Photo Credit: Muhammad Fawaid

In this medical fiction tale, staff in a makeshift mental health clinic find themselves facing an armed intruder convinced of a sinister conspiracy.

This medical fiction tale is one of a collection of stories that are like “Final Destination” meets “The Monkey’s Paw” (W. W. Jacobs, 1902). As such, they are tragedies that appeal most to readers who enjoy the inexorable pull of a story arc that leads to doom. The technical details surrounding the event are drawn from real cases in the US OSHA incident report database or similar sources and are, therefore, entirely realistic, even if seemingly outlandish.

Emmy loved her job as a medical office assistant but hated her workplace. Moving the free mental health clinic from the decrepit offices behind the ER had been a nightmare, and cramming everything into a mobile classroom trailer in the parking lot was an ordeal. She liked her desk orderly, but now, whenever the trailer door opened, the wind scattered her paperwork across the floor. Closing vents and windows helped, but the space grew muggy and stifling. As a solution, she bought a paper spindle with a brass base from a thrift store for $2.50 and filed the requisite reimbursement form for the expense.

As the clinic’s leading psychiatrist, Dr. Helena Bass had seen many people yell—the heavyset bald man bellowing about his co-pay, the petite redhead hallucinating spiders crawling the walls, the elderly lady whose dementia defied her meds—these were expected. She was not, however, prepared for the angry, frantic man with a rifle who burst into the clinic ranting about abducted children being held in the basement of the trailer.

That man, Clive, had led an unremarkable life until he’d discovered the febrile fame that festers in many online conspiracy forums. Online, he could finally be heroic and masterful in ways his socioeconomic status, regional accent, and social awkwardness denied him in the physical world. Though no one had explicitly promised Clive fame and success, he’d always felt entitled to it. In the swamps of the internet, he connected with people who constantly reassured him he was indeed being cheated out of happiness due to him.

Lately, he’d found himself fixated on stories of a satanic ring of doctors trafficking children and peddling their body parts to wealthy patrons seeking eternal life no matter the cost. Clive and his online forum friends had deciphered the secret codes being used by the evil doctors. They narrowed the gateway down to a location they’d pinpointed on Google Maps: a local mental health clinic. Clive was incensed that this was happening in his own town and that nobody was doing anything to stop it. He swore an oath to his forum friends that he would be the person to do so. It was a heroic quest that he was ready, willing, and able to take on. By the time he and his online friends had spent a week devising a Clive-led rescue plan, they were all in a feverish mood, and the mission to save the kidnapped children absorbed every neuron in Clive’s brain. “This is going to be epic,” he repeated to himself as he grabbed his rifle, raced to the clinic, and stormed into the trailer.

“Hello,” Helena greeted Clive with a broad smile. “I’m Dr. Helena Bass, the physician in charge of this clinic. Have a seat over there, please.” She gestured to a comfy chair on the other side of the trailer, opposite the door. “Would you like some coffee or tea while you wait?”

Clive felt bewildered. This had not been in his “saving the children” script, and the choice of coffee or tea held his attention long enough for him to follow Helena’s instructions and walk over to the chair before suddenly remembering his mission.

“The basement!” He turned and yelled, glaring at Helena and raising his rifle barrel. “Where’s the basement where you’re holding the kids?”

Helena was simultaneously surprised, frightened, and mystified. Basement? Children?

“This clinic is for adults seeking help with mental health issues, and we don’t have a basement,” she explained calmly despite her rising sense of panic over the fact that the man was now waving the rifle in her face.

“What do you mean, ‘no basement’?”

“We have no basement,” Helena repeated, looking Clive in the eye.

“Well, where are you keeping the kids then?”

“Adults patients only. There are no children here.”

Suspicious, Clive inspected the small closet by the trailer’s door, finding only coats and cleaning supplies.

“What about underneath?” He stamped on the trailer’s floor with his heavy boots.

“Take a look outside if you like,” Helena responded. “We’re in a trailer on top of a parking lot. You can see all the way underneath.”

During this exchange, Emmy had bent her head low over her desk, hiding her face behind her thick, copper hair. Whispering into the panic pendant she’d activated, she relayed the emergency: angry white man, gun, police and ambulance needed immediately.

Clive opened the trailer door, leaned out, and peered at the bottom. Then he slowly closed the door, turned around, and sagged against it, looking from Helena to Emma.

“Abducted children. Abducted children. Abducted children,” he muttered to himself as if he could summon this into reality.

The distant sound of approaching sirens startled Clive back into action. Furious that he’d obviously been tricked, he let out a rage-filled roar and fired two shots into the ceiling. The first blast knocked out the lights, throwing the trailer’s interior into twilight. The bullet from the second shot clipped a steel beam, sending shrapnel into Clive’s eye. “Ow! Ow! Ow!” he screamed, dropping his rifle and clawing at his bleeding eye.

Seizing the moment, Emmy vaulted over her desk and drove her paper spindle into Clive’s chest with so much force that the steel spike snapped off the base. In the moment between sinking to his knees and the heavy brass base of the paper spindle smashing into the side of his head, he plaintively begged, “Help me.”

Emmy cursed. “That makes him a patient, and I just attacked him with office equipment!”

She fished Clive’s wallet out of his pocket, grabbed his driver’s license, and quickly registered him as a new patient. As the sirens grew steadily louder, the clickety-clack of fingers on keyboards filled the air as the two women completed an encounter form, a billing sheet, and an incident report of a patient injured during an encounter. By the time the police arrived with squealing tires and guns drawn, the paperwork was completed, Emmy had tidied her desk, and the next patient was standing uncertainly in the doorway.

“Mental health clinic?” the woman asked timidly.

“Hello,” Helena greeted her with a broad smile. “I’m Dr. Helena Bass, the physician in charge of this clinic.” She suggested they continue their conversation outside on a bench or reschedule if that was not desirable. Emmy marked the scheduled patient as “arrived” and sat poised and ready to see if she needed to reschedule.