#id tag this with trigger warnings but i dont want anyone freaking out so just know its ideations and thats it.

[avakitsune]

.

[vampirewithbedsidemanners]

Out of the Vault: Story Time

STORY TIME This is not a work of fiction. TRIGGER WARNING: ACTIVE SHOOTER/THREAT. If you are sensitive to the topic, dont read. This is something I wrote for myself following a pretty intense situation at work. This was a few years ago but Im leaving out names and places on purpose, still. You hear a lot about active shooters in the media but they rarely cover active shooter threats, which can take a toll as well. I saw a news report once about schools in bad neighborhoods that have regular lock downs because of shootings in the surrounding neighborhoods are giving their students PTSD just trying to protect them.  I can see why. I don’t think I have PTSD, but I wont really know until I get another call like this.

I don’t think about it often. Sometimes, in the days after when the rest of the world started forgetting, I would remember it.

But most days, especially now, it was a distant nightmare. I was still a kid at the time, young and naive. I still lived in that bubble of ‘it will never happen to me’. Every close call solidified that bubble. The almost stabbing, the drug busts, the scrappy fist fights that always ended with someone getting snowed, fed the delusion. Somewhere in the middle of all of it, I knew that we were short staffed. That I shouldn’t be clearing buildings and parking lots and bathrooms with drug addicts overdosed on the floor, by myself. Most days, I didn’t even notice.

It makes you feel big, even when you’re not. 5′1″, I disappeared behind the desk at the stationary post without even trying. The other guards couldn’t get in the patrol car behind me without moving the seat back. But there was an adrenaline rush to it that made me feel like I could do this, no matter my size. I liked the work, it made me a piece of a larger puzzle.

“You better lock down the hospital, I’m coming to kill you all.”

12 words.

5 minutes before help arrived.

1 other guard.

6 buildings. 23 floors between all of them. 11 elevators. 2 pedways. A tunnel. 17 entrances.

9 parking lots.

43 employees. Roughly 100 patients.

5:30 a.m., all the doors have automatically unlocked.

We had no plan. We had no face to put to the voice. The operator who took the call was doubled over in a corner, crying. The House Supervisor was quiet. My coworker, always confident on the border of cocky, was at a loss for words.

“Do we take this threat serious.” The question hung in the air.

“We have to.” House said. And that was it. The horrible, terrible, unfair truth about threats. Bomb threats. Active Shooter threats. It didn’t matter.

Its real until it’s not.

I used to write about how adrenaline rushes make you numb to the pain. I slammed my hand in the first door, trying to get it to lock. I was at the end of a long hallway, outside the Emergency Room. It was the first external door I passed on the way into the rest of the hospital. I felt the pain in my hand, even though the adrenaline was pumping. My palms were sweaty, and I was out of breath. I had to jump up over and over, swiping at the off button before I could lock the door.

As I ran down the hall towards the surgery area, all I could think was ‘I should have started at the main lobby.’ These long hallways with nowhere to hide would have made me an easy target. One short, out of breath, underpaid and overworked guard with a thousand keys and blood dripping down her hand because she was clumsy and couldn't lock a door, target.

The surgery entrance door stands open when you turn off the box. I didn’t know that at the time. I could feel the seconds ticking by as I struggled with it. In hindsight, I should have just locked the inner door and been done with it. They were glass anyways, and definitely not bullet proof. Anyone who wanted to get in wouldn't have been deterred by glass.

By the time I hit the pedway, I felt sick. It had been 2 minutes since I had started locking down the hospital, something that we had no plan or procedure for. Somewhere between day surgery and the pedway, I started to get tunnel vision. I don’t remember my thought process for calling my husband, and I vaguely recall what I actually said on the voicemail. My words were kind of hard to make out over the sound of me running down a flight of stairs.

‘I love you. I’ll be home late. Don’t freak out, but we have a Code Black at East. I love you.’ It was all I could make out. The first time I listened to it, a few weeks after that day, all I could remember thinking was ‘this could have been the last thing he ever heard from me.’

When I reached the main lobby, I started moving people away from windows and down into hallways. Registration helped some, mostly with moving benches. No one really knew what to do. Someone brought me a printout. Cops had arrived, there was just 2 patrol cars parked outside the Emergency Department. More were coming. They traced the number and got an ID. I was expecting a mugshot, not a military ID. The grainy black and white photo did very little to help with identification. I was looking for a black man, in his early 20’s, of unknown height or weight, neither of which are listed. I stood by the door, vetting everyone that came in. More cops showed up, some in undercover vehicles, some off duty in their own cars. It became harder and harder to tell what was suspicious from what wasn’t. I think by that point, the paranoia had set in. Even if the cops had more info than I did, they would have had just as hard a time picking a non-descript black man out in a crowd.

A man in sweats approached the front door. He had walked past the off-duty cop parked in front. The cop started opening his door to get out, or at least that is what my brain saw. It could have been anything, or nothing. I didn’t know. It was the hoodie that caught me off guard. Baggy clothes conceal everything. His hood was up, hands in his pockets. I couldn’t see his face.

It played out like one of those dreams where you’re cornered and scrambling and trying to get the words out, but you can’t. I was shaking so hard I could barely hold the glass sliding doors as I tried to force them back together. He walked at a normal pace, at ease. There was nothing aside from the clothes and skin color to say that this was the caller, but I was terrified that it was, regardless of the statistics. Looking back, I must have looked like a mess. Here I was, shaky and out of breath, struggling to push together glass doors that didn’t actually lock to stop a potential shooter who would just break them down anyways instead of running away. My voice was gone, as was all the air in my lungs. I’ve seen videos, of cops shooting suspects that were already down because of adrenaline. It gets to be too much, and they start to twitch and accidentally pull the trigger. I imagine, this is what that would feel like. We’re all human, after all.

When he pulled out his hospital badge, I thought I might actually start crying from relief.

It was over in under 10 minutes, but I was still shaky 2 and a half hours later  when they found him and I was finally sent home.

People at work said that it wasn’t real, because nothing happened. People, mostly the other guards, who were called in and showed up after the site was swarming with law enforcement. We had half the police force, it seemed like, between the off duty and the incoming shift. State troopers were combing the surrounding interstates. Military police were waiting at the caller’s residency. But there was just the two of us for those first 5 minutes. Before police were there, before we had any answers. We had to pick and choose what entrances to lock because there was no way to lock them all. We ignored entire buildings because there was too much ground to cover. If he had been sitting in his car in the parking lot when he called, it wouldn’t have mattered if the cops were called or the military police involved.

I would have been a target for the uniform I wore. Patients might have been fine. Nurses, too. Doctors maybe. The floors would have gone untouched. But the two of us would have been shot at, even if he didn’t hit either one.

Troopers found the caller overdosed in his car 3 miles from the hospital. He had a gun, but only a handful of bullets. Even if he had shown up, he was too messed up to do anything and would have quickly been taken down. They gave him Narcan, and the Military police took him away. I found out later when I was looking over the list of charges that he had also called the fire department and told them the hospital was on fire and that they needed to evacuate us. Someone said he wanted pain pills and the doctor said no because he was a junkie, but I’m not really sure why he did it. It doesn’t really matter. He was sentenced to 15 years for the civil side of things and court marshaled for conduct by the military. He will spend the better part of the next two decades in a military prison serving two consecutive sentences. 15 years and then another 5 for the military.

The hospital had forgotten by shift change. I had been held over 15 and a half hours because of the lockdown. I would have gotten off at 6 a.m. that morning. When I came in the next night, no one really talked about it. I guess that means I did my job. My debriefing was 10 minutes, and didn’t cover anything, really. The hospital locked down the truth and smoothed things over with the local paper. They didn’t want to make a big deal out of it.

We were 3 miles and 5 bullets away from a Code Silver, active shooter.

But nothing happened so it wasn’t real, right?

Tags: @fanfiction-trashpile