Chapter 7
The sedan screeched to a halt beneath the brightly lit emergency canopy of St. Jude Memorial Hospital. Before the car had even fully settled into park, Richard flung his door open and rushed toward the sliding automatic doors, shouting for medical assistance.
"We need a trauma team immediately!" Richard yelled, grabbing the nearest triage nurse by the arm. "My daughter—she's in a state of induced metabolic torpor! We just exhumed her from a premature burial; she has a viable pulse, but her metabolic rate is critically low!"
The nurse stared at Richard in sheer bewilderment, glancing back and forth between his mud-stained pinstripe suit and the frantic expression on his face. Security guards stepped forward, blocking the entrance to the emergency bay.
"Sir, you need to calm down," the head nurse said firmly, eyeing Leo and Eleanor as they carried Clara’s blanket-wrapped form out of the car. "If this patient was pronounced dead and buried, she needs to be brought in through the proper coroner channels. We can't just admit a deceased individual into an active trauma ward based on wild claims."
"She is not dead!" Leo shouted, stepping directly into the path of the advancing security guards. He pulled the waterproof flash drive from his t-shirt hem and held it up like a shield. "Look at the telemetry data! Her brain electrical activity is suppressed by ninety-eight percent, but her neural pathways are completely intact. If you put her in a standard morgue refrigerator, the cold will finish her off in twenty minutes!"
A tall, austere doctor in a pristine white coat stepped out from the automatic doors, drawn by the commotion. Dr. Harrison Hayes, the head of emergency neurology, looked down his nose at the muddy, desperate group before him. His expression was cold, clinical, and entirely devoid of empathy.
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"Mr. Sterling," Dr. Hayes said, recognizing the powerful executive instantly. "What is the meaning of this spectacle? Your daughter’s death certificate was signed less than twelve hours ago by Dr. Vance. Bringing a body into my emergency department is a severe violation of hospital protocol and local ordinance."
"Vance made a catastrophic error, Hayes, and so did you!" Richard snarled, stepping up to the doctor until they were chest-to-chest. "Now open a trauma bay, or I will personally dismantle this hospital brick by brick before sunrise."
