Contentedly munching on handfuls of oily Border Brand potato chips and slurping down bourbon, Henry James sat watching the “Treasure of the Sierra Madre” thinking very little about anything, when he heard a voice tell him something. At first he just thought he was hearing another TV from the apartment below, and stomped his naked, callused foot sharply against the floor. However, the voice persisted, and Henry realized that the voice was in his own head, and it sounded just like his dead wife, who had died from complications during knee surgery two months prior. The doctors had prescribed Henry with Pretax, a sedative to help Henry cope with the sudden death of his wife, however the pills did not help and, in fact, only created auditory hallucinations in the guise of his dead wife’s voice; she told him to put on a birthday party hat, just a party hat, and gun down the second floor of Our Lady of Sorrow Hospital. Henry immediately shook this off and went back to watching his movie, but the voice persisted; for hours the voice in Henry’s head screamed at him to do this horrible act until Henry realized the only way to quiet the voice was do what it said.
In the early hours of the morning Henry loaded his fully automatic rifle and headed down to Our Lady of Sorrow wearing only a party hat. He entered the hospital via a service entrance that had been carelessly left open and walked up the service stairs to the second floor unnoticed, there he began gunning down everyone he could find. Nick Lantree was killed by one of these bullets just as he awoke from his head injury. Henry attempted to turn the gun on himself; however, he had spent all the bullets. He then charged down the hall and out of the window, but being only a two-story drop, this too fell short of his goal. He broke both of his ankles and two ribs, and ruined a bed of freshly planted irises.
It is true, the reason for Henry James’ psychotic episode stemmed partly from his wife’s death. She had been scheduled to be operated on by Dr. Robin Fulstrom, a gifted knee and ankle surgeon, who, due to cutbacks earlier in the year, was extremely overworked. Before he performed Mrs. James’ knee surgery he had worked 60 straight hours without rest, and being somewhat groggy missed that she was allergic to local anesthetic, a fact that was also overlooked by the rotation’s anesthesiologist and strangely enough by every single nurse attending to Mrs. James, which resulted in a massive brain aneurysm and death. This massive staff oversight partly stemmed from the general fatigue amongst the staff, but the true culprit was the coffee filters the staff of the second floor had been using. They were given to the hospital by the state and had been bleached with a compound that caused severe short-term memory loss and increased the addictive qualities of caffeine. Shortly after Mrs. James death the staff had run out of the filters and had gone back to normal.