i find it so hard to survive;
"Susan?"

That query, the fourth that evening, was met with a non-descript sound of acknowledgement, halfway between a 'yeah?' and a grunt as the blonde haired nurse heaved herself up from the corner she'd been digging around in. After a moment she stood up, smacking her skull into the shelf above her and giving low curse as she rubbed her head, turning around to find herself face to face with a colleague who said, without preamble; "I'm looking for the morphine."

Susan rubbed her face with one hand, her eyes felt sore and heavy and her skin felt hot to the touch, she knew she was pink cheeked too, she'd been rooting around in the bottom of the drug lock up for the past hour after all, checking what they had in there, getting increasingly frustrated when she couldn't find the beta-blockers and had the distinct feeling that they were completely out of those. There were no inhalers left either. She'd even checked with the pharmacy to see if they'd raided the shelves for themselves.

"You and me both," she sighed, taking the chart and indicating that they move out of the small space.

Once out of the dimly lit room -which Susan locked up behind them, replacing the key under her scrub shirt - she opened up the chart and skimmed through it, nodding along as she read, "Okay." She said after a minute or so, sounding as if she were gearing herself up for something, "Give him five, that's all we can spare, after that we'll have to try homeopathic treatments."

Sceptically the younger nurse looked at Susan as they moved down the squeaky hallway, "You're kidding right? Giving patients foot rubs and enemas isn't going to help them if they've got a congenital heart defect."

"I know that, thank you, but it's the best we can do and before the war studies showed that-"

They were interrupted in their mild disagreement as they wandered into the Emergency room proper to a full blown argument taking place near the nurses' desk.

The nurse manning the phone leaned forwards, gesturing to a man a few feet from her, "Watch out for the-!"

"Shit!"

Too late. The warning apparently didn't register and the bags the man had been holding in his arms slipped from his grasp and smacked against the floor, sending a shower of the colourless, odourless but infinitely precious liquid across the floor. There was a brief, breathless silence form the staff nearby. They all knew what had just happened, some turned to stare, some shook their heads while others rubbed their faces haggardly.

Susan saw only red as she bore down on the man who was shouting at the nurse behind the desk, raising her voice to be heard above both of them; "What the hell are you doing?"

"I was taking those to paediatrics-"

"-And I was trying to stop him. Those saline bags were for emergency medical care only. For traumas."

With an irritated huff, Susan interrupted, "I didn't know anything about this. All charts are to be cleared by me before medication is prescribed, that means saline, morphine, epinephrine, anything. You do not just pick and choose what you want from other departments, we don't have the resources for that, especially not now." She looked at the Saline on the floor, on hand on her hip, the other at her forehead.

Those scraps of plastic in a flood of clear liquid were the last bags in the Medlab.

In the pause the man spoke up, "What makes you the fucking queen of everything?"

"Maybe the fact that this is my ER and yeah, here?" Susan's expression twisted slightly, and she glared up at her current opponent with narrowed eyes, "I am the fucking queen of everything. So back off."

Tempers were at their last, there was a distinct tension in the air, the silence following Susan's words hardly helped and maybe when she'd had time to cool down she would feel bad for losing her calm outer shell, it was hard to say really, in that moment she wasn't really thinking that far ahead. Everyone was tired. Everyone was stressed. Not even just in the medlabs, but everyone. And this moron had just gone and destroyed their last supply of something that was kind of a medical necessity. Already her mind was caught up in a lightly panicked state. People were going to start dying here, they didn't have the means to treat the patients that came through the doors. Maybe they hadn't before, they'd certainly been on the way towards that state of affairs, but those bas of saline had been like a safety net in a way, Susan wasn't the only one who felt that either. Now they were screwed and it was reality, not just some future point they would reach some indistinct time. It was now.

Gruffly, she spoke, staring down at the mess still, throat constricted with anger: "Get out of here," when he hesitated Susan sighed and pointed to the doorway, looking up, "Get out of my fucking sight."

[NARRATIVE; CLOSED]