Dusk of Humanity : (Book 1 in the Dusk of Humanity Series) Read online

  Dusk of

  Humanity

  Book 1 in the Dusk of Humanity Series

  M.K. Dawn

  Copyright © 2018 M.K. Dawn

  All rights reserved.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The broad doors of Riverside Hospital’s emergency room flung open and two paramedics wheeled in a man strapped to a gurney, head thrashing about as he bit at anything that came near his rabid mouth.

  “Male. Thirty-seven,” the elder of the two said to the attending physician. “Found passed out in the bathroom at JFK airport. Security officers thought he was dead. Only injury we could find is a bite mark to the shoulder.”

  Dr. Sloan Egan took a step back to clear the way for the incoming patient and the doctors who would treat him. Unless he required surgery, she was nothing more than a spectator.

  To her left, a psychiatrist sprinted by. “What the hell is going on?”

  “He appears to be suffering from some sort of schizophrenic episode,” the paramedic said. “He bit both officers and has attempted to bite anyone else he’s encounter.”

  “Dr. Egan!” the familiar voice of Beatrice Bickmore cut through the commotion, drawing her attention away from the crazed man. “Wait up!”

  Sloan ducked around the developing crowd, refusing to acknowledge the bubbly pediatric surgeon. Exhausted after her fifteen-hour stint in the operating room, she was in desperate need of some sleep. There should be an empty bed in one of the rooms reserved for on-call doctors. If she were lucky, it would be quiet enough to allow her a few hours of shut-eye before her next shift started in the morning, but not before she stopped at the cafeteria. If Beatrice caught up, Sloan could subtract a minimum of thirty minutes off her total time of sleep; Beatrice was known for her drawn-out conversations.

  “Sloan!” the woman shouted again, now steps behind her. “Didn’t you hear me calling your name?”

  With a deep, calming breath, Sloan slowed her pace, allowing the rather plump woman to catch up. “Sorry, Beatrice, I didn’t hear you.”

  “Sure you didn’t.” The woman rolled her big brown eyes. “I was only screaming at the top of my lungs. If you don’t have time to talk, why don’t you just say so? Ignoring me is plain rude.”

  Sloan held her tongue to prevent herself from saying the snotty comment rolling around in her mind. “I apologize. It’s been a long night. I was heading to the cafeteria if you would like to join me.”

  Beatrice laughed and pushed the few fallen strands of blonde curls out of her eyes. “Oh, honey. I’m just messing with you. Don’t take things so seriously. Anyway, I’m on my way to see a patient. A regular. Poor baby; damn seizures are getting worse. But I passed the chief in the hall and he asked me to relay a message.”

  Since Sloan left the OR, Chief Terence McClain had paged her no less than ten times. She had ignored them all, confident they were in regard to the letter she received from Homeland Security a few days back. A letter which she had chosen to ignore and not spoken of to anyone until a government official contacted Chief McClain inquiring why she hadn’t accepted their invitation. “What did he say?”

  Beatrice nibbled at her bottom lip in a blatant attempt to suppress her laughter. “Get your ass in his office or you’re suspended for a week.”

  “Shit,” Sloan mumbled. The chief never threatened her with suspension.

  “Oh my word! Is that a curse word leaving the lips of our prodigy, the great Dr. Sloan Egan? In all my life, I have never heard of such a thing!”

  Sloan feigned a smile. She hated when her colleagues referred to her as such. Yes, she had graduated valedictorian and summa cum laude from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine years younger than the rest of her class and she was the youngest general surgeon the hospital had ever employed, but to say she was a prodigy was a bit extreme. “I assume he’s aware I’m out of surgery?”

  Beatrice patted Sloan on the back. “Oh, honey, you know he is. And he’s been pacing outside your OR for hours. The only reason he wasn’t waiting when you finished was on account of a very important phone call he had to take. I bet my bottom dollar it pertained to you. Want to tell me what you got yourself into this time, darling?”

  As much as Sloan desired to tell her friend the situation she’d found herself tangled in, it was forbidden by order of the United States government. “I’m sure it’s nothing. The Chief has a way of blowing issues out of proportion.”

  “What, you don’t trust me to keep your little secret?” Beatrice slung out her hip, a dramatic hand resting on each.

  “This has nothing to do with trust.” Which was true even though Beatrice had a reputation for being quite the gossip. Sloan had known the southern woman since she began her residency; though she did speak often about their colleagues, not once had Beatrice spoken an ill word of Sloan—at least not that Sloan was aware. “It’s a top-secret matter. One which I’ve been instructed not to speak of, under penalty of prosecution.”

  “Prosecution, schmosecution. You know how good I am at keeping secrets, sugar pie.”

  At times, Beatrice seemed to forget her audience and spoke to her peers as she would her young patients. Over the years, Sloan had learned to ignore the woman’s quirkiness, though at times it still grated on her nerves. “I know—” The pager at her hip vibrated. “Sorry, Beatrice. It’s the Chief. I should go.”

  “Fine,” she huffed, “but just so you know, I’ll be asking the same questions tomorrow and the next day and the one after that until you come up with a fresh answer.”

  Some would have laughed at Beatrice’s threat, but Sloan knew better. Her friend would never let up until she got to the bottom of whatever it was she wanted to know.

  ***

  Chief McClain’s office was located on the first floor of the hospital along with the rest of the administration. Before he took the Chief Of Surgery position a couple of years back, he had been Sloan’s mentor. She credited her rapid success to Terence’s superb guidance. He had taken her under his wing, so to speak, when she first began her internship at the age of twenty-two and then her residency a year later. He helped her maneuver the red tape of standardization, which dictated how many years she was required to remain at the residency level—five years for surgeons—and completed the program in three years.

  At twenty-five, she had become an attending surgeon when her colleagues wouldn’t achieve such a feat until their early thirties. Now, two years later, she was training many of the same people she’d begun her internship with—hence the prodigy nickname, which in her case, was not a compliment.

  Sloan let herself into the Chief’s office without bothering to knock. He waited for her behind his desk, his scruffy white eyebrows a sharp contrast to his deep brown skin as they furrowed and he flipped through a stack of paperwork. She stood in the doorway and waited, not quite ready for the stern lecture he undoubtedly had prepared. It wasn’t the first time she had walked on the edge of ethics. Though she had never ignored something as serious as a federal summons, Sloan couldn’t imagine there would be any sort of consequence for disregarding a four-day retreat—government hosted or not.

  “You going to stand there staring or you going to take a seat?” Terence’s deep voice boomed.

  Sloan crossed the room and sat in the chair opposite of her boss. “I didn’t want to interrupt.”

  He looked up and lowered his glasses so they hung around his neck. “Last week you stormed into my office no less than fifty times for a variety of reasons, none which were life or death—once when I was on a call with my wife, deep in discussion over the budget of our house renovations. It was a conversation I w
as about to win when you caused me to lose my train of thought.”

  “How is Adele?”

  “Peachy, considering she now has ten-thousand more dollars to spend of my hard-earned money on our kitchen. A kitchen, I might add, that was perfectly fine.”

  “It was a lovely kitchen.” Sloan enjoyed goading the Chief more than she would admit. In some ways, he was more of a father figure than a boss. Her own father had died weeks after her high school graduation; she had been only sixteen and her older sister Britney became her guardian. Neither had handled the situation well. Britney was nineteen at the time and had to drop out of school to return home to run the family cattle ranch. When Sloan left the following fall to start college, a rift had formed between them. One that had yet to be filled. “Though the guest bath…”

  He lifted a finger to halt the conversation. “For the love of God, don’t you dare finish that thought.”

  Sloan had stayed with the Chief and his wife for a few days last year when her apartment had been fumigated, much to the dismay of Beatrice, who said her southern upbringing had groomed her to be the perfect hostess. Didn’t matter she lived in a studio apartment with three cats and a daybed that doubled as her couch.

  “I wouldn’t dare speak an ill word of the guest bathroom to Adele.”

  “Don’t even speak it to me,” the Chief said. “I swear that woman can read my mind.”

  It was more likely after being married for thirty-five years, Adele just knew him too well, but Sloan kept that thought to herself.

  “So, about this letter,” Terence began. “What the hell were you thinking? Did you really think you could ignore a federal summons and get away with it? Worse, I have people calling me from the Pentagon—the Pentagon—threatening to take legal action against not only you but the hospital.”

  Sloan sank back into her chair. He was the only person whom she allowed to outwardly intimidate her. “I apologize. When I received the letter, I thought it was a prank or a scam of some sort. It made no sense for the government to hold a tour of a classified facility.”

  “And the two that followed? Including the one which came through certified mail?”

  Had the Pentagon told him about all the additional notices? She thought the invitation was top-secret—for the recipient’s eyes only. “I have patients, interns, and residences that need me. I can’t just drop everything for a social function.”

  “It’s my understanding this four-day event is not just a social gathering but a way for the government to obtain input on their new facility from the greatest young minds this country has to offer.”

  “I appreciate the invitation, but as I stated earlier, I have patients. Responsibilities. A surgery tomorrow on a man I’ve been treating for months using a technique of my own design.”

  “The call I received this morning said you were to be in Fort Hood at eight p.m. yesterday for orientation. That this tour, as you’ve called it, begins today and lasts through Sunday.”

  Sloan smirked. “Appears I’ve already missed it.”

  He rustled a few papers and handed her a thick, white envelope. “Your flight to Fort Hood departs at noon. That gives you five hours to get home, pack, and get your ass to the airport. Miss your flight, you will be court-martialed and tried for insubordination.”

  “And my patients?”

  “Cordon will handle everything while you’re out. Now get out and don’t let me ever hear of you pulling this kind of stunt again.”

  ***

  Before Sloan could leave the hospital, she needed to have a word with Dr. Steve Cordon. He was a fine surgeon and quite capable of taking on her patients, but he disregarded the instructions of his colleagues when he acquired their cases—a practice which irritated Sloan to no end.

  Sloan stopped at the nearest nurses’ station in the ER and had Cordon paged. He was slated to arrive at seven this morning. It was a quarter till eight, which meant chances were good he would begin rounds shortly, after being briefed by the overnight on-call doctors.

  “Dr. Egan? You called?”

  Sloan turned as Cordon strolled down the hall. “Good morning, Steve.”

  He leaned against the counter and smiled at the nurses. “Morning to you too, ladies.”

  A few of the newer nurses giggled while the more seasoned ones minutely shook their heads. His blue-green eyes and boyish good looks only got him so far. Dr. Cordon had a reputation—one that involved several nurses and a few interns. Beatrice had filled Sloan’s ears—against her ever- present protest—with all the sordid details. Most which did not paint Cordon in the most flattering of ways.

  “Dr. Cordon?” Sloan snapped to draw Steve’s attention away from the young blond he had struck up a conversation with.

  He twisted his head and grinned. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I am to catch a fight at noon today and will return Monday morning.”

  “So I’ve heard. Some top-secret invitation for the whiz-kids of the country.” As expected, a passive-aggressive jab from the forty-year-old surgeon.

  Cordon was good at what he did, but within the year Sloan would surpass him in every aspect of the job. That alone should have been enough to put a wedge between the two colleagues. Turned out, what put them at odds was of a primal nature. On more than one occasion, Cordon had propositioned Sloan on a very personal and inappropriate level, and each time, she had turned him down. She was not one to intertwine intimate relationships with work. From his over-exaggerated, dramatic reaction, he was not used to be being told no. He persisted to the point Sloan had threatened to go to HR and file a sexual harassment complaint. That led him to file a complaint against her—not to HR because they knew of his reputation, but with Chief McClain about her irregular, impractical surgical methods. What Cordon hadn’t known was that on many occasions, Sloan used her mentor as a sounding board for such ideas.

  The conversation between Cordon and McClain did not fare well for Cordon. Sloan, on the other hand, ended up with a beautifully written apology courtesy of the seasoned surgeon and a promise their relationship would be held at a professional level going forward. That lasted three months. The only difference now was she had learned to deflect his innuendos and get what she wanted from them.

  “Yes, something of that nature. Before I leave, I thought it would be good if we went over my patients’ charts and surgeries to see if you had any questions.”

  He snatched an apple from behind the nurses’ station and bit into it, sending splatters of juice in all directions. “Nah. I can handle whatever little surgery you have planned.”

  Remain calm; don’t overreact, Sloan told herself. “I’m not suggesting you can’t handle the surgeries. There are minute issues which I believe would be beneficial to point out.”

  He took another bite of his apple. “Are these issues documented in the patients’ charts?”

  “That goes without saying.”

  “Good. My interns are charged with reading the charts and will provide a full report.”

  “Still—”

  “Sloan?” Chief McClain’s voice echoed down the hall. “I know that can’t be you because I ordered you out of my hospital an hour ago.”

  “Looks like Daddy caught you breaking curfew. Better scram.”

  ***

  Sloan lived less than a ten-minute walk from the hospital. The Lake Side apartment complex was dubbed the official dorm of Riverside Hospital since ninety-nine percent of its occupants were either doctors or interns. When you worked as many on-call hours as she did, it was imperative to live close to work. A bonus was that she was able to go home to shower instead of using the communal ones if she was unfortunate enough to be covered in some sort of unpleasant bodily fluid—which happened more times than she could count.

  Her third-floor apartment was not what she would call cozy. Sloan had an odd assortment of furniture, most given to her or purchased at second-hand stores. There was not a single item hung on the walls and there were no shelves adorned with kni
ckknacks, only medical books and journals. The few personal items she kept visible were family photos. One was from when Sloan was twelve and was the last picture taken before her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. The others were of her nephews and niece.

  Sloan’s closet was not even close to full. Most of her wardrobe consisted of scrubs, which she folded neatly in her dresser. She refused to be one of those surgeons who dressed in casual business attire to make her rounds.

  The invitation had mentioned a farewell party with a cocktail dress code. She had one knee- length black dress for such an occasion. The rest of the weekend, it was suggested the attendees dress casual with comfortable shoes good for walking. That was a dress code Sloan had no problem accommodating.

  In her small carry-on, Sloan packed a few pairs of jeans and fitted t-shirts along with undergarments, work-out clothes, and her two-piece flannel pajamas. Her limited experience with travel taught her most rooms were kept cooler rather than hot. The one thing that would prevent Sloan from getting a good night’s sleep was a chill in the air.

  After Sloan checked her toiletry bag to ensure all items were packed, she rolled up her cocktail dress and grabbed a pair of black heels. There was no point in taking a garment bag just for one dress. Her running shoes, she would wear today. Aside from her Crocs, they were the most comfortable shoes she owned and she only wore them at the hospital.

  The clock on the stove read five past ten. She ordered an Uber and poured herself a glass of wine. Not that she made a habit out of day drinking, but it seemed fitting considering the nature of her circumstances. Tonight, she had planned a quiet evening at home; order Chinese food, run a bath, and drink a few glasses of cab. She doubted wherever she was going would have such luxuries.

  When she got the notice her ride had arrived, Sloan drained the glass. With a last look around her apartment, she grabbed her suitcase and favorite family pictures, stuffing them into her messenger bag which doubled as a purse. If she was going to be surrounded by strangers the next few days, a little piece of familiarity would be needed to keep her company.