr. Kale. You can call me Jonas. Grant, we need to go run some tests."
Grant shuffled out of the room, and Zach almost followed, before the doctor stopped him.
"What?" He asked confused.
The Jonas glanced at Grant real quick before turning back to look at Zach with a gray-eyed, piercing gaze.
"Be careful with Grant. He may seem alright, but if you ever so much as make a loud noise around him, it could be disastrous."
Zach scoffed, disbelieving, "Why is he even here, he seems so normal?"
The Jonas's stare frosted over for a second before replying, "Because he almost killed his little sister once before."
Okay so maybe they aren't crazy all the time, Zach thought, but they're still nutcases.
Zach began wandering the housing wing looking for Kelly, or even his Uncle Steve, but no such luck. All he saw was room after room of the craziest people in Roseville, Virginia. In one room, a middle-aged women was hiding under a table, sucking her thumb as a doctor attempted to coax her out . In another, someone had taken a crayon to the wall and drawn cross-hairs over and over. Creepy.
Finally, he saw a crowd of nurses and doctors circled around something at the end of the hall. A woman's scream seemed to be emanating from it, and Zach hoped to God that nobody unstable was anywhere near the fray.
He ran closer hoping to get a closer look, but he couldn't see anything until a flash of brownish-blonde hair whipped through the crowd and caught his eye. He'd only seen one girl who had that color hair.
It couldn't be her.
He pushed through the throng of nurses swiftly, and rushed to the center of the crowd to find 3 doctors, his Uncle Steve and Nurse Kelly, all trying to subdue a teenage girl about his age. With her brownish hair falling around her face, her frail body, skinnier than before, flailing around and her deep blue eyes sunken with terror, she looked completely deranged. Completely different.
But it was still her.
Kelly looked up long enough to see him there, "A little help would be nice, Sugar."
"Cammie?" Zach exclaimed, unable to believe it was her. His ex-girlfriend was in an asylum.
Cameron Ann Morgan's eyes focused, and she suddenly broke free of the fight and threw herself into his arms sobbing.
"Oh Zach, please help me- please, oh please, ple-"
She didn't finish her begs. Because they shot her with a tranquilizer gun.
Yup, Zach thought, Asylum's are definitely worse
So Yeah. That did not go the way I planned. See I mean for this to be a new chapter for Bring Me Back (which I will get to eventually, haste makes waste) but then I'd read GG5 again this morning, and I loved it, so I wanted to write something about Cammie being a nutcase from other people's POV. Then it just turned into this. Whoops. I liked it anyway. Next chapter should be like two weeks from now. Oh, and in case you're wondering what Service Learning is, it's this thing they make all of the seniors do in Virginia; You have to do about 50 hours of community service.
~Sarah
P.S. Have you guys seen the Titanic. I haven't. But I saw about half-an-hour's worth of the best scenes on youtube yesterday, and even without seeing the whole thing, I was bawling my eyes out when Jack froze to death (SPOILER). Leo Dicaprio is so unfairly hot.