In this medical fiction, a prickly CIO’s 4th of July hospital staff BBQ spirals into chaos when a mischievous little girl ignites more than just sparklers.
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.
Brad loved Fourth of July celebrations. In fact, the Fourth was his favorite holiday. It wasn’t like Christmas—so cold your bare fingers froze to door handles. He found Easter and Thanksgiving boring, being mostly about meals. Brad felt ham was okay in small doses, but in big Easter dinner slices it caused him to pass gas something evil. Deep-fried turkey on Thanksgiving was hellishly messy, and last Thanksgiving his bird ended up still frozen inside, causing hot oil to explode from the deep-fryer like liquid shrapnel.
Which brings us to the other reason Brad preferred the Fourth of July to other holidays: Brad liked loud bangs, the more exotic and brash, the better. On Independence Day, Brad could enjoy as many loud bangs as he liked, so he always began planning far ahead of time. He spent more money on Independence Day than all the other holidays combined, and it showed. While other holidays needed simple planning, Independence Day called for serious logistics.
As the CIO of a for-profit hospital, Brad had ready access to festivity funds and a pool of people from whom he could demand assistance, as well as surprisingly ample free time. He was not a very popular person amongst the hospital staff, being prickly, self-important, and the source of many of his co-workers irritation. Brad was, however, a favorite of the CFO, CEO, and the board, who appreciated that he’d allowed them to cut the admin staff by nearly half and replace many of the janitorial and grounds-keeping teams. He’d ushered in automation: a computerized fax server, and an AI algorithm that selected the most lucrative charge codes to match any given procedure or encounter. Because of Brad, billing was more efficient, debtor days were cut in half, and staff members were annoyed.
Not all of Brad’s automation efforts were without hiccups. The robotic mowing machines occasionally overshot the lawn, launching fusillades of pea gravel across the parking lot. The automated billing system seemed to have a fetish for invoicing a Mr. Zbigniew Zzilard $2,718.28 each month, and no amount of tweaking or troubleshooting seemed to help. Eventually, the software engineer just wrote script to automatically credit the account by the same amount every month, and the system and Brad were satisfied. That is, until the system next started billing every deceased patient for $1,366.60. monthly. The same engineer swiftly fixed this snafu by writing another auto-crediting script. She expected to eventually catch hell for covering the errors of Brad’s billing system, but Brad was thrilled because her fix dropped the average debtor days by another 50%.
As in years past, Brad was the sole hospital staff member eagerly awaiting the upcoming hospital staff Fourth of July BBQ.
Brenda, an OB/GYN at the hospital, was dreading the event. She always found the food appalling and the music too loud. She also didn’t relish pretending to enjoy the crude jokes and supposedly witty double entendres that passed as party conversation for many of the males after a beer or two. Brenda’s husband, Lawrence, a hospital neurosurgeon, was also dreading the BBQ. The subtle politicking that always took place at hospital events exhausted him. Give him a complex arteriovenous malformation to deal with and he was a happy man, but the Byzantine intrigues cooked up by the c-suite left him nervous and nauseous.
Even Brenda and Lawrence’s daughter Siobhan—an energetic redhead full of curiosity, mischief, and occasional spite—wasn’t keen on attending the Independence Day BBQ. Eight year old Siobhan loved vampire movies and quasi-violent video games. Brenda and Lawrence hoped she’d one day follow in their footsteps and become a physician, but Siobhan thought touching strangers’ bodies for work was gross, and going to college for twelve years was stupid. Brenda tried to give Siobhan the girly childhood she herself had never had, but Siobhan was adamant that brushing her hair and teeth was as girly as she wanted to be. When Brenda enrolled Siobhan in ballet, Siobhan stuffed her brand-new tights and leotards down the garbage disposal and locked herself in her bedroom. Eager to find a healthy outlet for Siobhan’s energy, Lawrence enrolled her in horseback riding lessons. Siobhan very firmly decreed that if she had to ride a horse, she wanted to “do tent-pegging.” Witnessing her parents’ confusion, Siobhan eagerly showed them Instagram pictures of swords and lances, and YouTube clips of riders decapitating or impaling coconuts, melons, and scarecrows. While well-aware of their daughter’s rambunctious nature, the thought of little Siobhan galloping around brandishing a saber was a bit too much, even for a very broad-minded couple. They eventually agreed on barebow archery as a compromise, and Siobhan was satisfied. Secretly, neither parent was quite comfortable with Siobhan launching sharp sticks across the backyard for practice, but they reasoned it’d be better than chopping up stuff with a sword or stabbing things with a lance.
As far as attending the hospital staff Independence Day BBQ, Siobhan hated the annual event. The speeches were boring, the food was nasty, and the adults were stupid. But before this year’s big event, she’d overheard her parents nervously discussing the fact that “that idiot CIO Brad” was planning a huge fireworks display. Brenda expressed concerns about air pollution, and Lawrence wasn’t keen on amateurs launching huge explosives on hospital grounds. Siobhan, on the other hand, rather liked the idea of massive fireworks. The clincher was, as usual, office politics. Absence from the big event would guarantee future repercussions. They had to go.
When the family pulled into the staff parking lot, Brenda grimaced at the blindingly metallic vehicle in the next space, and asked, “What in heaven’s name is that?” Lawrence whispered that it was the CIO’s Cybertruck, discreetly gesturing to the man in the truck’s cargo space who was bending over boxes of fireworks and checking a big drum. “Gross, I can see his butt crack!” Siobhan squealed, disgusted. “Shiv! Manners and words, please!” Brenda whisper-pleaded. Lawrence quietly explained to his daughter that Bradley Bewson was the chief of all the computer systems. “Figures” grumbled Siobhan. “Buttcrack Brad is a geek.”
Lawrence and Brenda unloaded their picnic blankets and umbrella, and the family went in search of a picnic spot. Next, Brenda and Lawrence set up their umbrella and blankets while Siobhan wandered off. It was perhaps natural she’d be attracted to the area where some of the older, rowdier kids also stuck at the picnic were setting off squibs—mini-pyrotechnic cartridges—and horsing around. She watched with great interest, then the squibs gave her an idea, and she made a wide circle back to the parking lot where she hoped “Buttcrack Brad” might still be.
Brad was still busy sorting through the trove of industrial-scale fireworks in the back of his Cybertruck, and double-checking that he’d brought the correct electronic sequencer for the firework ignition. Loads and loads of rockets were laid out neatly in their boxes, roman candles were stacked to one side and, in the large drum, Brad had the 7″ shells he’d use as the grand finale of his fireworks display. He turned them over carefully, one by one, checking that the fusing was intact and secure. “This is going to be a monster show,” he thought with a big, slightly twisted grin.
Brad was recounting the mortar tubes and igniters when a youngster’s voice interrupted him: “Can I have a firecracker, please, Brad?” The little girl’s question began a dialogue in which Brad’s responses grew increasingly more irritable, but within political limits. He wasn’t sure who this little redheaded, green-eyed annoyance belonged to. Sending her off bawling would be bad if she turned out to be the brat of someone on the hospital board or, worse still, the progeny of a hospital investor.
Siobhan was polite but adamant. She made it crystal clear through her posture, phrasing, and general persistence that she was going nowhere until Brad handed over fireworks.
Brad didn’t have time to waste on arguing with this little brat. He needed to finish his fireworks set-up and start schmoozing with the board members and investors. For her part, Siobhan was also growing very irritated, but there was no way she was going to back down. She was going to get a firework from him and that was that. Finally, she took a square stance, lowered her head, glared at him, and stuck out her hand. Brad mentally crumbled. What kind of kid was this? Angrily, he fished around in his box of leftovers from past parties and handed her a sparkler. It was actually one of the nice ones with a wick and compressed gunpowder that gave off colored sparks in red, white, and blue, and was at least double the length of traditional sparklers.
“There. Off you go! That’s it,” he growled. Siobhan whined, “It’s not lit!” So Brad fumbled in his pocket for a lighter, lit the sparkler, and returned to his fireworks inventory without another word.
Siobhan glowered at his back. All that effort for one stupid sparkler. He had boxes and boxes of cool fireworks and a whole big bin of who knows what, and all he hands her is one dumb baby sparkler? She pursed her lips, screwed up her eyes, and launched the smoking sparkler at Brad like an arrow before turning and running off in search of the kids with the squibs.
Brad was so focused on finishing his inventory he barely noticed the sparkler bounce off his wallet-stuffed back pocket, but he sure as heck noticed the smell and heard the fizzing as the sparkler began to do its thing. “The hell?” he said, looking around for the source of the scent and sound. Telltale trails of smoke led him to the inside of the shell-filled bin and, as Brad leaned over it, he took in the image of a halo of sparks filling the drum. Mercifully, that was his last full thought because the first two-pound shell launched itself and hit him in the face, knocking the consciousness clean out of his head, along with a few teeth and a chunk of cartilage from his nose. Over the next seven seconds, rockets burst out in every direction, sending cascades of sparks and smoldering bits over the astonished picnickers. When the bin of shells detonated, the hospital’s chief investor choked on his hotdog and collapsed. He might have been noticed and rescued by any one of many physicians who surrounded him, but their attention was now occupied by the spectacle of Brad’s Cybertruck’s massive lithium battery catching fire and outdoing the fireworks in sheer ferocity.
When the explosions finally ended, a hush fell over the crowd. The first person to say anything meaningful was a little redheaded girl whose green eyes sparkled at the spectacle, and whose broad grin of wonderment was interrupted by her heartfelt, “Hell, yeah!”
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