The Ghost Doctor

CHAPTER 1 — The Disgraced Healer

The corridor of St. Mark’s Medical Center was chaos wrapped in fluorescent light. Nurses rushed, the smell of antiseptic burned, and somewhere behind the glass doors, someone screamed, “He’s killing the patient!”

Dr. Justin Forbes froze. His gloved hands were steady, but his heart wasn’t. He’d been here before, same words, different day. “Step away from the table, Forbes!” barked Dr. Reynolds, the Chief Surgeon, voice slicing through the panic.

Justin’s jaw clenched. “His airway’s collapsing. If you intubate at that angle, you’ll”

“You’ll kill him?” Reynolds sneered. “You already did. Look at the monitor.”

Flatline. A single beep of finality. The nurses stepped back. The patient, a construction worker with internal bleeding, lay still beneath the surgical lights.

Justin’s chest constricted, his pulse pounding louder than the heart that had just stopped. “Call it,” said Reynolds, coldly.

Justin’s lips parted. “We can still”

“Call. It.”

The silence was suffocating. “Time of death: 3:47 PM.”

Reynolds yanked off his gloves, tossed them into the biohazard bin, and turned to the team. “This is what happens when arrogance replaces discipline. Remember that.” His eyes flicked to Justin. “You’re done here.”

Justin stripped off his gloves, his fingers trembling. “You can’t pin this on me. The man was bleeding internally, you refused the laparotomy”

“You broke protocol, Forbes!” Reynolds shouted. “You injected your own compound into a patient without authorization. What was it this time? Another one of your miracle serums?”

The word miracle dripped with venom.

Justin’s mouth went dry. “It was an experimental stabilizer. It worked on test subjects”

“You’re not a scientist,” Reynolds snapped. “You’re a liability.”

The nurses wouldn’t meet Justin’s eyes. Even Dr. Miles, his closest colleague, looked away. By evening, the hospital lobby had turned into a circus of whispers.

A crowd of reporters waited outside; someone had already leaked the story. “Disgraced doctor kills patient during illegal procedure!” screamed one headline on a nurse’s phone.

Justin shoved through the revolving doors into the street, his coat still spattered with blood. Cameras flashed. “Dr. Forbes, did you inject an unapproved drug?”

“Is it true your girlfriend left you this morning?”

“Are you mentally unstable?”

He kept walking, jaw locked. A microphone caught his shoulder; he shoved it aside. “Leave me the hell alone!”

He made it to the alley behind the hospital, his breath turning to vapor in the cold. A trash truck rumbled by. He leaned against a wall, head pounding.

His phone buzzed. April. He stared at the name, thumb hovering over the screen. Then he answered. “April, I”

“Don’t.” Her voice was tight, trembling. “They’re saying you killed someone.”

“It wasn’t like that. The drug worked in simulations. He was dying already, I ”

“You always think you’re right, Justin!” she snapped. “Always chasing some impossible cure. You don’t even see how crazy you sound.”

He swallowed. “You know me better than that.”

“I thought I did. But everyone’s talking. My father’s furious. I can’t,  I can’t do this anymore.”

Something in his chest cracked. “You’re breaking up with me?”

“I can’t stand next to you when everyone’s laughing at us.”

He closed his eyes. “So it’s about your reputation.”

A pause. Then, softly: “I’m sorry.”

Click. The line went dead. He slid down the wall until he was sitting in the cold, the phone still in his hand. The hospital lights glowed behind him like a judgmental halo.

From somewhere above, a voice echoed down. “Rough day, Doc?”

Justin looked up. A man in a janitor’s uniform was leaning over the fire escape, smoking. “Just another day in paradise,” Justin muttered.

The man chuckled, flicking ash. “You look like you lost more than a patient.”

Justin said nothing. “Word travels fast,” the janitor continued. “They’re saying you pumped a man full of some mystery serum.”

Justin exhaled slowly. “They’re right.”

The man’s brow lifted. “Did it work?”

“It should have.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

Justin looked at his hands, pale under the flickering streetlight. “It didn’t.”

The janitor studied him for a moment, then dropped his cigarette. “Careful, Doc. The world doesn’t like people who can do things it can’t explain.”

Then he disappeared inside. Rain started to fall. soft, almost merciful.

Justin pulled his coat tighter and started walking. Nowhere to go, no one to call. His thoughts were loud enough to drown the city. Then a scream split the night.

He turned. At the corner near the shopping plaza, a woman was kneeling beside a car, screaming for help. A young girl, maybe twelve, lay motionless on the pavement, blood seeping from her temple.

Justin ran before he even thought about it. “Call an ambulance!” he barked, sliding to his knees beside the child.

The mother sobbed. “She’s not breathing! She’s not”

“Move!” Justin’s voice was sharp now, the instinct of a doctor cutting through panic. He checked the pulse. Nothing. Pupils, fixed. Skin, cold.

He started compressions. “Come on… come on, kid.”

A bystander shouted, “She’s gone, man!”

“Shut up!” Justin growled. “I said she’s not done!”

He pressed harder, counting under his breath, the rhythm of a desperate man refusing to let go. And then, something shifted.

A heat shot through his palms, crawling up his arms like electricity. The girl’s chest jerked. Once. Twice. The crowd gasped. “Jesus, she’s breathing!” someone cried.

Justin stared at his hands, faint light flickered beneath the skin, gone as fast as it came. The girl coughed, eyes fluttering open.

The mother screamed, clutching her daughter. “Oh my God! She’s alive! She’s alive!”

Justin stumbled back, breath shaking. People stared, phones recording, voices overlapping, “What did he do?”

“Did you see that light?”

“Who is that guy?”

Sirens wailed in the distance. Justin backed away, eyes wide. His hands still burned. The girl’s heartbeat echoed in his skull like a drum.

Then someone whispered what would haunt him forever: “That’s him. That’s the doctor who killed a man this morning.”