The Family Business

The Family Business

By Plot Roach

(Copyright Plot Roach 2014. All Rights Reserved. All characters and events are fictional... we hope.)

 
“Dean…Death?” the receptionist asked.

A young man in a teal polo shirt and faded jeans walked to the front of the line and smiled sheepishly at her. “That’s me.”

“This way, please.” She said, gesturing down the long hallway. “You’ll be in room 4, on the right.” She said, giving him a wide berth in the closed in space of the hall. She couldn’t have explained it if she tried, but there was something beyond the last name of the man that troubled her.

Once inside the sterile white room, he sat on the observation table and waited for the torrent of questions to begin. It didn’t take long. After answering, again, all of the questions he had already answered on the paperwork that they had given him in the waiting room, she took his temperature, his pulse and looked into his eyes, throat and ears.

“So what are your symptoms?” she asked.

“I feel tired, depressed and achy.”

“Have you had a fever lately?”

“No.”

“Has anyone around you been sick lately?”

“No."

“What do you think it might be from?” she asked, writing each answer down on a little slip of paper with a small pencil which looked to him incredibly hard to use while standing and talking to a patient. She used his chart as a makeshift clipboard and it was failing miserably, bending under the pressure of her writing. He tried to chuckle, but it came out dry and forced. He wished he had just kept it in, because she gave him a look that he thought bugs might see just before some collector pinned them to a specimen board.

“Um” he said, trying to break the tension in the room.

“What do you think it might be?”

“Who?”

“What-who?” She asked. “What do you think is going on with you?”

Just then the pain hit. “Stomach cramps and dizziness.” He wheezed. “Chills.” He fell to the floor.

“Sir? Sir!” she rushed to him, yet still she held back from touching him. “Are you alright?”

He felt the pressure build until it threatened to crush him from the weight. “It’s fatigue.” He said, between clenched teeth. “I need to stop working so hard.”

Just then there was another thump in the office. Across the hall another patient hit the floor. Only this one was an older man, in his late forties.

“Someone help him!” a woman in the same room, perhaps his wife or sister, called out upon seeing his prone form on the floor. “I think he’s had a heart attack!”

The rest of the nurses rushed to the fallen man, but the one with Dean stayed rooted to the floor. She wanted to help both the young man and the old one, but was suddenly afraid to touch either one. She wanted to warn the others, but could not say what to warn them about. She just had a feeling.  Like the one a rabbit gets just before a hawk swoops overhead. Run or hide?

The doctors came and attempted CPR, one even called out for the AED device on the wall to try and get the man’s heart beating again. Slowly Dean pulled himself up off of the floor, stretched and his joints audibly cracked.

“I feel better now.”  he said, nodding o the terrified nurse.

“You better stay, the doctor will want to have a look at you.” she said. But secretly she hoped that he would leave anyway.

“Oh, it’s okay now.” He said, looking over at the man that they failed to revive on the floor of the hallway. “It’s a family condition that I’ve learned to live with over the years.” He walked out of the room which had gotten far too small for the nurse. He stepped over the body of the fallen man as if he were nothing more than garbage or a pile of fallen leaves.

It was then that the nurse noticed that he cast no shadow.