Dark Moonlighting (5 page)

“If my husband and I changed our minds about
the vaccines, would it be too late?” she questioned.

“Nope,” I said with a forced smile. “Katie’s
primary care doctor should be able to take care of that for
you.”

“Thank you, doctor,” Katie’s mother
responded.

“No problem,” I said to myself after the two
had darted from the examination room. “I love being a cautionary
tale.”

It was an hour and a half later that the E.R.
staff, with my assistance, finally worked through the backlog of
patients caused by the aardvark flu scare. I was finishing up an
examination of my last patient for the night. He was fourteen,
tired and vomiting into an emesis basin. Young Tyrone did have the
flu, but there was nothing exotic or unusual about it. Before I had
a chance to finish with the patient, Robert Little walked into the
examination room with one of the most beautiful women I had ever
seen in tow.

“Sounds like someone is having a bad night,”
the Chief of Medicine said to my patient.

Tyrone’s response came in the form of another
violent round of puking.

“Sorry to interrupt, Nick. I just wanted to
introduce you to one of our new medical interns. This is Lara
Russell,” Robert said.

Lara was on a tour of the hospital, so she
was not wearing the scrubs or lab coat typically worn by the
medical staff. Instead, she wore a professionally appropriate
blouse and skirt. The clothing was not designed to highlight her
physical features, but she would have been hard-pressed to find
anything that could hide them. She was tall, skinny and chesty. Her
blond hair was cut in a short, stylish fashion that certainly
required a lot of expensive upkeep. Her exposed legs and arms were
tanned almost brown and looked out of place compared to the
extremities of everyone else living through the winter in Illinois.
Overall she looked better suited to be a
Hawaiian Tropic
bikini model than a doctor.

“Nice to meet you, Dr. Whittier,” Lara
greeted me with an extended hand.

“Likewise,” I responded as I returned the
gesture.

I immediately regretted my single word
response. It had been an impulsive attempt to look cool and hip,
but I was sure it had failed miserably. I realized this was not the
worst part of the introduction a second later. A small dab of
Tyrone’s vomit had been on my hand and was transferred to Lara’s
during the handshake. She sneered at the partially digested chicken
soup and turned towards the sink at the back of the room. I was
about to apologize when Robert interrupted.

“We were just finishing up the tour, so I
thought I’d pop in and show her Doogie Howser in action.”

“Doogie Howser?” Lara questioned over the
sound of a running faucet.

“Oh, you’re probably too young to remember
that old TV show,” Robert reminisced. “It was about a genius kid
who becomes a doctor. Dr. Whittier here was only twenty years old
when we hired him. Not quite as smart as Doogie, but impressive
nonetheless. The weird thing is that he doesn’t look a day older
than he did on the day we met.”

“Doogie Howser wasn’t so smart,” I said
quickly to change the subject. “Look at the end of the show when he
was on the computer. He could only type, like, eight words per
minute.”

Having never seen the show, Lara did not
understand the reference. Robert got it but did not care. The joked
failed, and I felt embarrassed for the second time in as many
minutes. A silence fell in the room as even Tyrone’s chorus of
upchucking had momentarily abated.

“So, are we all done here?” Tyrone’s father
awkwardly interrupted.

“Yes, sorry,” I answered. “Give him plenty of
clear fluids and Tylenol for the—”

“Don’t give that child Tylenol!” Robert
interjected forcefully. “Fever is an important part of the human
immune system. It helps kill the virus.”

“Sir,” I started diplomatically for the sake
of my patient. “I really don’t think—”

“Dr. Whittier, I have been practicing
medicine a lot longer than you. I think I know the proper way to
treat the flu.”

I found his statement to be quite amusing as
I was old enough to remember the creation of modern medicine.

“Is that true?” Tyrone’s father asked. “Will
the fever help him get better faster?”

“Yes,” Lara answered as she stared down at
the chart she had taken the liberty of examining. “But it’s kind of
a moot point if his brain boils.”

Robert furrowed his brow at the chart that
Lara helpfully pushed towards him. He let out a whistle and shook
his head in resignation.

“Boy, that’s a high fever. Yeah, on second
thought go ahead and give him the Tylenol just to be on the safe
side. The trade-off is that he’ll be sick longer but feel less
miserable over that period of time.”

Robert, Lara and I escorted Tyrone and his
father out of the examination room. Robert offered to take them the
rest of the way and asked me to show Lara to the human resources
office. It was a short walk, but I was happy to get the time alone
with her.

“So, where did you go to medical school?” I
asked casually.

“Case Western in Cleveland,” she responded.
“I was hoping to do my residency back in Ohio, but this was the
closest hospital that would take me.”

“You have family back there?”

Lara nodded. “My parents. I’m an only child
so I feel bad being so far away from them. They helped put me
through med school, and I was hoping to at least be able to keep
them company.”

“You’ll be so busy this first year that the
time will just fly by,” I reassured her. “You’ll probably find a
position back home before you know it.”

“Yeah. So what’s with the Doogie Howser
nickname?” Lara asked, eager to change the subject. “You been
putting up with that shit from Dr. Little for long?”

“He means it as a term of endearment,” I
responded defensively. “Besides, I have lots of different nicknames
here. Doogie Howser, Dr. Awesome, The Love Doctor…” I finished
slyly.

I was typically never awkward around women,
even those as beautiful as Lara. It has been my experience that men
are more confident with women when there is an age gap. A thirty
year old man would feel at ease with a woman in her early twenties,
for example. As I was easily 600 years older than any woman I met,
confidence was never a big issue for me. I wrote off the series of
unfortunate faux pas as an effect of sleep deprivation. To my
surprise, Lara did not seem disturbed by my comment.

“With lines like that I have my doubts,” Lara
joked. “I’m thinking the
love doctor
is going to have to do
a lot of
healing thyself
if you know what I mean.”

Lara winked at me before entering the office
for human resources. I stared at the closed door for a moment,
thinking about how amazing she seemed after only a few minutes of
conversation. The fact that she pulled off a sexy wink without
looking awkward was fascinating to me. I had never known anyone
under the age of sixty who was able to make winking look like a
natural facial expression. The puzzled look I received from a
passing oncologist snapped me out of my fantasy. I cleared my
throat awkwardly as I realized I was standing in the middle of the
hallway, and I quickly moved towards the nearest elevator.

I felt relieved when I made it back to my
isolated office in the basement of the hospital. I had become a
doctor specifically to see and treat patients, but that was not the
reason I had accepted my current position. The social aspect of the
job had taken a back seat over the last decade as I increased my
efforts involving my pet project. It had started as a fantasy many
centuries earlier then gradually developed into a working theory.
With the hospital’s hematology fellowship as my cover, I was in the
process of running practical experiments. There was not enough time
left in my shift on that day to start anything too involved. I
resigned myself to type up the notes I had dictated into a small
recorder earlier in the week.

I had been living as a vampire for two
centuries before I had a startling realization. The religious and
mythical aspects of vampirism were so prevalent that I had always
accepted them at face value. Vampires were possessed by demonic
spirits, and they killed humans because of an inherit desire to do
evil. This was, of course, horseshit. When I started studying
science, I realized that the “evil” I was doing was done commonly
by many other species in the natural world. Hematophagy, drinking
the blood of another creature, is practiced by some fish, leeches
and worms. Even mammals like the appropriately named vampire bat
survive off the blood of others. The only odd part of the process
was that it was being performed by some human beings. With this new
knowledge, I became convinced that my condition must have a logical
cause. The solution escaped me for many centuries. Finally, in the
last decade of the nineteenth century a Russian scientist by the
name of Dmitri Ivanovsky discovered the first virus. That
revolutionary advancement in the field of medicine allowed me,
after three decades of work, to discover the bug responsible for
vampirism.

I had confirmed that my rare condition was a
strictly medical problem. There was nothing supernatural or evil
about being a vampire, it was simply another in a large family of
viruses. The bug I discovered was somewhat unusual given that it
forms a symbiotic relationship with the host. Through research
conducted exclusively on myself, I found that the vampire virus
infects almost every cell in the human body. It fundamentally
changes human physiology. Infected humans become physically
stronger, develop better eyesight and have more sensitive hearing.
It greatly increases metabolism and speeds up the host’s natural
ability to heal. This increase in rejuvenation means less sleep is
necessary for the infected human. It also stimulates the immune
system which kills any other virus or foreign bacteria that tries
to get a foothold within the host. The virus even shuts down the
natural aging process.

There are obvious downsides to this
relationship as well. The virus is susceptible to sunlight. Though
it is impossible to know why, I speculate that the organism
developed in an area devoid of sunlight like a cave or even deep in
the ocean. Sunlight kills the virus, and since it is so intricately
tied to its host, exposure to ultraviolet radiation causes intense
pain and damage to the epidermis. My early experiments focused on
using sunlight to destroy the virus. After several painful
attempts, I realized that the host would die long before the virus
was completely eradicated.

The vampire virus does not kill, but it
results in death. It is designed to change the host into a more
efficient specimen. Cooking meat and harvesting vegetables is not
the most convenient way to survive. Digesting animals and plants to
absorb their nutrients is a waste of time. The easiest way to live
is to take what your body needs directly from the blood of another
creature. When the majority of your own species is still digesting
their food like a bunch of chumps, the best way to ensure you get
all the nutrients your body needs is to feed off one of your own
kind. The virus cannot comprehend human morality. It does not
understand why someone would be reluctant to drink the blood of
another person. After thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of
years with human hosts, the bug evolved to ensure its own survival.
The virus greatly amplifies the predatory instinct in human beings.
If the host refuses to hunt on moral grounds it will die of
starvation. The bug is quite committed to ensuring that its host
survives.

The reason I took the hospital’s hematology
fellowship and started pretending to study anemia was because of
yet another stunning medical breakthrough. While antibiotics have
been used for quite some time to kill bacteria, the development of
antiviral medication did not start until the late 20th century.
Thousands of scientists with billions of dollars worth of funding
have designed antivirals to attack HIV, influenza, herpes and many
other viruses. Building on their research, I had spent years
developing my own custom built antiviral. After centuries of hard
work and research, I was finally on the verge of curing
vampirism.

Chapter Three: Nocturnal Emissions

Although I was encouraged by the progress I
was making towards a cure, I was perfectly happy to leave the
hospital when my shift was over. It had been a grueling workweek,
and I was looking forward to having the weekend off. I did not need
much time to physically recuperate after a rough week, but I always
liked to keep my weekends open for hunting.

I lived in a nice apartment complex in a
fairly affluent part of town. My apartment had plenty of space that
I did not need, and a huge bedroom that I rarely used. After the
glorified rat’s nest I had called home in New York, I had decided
to splurge on my new place when I moved to Starside. My apartment
was at the far end of one row, bordering only one other apartment
and an empty field. This allowed me a little more privacy, for
which I was thankful. All the apartments in the complex had
attached garages, which was essential for my comings and goings. It
was past midnight when I got home on that day, so the sun’s deadly
rays were not a concern. I left my garage door open after parking,
and I walked across the street to retrieve my mail from the
box.

“Evening, Mr. Whittier.”

I turned to find a young black man wearing
dark slacks and a Chicago White Sox jacket on the other side of the
street. He would have been invisible to most humans given the dim
light, but my predatory eyes could make him out clearly. Though it
would have been a terrifying encounter for most Caucasians to run
into a black man dressed the way he was after midnight, I was
actually delighted to see him. I retrieved my mail, locked the box
and moved quickly back across the street.