**And here's the shortest!**

The rooms in the ICU, the Intensive Care Unit, are all numbered. That's perhaps a bad way to describe the rooms in the ICU, since they weren't the only ones that were numbered. All the rooms in the hospital were numbered.

But the ICU's were different. They were a lot smaller and held a lot less people in them. The numbers ranged from 1-20 or 25. For every two rooms, there was a nurse's station where one nurse would watch the vitals or watch patients.

There was a man in room 1 who got out of heart surgery 2 hours ago.

There was a young woman in room 2 who was in a motorcycling accident.

The next 4 rooms were empty.

There was another young woman in room 7 who had been in the same motorcycling accident as the first.

There was an elderly man in room 8 who had shattered his hip that night and had been flown in.

There was a man in room 9 who had gotten out of surgery and was still unstable.

There was an older woman in room 10 who had been in a car accident.

There was a man in room 11 who had something to do with the motorcycling accident, but wasn't driving a motorcycle at the time.

The rest of the rooms were empty. Recently. That was a common thing for the ICU. One hour there might be 12 people in the ward, but the next hour, they could only have 5. Some of them might have been moved to other wards, yes. Some of them had died, though.

It was hard to be in the ICU. Some of the nurses waited years to get to transferred to other wards. One of the nurses was holding out hope to move to the newborn ICU. She said that would be less painful emotionally. She said that in the regular ICU, you had to treat the victim and the aggressor in any given accident. The drunk driver and the person driving the other car. The person mugged and the person who was mugging. In the NICU, there was only sick babies and only victims of fate.

It was late in the night was a young man was wheeled into room 18.

He had been flown in for a gunshot wound. He'd been wheeled out that same night.

His mother wailed in the halls; it was her second son to be lost to the plight of bullets. Her cries woke up Autumn's mother, but not the girl. She was too heavy a sleeper.

Room 18 was empty for a few hours, then there was another young man wheeled in who had attempted suicide by overdose.

He was transferred a few hours later to another ward.

Room 18 was empty until later that night, around 6 o'clock. They wheeled in an older man who was going through ceptis. His family didn't make it in time to see him go, but they got to keep his quilt.

Room 18 was empty for a full day after that, but then it was filled again by a young woman with nice black hair who was shot by accident.

After she went away, another shooting victim from the same accident moved in. After they left, the final victim was brought in. They made it through the night and ended up moving a couple floors up.

Immediately after that, room 18 was filled by an older woman who was having major organ failure. Her family came for her things later in the day, but they didn't make an effort to get there in time to say goodbye.

Room 18 was empty for a record breaking 3 days.

Then it was filled by a young woman.

Autumn fell asleep just after she had been brought in. When she woke up 3 hours later, the woman was gone.

In the morning, a nice family joined Autumn and her family in the waiting room in high spirits.

"We've been waiting for 3 years," they said. "Doctors said it was a good one, too. A young liver."