Dr. Evan Jensen is a fourth-year resident in a General Surgery program at St. John's Hospital in Chicago, where she must face life and death decisions on a daily basis. After she is the passenger in a horrific car accident, she is taken to the same trauma hospital where she works. Comatose and with life-threatening injuries, random and misty images dance around in her silent brain. Evan finds herself lost in a world between life and death, but something else is there with her. Something sinister and terrifying.

They entered the central hub, the place where Sally watched everyone come and go between each of the therapy wings, conveniently ignoring the locked double doors in the forgotten wing. Jake pushed the chair into the hub, and Evan glanced to the quiet doors, more out of habit now than anything else. And like habit, her brain had expectation of seeing the steel lock, the two black windows and the chipped white paint.

But there was something else now.

The breath left Evan's lungs and her ribs locked for only the short moment before Jake turned the chair toward the therapy wing. How can it be, in the middle of the morning, with everyone walking around and phones ringing and televisions playing behind the closed doors of the patients?

The dark figure stood there, but not a shadow like she had seen so many times now in the hospital. It was just like it had been in the foggy woods of her thoughts, that moment between life and death when everything had gone still and quiet. The thing stood there, as plain as Sally who sat behind the desk. Only, nobody else seemed to notice the figure with long, stringy black hair and a dirty hospital gown, blood dripping down her legs and pooling on the floor as it stood right in front of the double doors. It - or probably, she - stood there motionless, her arms still at her side and trickles of crimson running downward and dripping from her fingertips.

CarrieMerrill.com