Two days went by fairly quickly. To my dismay, I hadn't gotten any closer to figuring out the cure for the plague. I would have to continue my work at the hospital.

I was happy to hear that we wouldn't have to walk the entire way. There was an armed transport that would take us there, we were too important to just send out into the open with no protection. Most of the medics recharged during the trip. I busied myself with tinkering with my hands, trying to make sure they wouldn't seize up anymore. They usually did that when I had worked too much or too long, but I couldn't have that happening.

The transport did get stopped once, but I never heard the word 'Decepticon' so I guessed it was just border security. Once we arrived at the hospital, we were shown where our quarters would be and the locations of the Medbays and tool storages. 

We were only there for an hour before wounded soldiers started coming in. Most of them were just banged up or burned, hardly any of them had severe wounds. All in all, there were no casualties on the first day, which was great.

Now it was time for a well-deserved recharge and some deep thinking.

———

A week passed and I was up bright and early every morning, like always, preparing the Medbays and cleaning the equipment. Being CMO of a hospital was nothing compared to being one at the Iacon Medical Center, which was like ten hospitals in one building. It was still stressful, though.

The influx of patients had increased ever since the war really began to pick up and we hardly had any downtime. I often had to take my energon rations with me to my next patient because I had no time to sit down and enjoy it. Being the most experienced medic there, I also had to balance my time between helping the younger medics and treating my own patients, which a difficult task in itself.

Right now, the patient I was treating only had burn wounds to his chassis and midsection. We ran out of the gel that I needed to soothe the burns, so I was heading into the back room to get some more. When I opened the door, I was greeted by this... strange smell. It smelled foul, like something had spoiled and no one bothered to dispose of it. After I found what I needed, I decided to investigate.

The back storage room was fairly large with rows of shelving and locked containers, so it took a decent amount of time to work my way through it all. I noticed that the smell got stronger when I came close to a certain corner that had several boxes stacked on top of each other. As I got closer, I recognized the smell. That was the smell of decomposition and rancid energon.

Something was dead back there.

"I swear I told them to clean out this place." I grumbled to myself, setting down the gel so I could move the boxes. "No one ever does what they're told..." I managed to push the boxes aside so I could see what was back there, and my spark immediately stopped beating.

There was a dead corpse shoved into the corner, it's limbs all crumpled up and bent at odd angles. There was a decent sized pool of bright blue energon beneath it, meaning that this bot was healthy before they died. I couldn't believe this had gone under my radar, when did the corpse get here?

After further investigation using a special light that makes energon that's been cleaned up glow, I found the spot where the Autobot had originally died. And it was right next to the lift that we used to get to the higher shelves. My insides churned when I realized that the Autobot must've been crushed by the mechanisms as the lift went down.

I quickly tended to my original patient first before beginning an autopsy on the corpse I had found. My conclusion was right, but that still didn't explain how the Autobot even got under the lift in the first place. When I scanned the Autobot's head, however, I noticed that there was extensive cranial damage and internal bleeding.

'They were hit in the head...' I thought, taking a step back and rubbing my chin. 'That explains how they got there without a fight. Someone did this on purpose.'

After running some more tests, I discovered that this bot hadn't died that long ago. They were probably still alive when I had just woken up. That being said....

I had a murder victim laying on my medberth.