Wake for Me (Life or Death Series) Read Online Free Page B

food coloring to see if it would make his pee turn blue. It had, but their mom had freaked out when she saw it, and since neither of them wanted to cop to stealing the food coloring Sam had spent the next few hours in an emergency room. Sam was terrified they were going to give him a shot, and Ben couldn’t stop laughing.
    It was more painful than usual, remembering that first time in the hospital. Maybe because this year, it wasn’t just another anniversary. This year, history was repeating itself—another young person had been robbed of a bright and promising future, for no good reason that anyone could see. And no matter how hard Sam tried to pretend that neither tragedy had anything to do with him, he couldn’t shake the knowledge that he was the only common denominator between Ben and Viola.
    Twenty minutes and a lot of distracted nodding later, Sam pulled up to the hospital’s back entrance. Brady shoved the door open before the car had even come to a complete stop. He launched himself out of the seat, creating an explosion of donut crumbs in his wake.
    “What are you thinking, ten minutes?”
    “If we’re lucky,” Sam told him, glancing at the dashboard clock, which read 5:58 AM. “You know the drill. Just do the best you can.”
    Five minutes later, Sam finally found a parking spot. It was a little tight, which wasn’t ideal, but it would have to do unless he wanted to suffer the wrath of Chakrabarti on top of everything else he was dealing with. He locked the car and sprinted toward the entrance, managing to ninja his way through the door behind a grey-uniformed housekeeper.
    “Sorry,” he called back over his shoulder, as he left the startled looking elderly man in the dust. He yanked open the door to the stairwell and sprinted up three flights without stopping. At the top, he paused for two seconds to peek through the window and make sure the coast was clear, then shoved the door open and Steven Seagalled his way from one side of the hallway to the other. Inside the locker room, he ripped off his clothes, feeling like a cross between a stripper and the Tasmanian Devil. He shoved everything into his locker, pulling on his mint green scrubs without bothering to check whether they were right side out or not. Grabbing his starched white coat from its hook, he checked to see if his stethoscope was still in the pocket before shrugging it on.
    The clock above the door read 6:11. It was the latest he’d ever been.
    As he blew past the seventh floor nurse’s station, Sam could’ve sworn he heard Nurse Bouchard laughing at him. He rounded the corner and almost collided with the small herd of interns who were filing into room 716 behind Dr. Chakrabarti. Because he was so tall, there was no such thing as a subtle entrance. Luckily, Brady had his back.
    “Hey Dr. Philips,” he asked loudly. “Did you get those lab results for 728?”
    “No,” Sam answered, equally loudly. He grabbed his hospital ID badge out of Brady’s outstretched hand, clipping it on as he sidled into the line. “And I was waiting down there forever. They told me to come back in an hour.”
    “Damn,” Brady shook his head dramatically. “Mrs. Colson was really hoping to find out whether or not she has…prostatic hyperplasia.”
    A few of the other interns looked askance at Brady, and Sam had to fake a cough to keep from laughing. Brady had taken the joke too far, because he knew that women didn’t have prostates, and therefore couldn’t have prostate cancer. Didn’t he? God, Sam thought suddenly. Please let him be taking the joke too far.
    “Quiet,” Dr. Chakrabarti barked, from his place at the patient’s bedside. Everyone in the room assumed ‘deer caught in headlights’ position, while those who weren’t in the room filed in quietly, heads down, eyes to the floor. Not bothering to wait for the stragglers, the attending physician picked up the chart and started rattling off the patient’s vital data.
    “Swiped you in at