Welcome to chapter two! Thanks a ton to any reveiwers, and also thanks to readers of my story... Now you can read some more!

Carla drummed her fingers against the edge of the bed distractedly. Her mother was sitting on the other side of the room, pretending to read a pamphlet about AIDs that she found somewhere in the waiting room, but really glancing at her daughter every few seconds when she thought she wasn't looking.

Carla sighed in that overly dramatic, exaggerated way that only people of the long-suffering younger generation are able to pull off, and crossed her arms, preparing to, once again, ask her even longer suffering mother just why she was making a big deal over nothing. But, just as she opened her mouth and her mom went back to pretending to read, so she wouldn't be caught looking, the door opened, and in walked a young man wearing blue scrubs and a slightly terrified expression.

He nervously cleared his throat a few times before speaking. "Hello," he said, "I'm Dr. Cox, your, well, doctor." Carla's mom, who was actually named Lisa Espinosa, stood up from her chair and put the pamphlet down on it. "Anyway," he continued, fingering the dull metal chart in his hands, "Why are you here?"

Carla shifted uncomfortably, looking to her mom for help, but she just crossed her arms in a way that suggested this was payback for some tiny thing her daughter had done, or, more likely, forgotten to do. Carla soon gave up her gaze of pleading, which at some point had turned into a glare of deep annoyance, once she realized her mother wasn't going to help her. "Um, well... wait, a nurse came in and wrote it on the clipboard thing." She pointed at the chart he was still fidgeting with, and glanced at Lisa triumphantly.

"Right," he said, flipping the chart open and glancing over the symptoms: abdominal pain, fever, and what was loosely described as 'chronic diarrhea'. "Okay, then, I'm going to…" He paused, commanding himself to think, think, he went to medical school for four years, come on, damn it… He swallowed. "Draw some blood." He smiled at Lisa.

She raised an eyebrow, wondering why this doctor seemed so nervous and— she added to herself as she saw him fumble with the needle— incompentent. He eventually got the needle right, though, and leaned over Carla's arm. He poked once, pulled it out, and then pushed it back in, looking rather relieved, if a little disbelieving, when he realized he had hit the vein. Holding himself back from jumping through the ceiling in pure ecstacy, mostly because he didn't want to disturb anyone preforming surgery or something equally important by crashing up from beneath them, he pulled back on the end of the needle until it had filled almost all the way with blood. He tried not to smile to big as he said, "I'm just going to go take this to be tested."

He left the room feeling like a doctor.

He entered the cafeteria still feeling like some experianced, professional, amazing doctor, all because he was able to draw a living person's blood and then drop it off at the lab to be tested. Wow! He was still waiting for results to come back, was on a break (his first one ever!) and hungry, so he came here.

Once he had gotten his food, he sat down at the nearest table, not noticing that some else was already sitting there. He had just picked up his fork when he saw her.

He had seen her earlier, of course, talking to that weird lawyer. He had called her Ms. Sullivan or something, Perry recalled, and she was also kind of scary. She was looking into a hand mirror and applying lipstick, so he was fairly certain that she hadn't noticed him yet. He quietly twisted his chair around and scooted closer to the table that was now in front of him, until he noticed the janitors, each with matching orange stethoscopes around their necks and matching expressions of hatred that was undoubtably directed at him, sitting at the table. He turned his chair back around quickly.

When she heard his chair scooting back to the table, Ms. Sullivan looked up. She narrowed her eyes at him, but seemed generally indifferent to his presence.

He poked at his food, salad and a sandwich, and shuffled his feet under the table. He accidentally hit her foot with his own. He quickly drew his feet back when she looked at him. "Hey, Sally, watch it," she said sharply, and he suddenly felt a strange, inaproprite wave of defiance rise up in him, something that probably had too much to do with his earlier success drawing blood.

"My name's not Sally," said Perry just as harshly, forgetting that everyone in this place should be considered insane, armed, and most certainly dangerous.

"Really?" she replied, "'Cause you look like a Sally to me." He opened his mouth to reply to this comment (I bet she's never drawn blood…), but she started speaking before he could. "What's your real name, then?"

"Perry," he replied shortly, not being very fond of his name or this woman.

She chuckled. "I'm Jordan," she told him.

He made a snorting noise, the one that close friends of his (which for some reason, he always seemed to have, but never seemed to keep) always came to identify as uniquely his.

Jordan crossed her arms, glanced at her food as if it was the first time she had ever seen it, and prodded a lump of jello on her plate with a fork, a vaguely disgusted expression coming over her face as it's milky contents began to leak out. "Seriously," she said to both herself and Perry. "I swear, next time I come here, I'm not going to buy their sick ass excuse for food, hoping that maybe they have improved just a little bit, or have stopped trying to posien everyone who just happens to have any business in this hellish place." There it was again: someone refering to this place as hell. It wasn't really that bad, was it?

Suddenly, an alarm went off, beeping loudly. Jordan rolled her eyes, and yelled across the table, "Shit! It always seems to happen whenever I'm here!"

"What happens?" Perry asked over all the noise. Jordan pointed at something behind him. He swirved around, and gasped at what he saw: flames. The place was on fire!

Dr. Benson ran past, muttering to himself. Perry wasn't sure, but he thought he heard him say something about how he knew the Convicts to Cooks program was the worst idea ever, and about it being the fifth time this month.

Employees and other people who visited the hospital regularly just kept on eating, despite the flames and the chaos and the alarms and the rapidly aproaching sound of sirens.

Glumly plopping himself back into his uncomfortable chair, the fires raging behind him like a bad special effect in a bad movie, Perry decided that maybe, just maybe, he had gotten himself landed in hell after all.

Reviews are immensely appreciated.

TBC...