Tales of the Parodyverse

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Nats
Sat Jun 05, 2004 at 10:18:50 pm EDT
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Night Nurse #8: Death Be Not Proud
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    “So I open up the newspaper this morning, and what do I find?” asked a redheaded nurse with a scowl that could kill a puppy. She took another puff on her cigarette before speaking again. “Yet another damn medical breakthrough over at St. Silver’s made the front page again. You know, I applied there, and they turned me down. Y’know? And yet that young doctor girl there that gets her face on the news …whatshername... she’s supposed to be going with that McKinley guy. Anyway, I can’t stand the whole lot of them.” She flicked her cigarette away and watched it drown in a puddle from the rain that had finally cleared up.
    “Yeah, Mabie,” agreed the other nurse she was speaking to half-heartedly. “Probably some vast left-wing conspiracy.”
    “You’re probably right,” Mabie MacCullins, the surliest nurse in the tri-state area replied. “That’s some good thinking. Anyway, my break’s over.” She tossed her now-empty pack of cigarettes towards the nearest dumpster, which was fifteen feet away. The empty vessel didn’t reach that far, but Mabie didn’t care; the whole alleyway, no, the whole planet was a dumpster, as far as she was concerned.
    As she walked inside, the nurse she was speaking to just moments previous eyed her discarded cigarette pack and then picked it up and properly threw it away. Mabie would be back with one of her three replacement packs later, but this nurse still respected the proper conditions of waste disposal. While the world may have been a dumpster, she was a part of it, and she was determined to make sure that none of the trash fell astray. She’d seen the dirty parts of the world. She was one of them. All the trash had to go somewhere. And someone had to take care of it.
    She was Grace O’Mercy. She was the Night Nurse.


Night Nurse #8: Death Be Not Proud
By Night Nats!


    Being a supernatural spawn of darkness herself, the vampiric Night Nurse didn’t have to breath or take smoke breaks. She never smoked when she was alive, but being undead meant one didn’t have to worry about lung cancer; and sometimes, a smoke break could enable you to meet a person you normally wouldn’t talk to, and get involved with their life. Such was the case today.
    Mabie MacCullins had just moved to Parodiopolis in the last few months, and had applied to several hospitals in the area, and was accepted to Phantomhawk Memorial. While the hospital wasn’t the most prestigious (that would be St. Silver’s), it wasn’t the most infamous either. It was clean, and had some of the damn kindest people working in it. people that really cared about their patients. Except, quite probably, for Mabie MacCullins.
    Nurse O’Mercy (middle name Hope, but she thought that made everything sound pretentious) walked back into the ER lobby and waved a hello to the receptionist, Uuanda, who was just leaving. Then she waved a goodbye and grabbed her thermos, sitting next to the coffee machine. She sipped it. It was warm, and delicious, and blood. But it was pig’s blood; the human blood at the hospital was running low and Grace would’ve felt bad if she partook of it. Human blood was by far one of the tastiest kinds, but it also had a tendency to put vampires into a bit of an addictive lust for the stuff, something Grace didn’t like to get into.
    “Oh, hi, Grace! Having fun tonight?”
    “In comparison with others, or just in general?” she replied.
    “Either,” Dr. Kate Mills said. She was one of the best ER docs on staff. She worked crazy hours for crappy pay and really cared about the patients, and she was a close friend of the Night Nurse. “Hey, can I have a sip of that?” she asked, eyeing Grace’s thermos.
    “Trust me, you wouldn’t like it,” Grace answered. “And as for a fun factor, I’d say it’s on about five now.”
    “Out of ten?”
    “Out of infinity.”
    “Ouch,” Kate said, filling up a mug with coffee from the machine. “If this stuff poisons me, remember, it’s your fault.”
    “Good thing you’re in a hospital then,” Grace smirked back. “So how’s the good Dr. Trent?”
    “Left this afternoon with a terrible head cold,” she responded, “so he’s probably off moping.”
    “And Rick?”
    “Rick’s fine.”
    Grace didn’t reply.
    “What? Really, we’re fine. Everything’s okay.”
    “Yes, that’s what you said the week before you dumped him the last time. And I’ve heard the stories. I hope it doesn’t take another dead person to bring you two together again,” Grace said, noting the poetics. “He’s a nice guy, dammit.”
    Kate choked down her coffee and then sighed. “I know, but sometimes he can be so distant, or confusing. And I don’t know if it feels right.”
    “Well, I can’t say I’ve had the best luck with relationships,” said Grace---her last boyfriend, well, killed her---“but I think you two have a good thing going.”
    “Thanks,” Kate smiled. “I guess I’d better get back to check on some patients. Don’t work too hard.” And with that, she walked off, but not before depositing her coffee mug in the nearest toxic bio-waste receptacle.
     The Night Nurse put her thermos of blood back and turned to find Patty Dubrovnik walking right into her. “Oh, sorry,” Patty, a fellow nurse, apologized. “I was just…have you seen Mabie?”
    “She was just out back on a smoke break with me,” Grace told her.
    “Oh, because now she’s disapp…you smoke?”
    “Not regularly,” Nurse O’Mercy said.
    “Whatever,” Patty continued. “It’s just, now she’s vanished, and she’s needed on shift, so if you could find her…”
    “I’ll check it out,” said Grace, “although I’m not sure where she would have disappeared to.” Something seemed a bit strange. This wasn’t like Mabie MacCullins. Sure, she was a paranoid and bitter woman that hated everyone, but she never just walked off the job. She wasn’t that kind of person.
    The Night Nurse looked back out in the alley, but no one was there. She walked towards the street but did not spy anyone resembling Mabie MacCullins, nor did her vampire senses pick up the distinct scent of Mabie’s favorite brand of cigarettes. With nowhere else to go, Nurse Grace went up. She went to the end of the alley and launched herself up into the air with her strong undead muscles and latched onto a pipe running up the side of the building. Finally, she made it to the roof. From here she’d at least be able to see Mabie no matter where she was.
    Knowing Parodiopolis had a habit of attracting some nasty baddies, Grace feared the worst. If a vampire or demon or some super-powered galoot with a hideous topknot had been nearby, they could’ve attacked or captured Mabie for some ill-defined yet nefarious purpose. And one of Grace’s vampire senses was noting something lurking in the shadows, and it didn’t smell like cigarettes, but rather like death.
    The Night Nurse whirled around and grabbed the mysterious figure in the shadows, tossing it into the moonlight. The mysterious figure landed with a dull thud (although not the one that like vending machines a little too much) and an “Ugph!”
    “What did you do with Mabie MacCullins?” growled Grace, her face suddenly becoming more bat-like. She now had a pronounced overbite which looked quite formidable. Her fangs were bared. She didn’t want to pull any punches.
    “Ow,” said the figure, standing up. He looked quite pale, with sullen eyes and stringy black hair. He not only smelled like death, but looked like it, too.
    “You’re…not a vampire,” Grace noticed.
    “No, but I’m thinking you are,” said Dead Boy. “I’d heard they were in the area.” He pulled a stake out from under the inside of his coat. “You moved faster than I’d anticipated. Although, my stealth techniques usually work.”
    “So you’d say you’re more of the wait-in-the-shadows-and-hunt-evil-fiends type than the wait-in-the-shadows-and-murder-unsuspecting-young-women type, then,” replied Grace. “Even though you’re a zombie?”
    “Well, yeah,” said the walking corpse. “And I’m not really a zombie, more of a, I don’t know, Undead-American? Living Dead? Something like that. They call me Dead Boy.” He paused. “…Wait, are we gonna fight, or…?”
    Grace sighed and her face turned back from feral creature of the night to the pretty young woman she was. “I’m a nurse,” she said, “although I guess you could tell by the outfit. I’m not here to kill anybody, just to help the sick and injured. Once a nurse, always a nurse.”
    “So you’re not an evil dead, are you?”
    “And neither are you, as far as I can tell,” Grace said. “The whole killing people gig isn’t my idea of fun. I’m here to help. And I’m looking for someone. Another nurse. She apparently walked off her shift, and I thought you…well, you know.”
    “One of those misunderstandings that lead to a quick fight and then a team-up?” Dead Boy replied. “Yeah. Can we skip that?”
    “I’m not really a fighter,” said Grace. “Or a lover, these days, so don’t get your hopes up.”
    “What? I--”
    “Just because you’re a dead guy doesn’t mean you aren’t a guy.”
    “So what do I call you? Dead Girl?”
    “My name’s Grace,” she said. “You read too many comic books.”
    “Not really,” Dead Boy told her, “but I do watch a lot of Buffy. Are you by any chance one of those noble souled vampires, or…?”
    Grace ignored him. “So have you seen her?”
    “Her? No, but--”
    Grace, however, suddenly pushed him out of the way and raced past. Dead Boy landed on the ground with another dull thud and another “Ugph!” He rolled over and picked himself up. “Well, nice meeting you then. Where are you…?”
    Grace wasn’t listening to him, however, as she was leaping across the alleyway onto the hospital roof, where her vampiric hearing had just picked up the distinct sound of a gun hammer cocking. “Stop right there!” she yelled. “Don’t hurt…”
    What the Night Nurse saw surprised her. Instead of a dastardly felon pointing a gun at Mabie, she found Mabie pointing a gun at Mabie.
    “…yourself,” she finished. “My God, Mabie, what…?”
    “Stay back,” Mabie MacCullins told her. “Don’t you come near. I only wanted to use the one bullet.”
    “Mabie, don’t do this to yourself,” Grace bade her. “You don’t want to.”
    “Don’t want to?” Mabie shrieked. “St. Silver’s didn’t want me! The nurses here, they don’t want me! No one likes me! And the damn liberals…!”
    “You have to stop blaming everyone else for your troubles,” Grace said. “But taking the responsibility for yourself does not mean putting a pistol to your head.”
    “Don’t patronize me,” Mabie shot back. “You’re one of the pretty ones.”
    “Doesn’t mean my life can’t be crappy,” she said. “And trust me, death isn’t a picnic either.”
    “But life sucks.”
    “Yeah, it does, but it still happens anyway, doesn’t it? Everybody deals with their own problems, and everybody keeps on keeping on, living life. That’s what it’s there for. Some people don’t get the luxury of living. You should be glad you do.”
    “But nothing makes sense… Nothing’s fair.”
    “No,” said Grace, “nothing is fair. Nobody wrote an instruction manual, you just kinda have to wing it. There’s people in this hospital that need your help, Mabie. It doesn’t matter what your salary is, or where you work, you’re still of use, you’re still helping people…”
    “I’m sorry,” Mabie said.
    “I could easily take the gun from you,” said Grace, “but I don’t want to have to.”
    Mabie sniffed, and threw the gun down to the ground with a clatter. “Everything’s just so hard…”
    “Tell me about it,” Grace said. “Life isn’t easy. But death? Death be not proud.”
    Mabie hugged her, now, and bawled her eyes out. “I hate it,” she said. “I hate it.”
    “Shh,” said Grace. “It’s okay. It’s okay to hate it. Just don’t give up.”
    No, life was not easy, and death was not a picnic. The world may have been a dumpster, but the Night Nurse was there to tend to the garbage. After all, one woman’s trash was another woman’s treasure.
    And so it goes.

The End! For #9, scroll down the board and read AG's.







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