Draculas (3 page)

"Hello, Randall. How are--?"

"You coming to visit?" Randall interrupted. "I'm in room Three-One-Eight."

Jenny sighed. She watched Dr. Lanz charge the defib paddles. "Yeah, I know. You said it on every message you left for me."

"You listened to them? All of them?"

"All thirty-eight, Randall."

"Thirty-eight? It couldn't have been anywhere near that many. But I wasn't sure you were getting them. You been having a problem with your phone?"

Yeah, you keep calling me.
"I've just been busy. So how are you doing?"

"Dry ninety-seven days now. I don't even
want
to drink anymore, I swear. I'm a changed man, Jenny."

So he'd said in all thirty-eight messages. She was impressed if it was true, but he'd done a lot of lying in his drinking days. And even if it were true--too little, too late.

"I meant your injury, Randall."

"Oh." His voice suddenly lost the excited, almost child-like tone. "I got seventy-seven stitches. Everyone thinks it's real ironical that I cut the back of my leg."

"You mean
ironic
, Randall," Jenny corrected. She'd been the one to teach him the meaning of the word, but he had yet to get the pronunciation right.

Winslow--a wisp of a woman who became head nurse when Jenny was fired--squirted conductive gel onto Mortimer's bare, hairless chest. Jenny's patient was convulsing--v-fib or v-tach. Even from across the room, she could see that Mort's eyes had rolled up into his skull, the whites protruding like two eggs. Flecks of foam and blood still sprayed from her patient's mouth, dotting Dr. Lanz's face and his pristine, white lab coat. Lanz's expression twisted in disgust as he wiped his sleeve across his lips, and the fastidious, meticulous doctor actually spat over his shoulder.

Should have put on your face mask, Dr. Jack Ass.

Jenny spotted Shanna, looking a little green, scurrying through the doors into the main hospital. Everyone in the ER looked on as Lanz applied the paddles, even Benny the Clown, Oasis, and her mother.

"Jenny? You there? Hello?"

Jenny only turned her eyes away for a second, trying to gather herself, not ready to see Mortimer die. Rude and self-important as he was, she'd found things about the old man to admire, and even like. She also wondered when she would work again. This was a small town, and hospice nurses weren't in constant demand.

Full of shame at the selfish thought, she forced herself to look back, to say a final, silent goodbye.

She was shocked to see Mortimer--
standing--
on top of the gurney, restraints broken off and dangling from his ankles and wrists, his mouth wide and--

Is he hissing?

The sound came from deep in Mortimer's throat, less like a threatened cat, more like a tea kettle coming to boil. It kept rising in pitch until it became a shrill whistle, the noise unlike anything Jenny had ever heard.

It was inhuman.

"Jenny? What's wrong?" Randall said.

"Oh my God."

"What?
What, Jen?
"

Mortimer's teeth. Something was happening to them. They were falling out--
no
--he was spitting them out, spitting them at Lanz and the nurses who were frantically trying to coax him off the gurney.

"Randall, I have to go. There's something happening in the ER."

"You're here in the--?"

She hung up the phone and started toward Mortimer. No doubt Randall would be trying to call her back on her cell, but she had the ringer turned off--the hospital took its no cell phone rule seriously.

Mortimer abruptly stopped hissing, and Jenny could hear Dr. Lanz ordering him down off the gurney.

Stiff as a plank, Mortimer fell face-first onto the floor.

Jenny rushed to him. She didn't care anymore about hospital protocol, or Lanz having her thrown out.
Mortimer needs me.
Jenny had never seen anything like this in twenty-five years of health care.

She pushed her way through the nurses surrounding Mortimer and knelt at his prone body.

"Jenny Bolton? What the hell are you doing in my hospital?" Dr. Lanz demanded.

"This is my hospice patient," she said, touching Mortimer's neck and seeking out the pulse of his carotid. To her surprise, she didn't have to press hard. His entire neck was vibrating, his artery jolting beneath her fingers like a heavy metal drum solo. The only thing she could compare this to was a crystal meth OD, the heartbeat raging out of control.

Jenny patted the old man's back, checking to see if he was conscious.

"Mortimer, can you hear me? It's Jenny. I'm right here. We're gonna help--"

"
I'm
going to help him. Somebody get security."

She felt Dr. Lanz's hands grip her shoulders, dragging her away from Mortimer just as her patient grabbed her hip.

Jenny felt instant pain, and not only from the pressure of Mortimer's grip. Something sharp was digging into her skin through her uniform.

That can't be Mortimer's hand.

It was more like a claw. A bloody, ragged claw. Jenny stared, mouth agape. Mortimer's finger bones--the phalanges--were extending out through his fingertips, splitting the skin and coming to five sharp points.

The old man hissed again, a high-pitched keen, and when he turned his head to look at Jenny, calm, stoic Nurse Winslow shouted, "Sweet Jesus Christ!"

Mortimer's cheeks exploded like a grenade had gone off inside his mouth, white points bursting through his lips, shearing flesh, digging rents into his face.

Oh my God. Fangs.

He's growing fangs.

His new teeth began to elongate--an inch, two inches, bursting through his bleeding gums in rows that ended in wicked, dagger-like tips. They shredded Mortimer's face into jagged strips, and he began to snap his jaws, chewing through the inside of his mouth, grinding off his cheeks all the way back to his earlobes, making room for his monstrous new dentata.

Then Mortimer's lower jaw unhinged, thrusting forward and hanging open like some perversion of an angler fish. He stared at Jenny, his eyes wide, pupils dilating beyond anything human, spreading until they eclipsed the whites.

For the first time in her life, Jenny screamed a scream of abject, primordial terror.

She jerked back, trying to pull away from Mortimer's grip, but his sharp, bony fingers had embedded themselves into the meat of her hip. She watched her skin stretch through the holes in her clothing--stretch, but not tear--and realized that the bones protruding from Mortimer's finger tips were barbed like fish hooks.

Then he jerked his hand back, taking Jenny with it, knocking her onto her butt, her face inches from his snapping jaws.

Mortimer rolled on top of her, like a lover, blood and saliva dripping onto Jenny's face and neck. She reached up to push him away, but as terror-stricken as she was, Jenny couldn't bring herself to touch him. It was like willingly sticking your hand into a box of angry rattlesnakes. Even as his jaws drew near, Jenny's revulsion wouldn't allow her to fight back. She stretched out her hand--her face imploring--to Dr. Lanz, who stood within reach. But he shrank away from her beckoning fingers, retreating into the safety of the nurse's station.

This is it,
Jenny thought.
I'm going to die.

"Get the
fuck
away from my wife!"

Jenny turned, watching her bear of an ex-husband limping toward her, his hospital gown flapping from the speed of his approach.

He raised something large and red over his head.

"Smile, motherfucker!"

Mortimer's misshapen head jerked up as Randall swung the fire extinguisher, connecting with the jagged nest of teeth. A
clang
resonated over the screams of the onlookers, and Mortimer flew back, his terrible claw disengaging from Jenny's hip, several of his fangs breaking free and tinkling like icicles on the tile.

Jenny found herself being dragged across the floor, Randall's hard, calloused hands under her armpits, pulling her to the water cooler.

"You okay, babe?"

She started to respond, but then saw Mortimer, or whatever he had become, rising to his feet. His head swiveled on his shoulders one hundred eighty degrees, taking a quick, predatory scan of the emergency room.

His eyes locked onto Oasis and Benny the Clown as they retreated through the opening automatic doors.

Mortimer crouched, then leapt after them, soaring three meters into the breezeway.

As the doors slid closed, Jenny heard the most God-awful screaming and Benny the Clown shouting, "No! I'm getting bitten! Again!"

His shoes were frantically squeaking and blood sprayed the automatic glass doors, which opened and closed over and over.

As Mortimer feasted on Benny the Clown's neck, little Oasis desperately pulled on Benny the Clown's arm, trying to disengage her braces, shaking her head like a rabid dog while her mother tugged on her waist. Suddenly the child broke free, falling backward onto her screaming parent.

Mortimer's eyes zeroed in on the movement, and his head jerked up, blood draining out of his mouth and down the front of his shirt like a sieve.

He dropped Benny the Clown and hissed.

Oasis's mother was trembling. "Please," she begged. "It's her birthday."

Mortimer attacked Oasis, savagely biting her arm, and tossing her back into the ER.

Then he burrowed his ravenous jaws into her mother's stomach, tearing into intestines, pulling out her glistening liver and snacking on it like a slice of watermelon.

Randall stood in front of Jenny. "What is that goddamn thing? A fucking dracula?"

Mortimer abandoned Oasis's mother and moved back into the ER, lured by two large men in softball uniforms, one with a black eye--probably a casualty of playing the game while drinking beer. They'd been screaming at Mortimer to leave the woman alone, and now the monster had obliged them. Apparently realizing their mistake, they turned and ran through the ER, pushing through a pair of double doors and disappearing into the bowels of the hospital.

Mortimer pursued, bounding after them on all fours, his body stretching out like a cheetah.

Then the ER stood silent except for the groans of the dying and the injured.

Jenny turned to ask Randall something, but he was already moving away from her, limping toward the automatic doors.

She grabbed his arm. "No, Randall," she pleaded. "Please. Stay with me."

"I'm just going out to my truck," he said.

"Why?"

"I need my chainsaw."

He pulled his arm free, starting toward the doors again.

"For what?" Jenny called after him.

"I'm gonna cut that son of a bitch in half."

KURT Lanz, MD, rose from where he'd crouched behind the nurse's station.

What...what had just happened?

He surveyed the carnage of the ER--
his
ER--trying to comprehend what he'd witnessed, but his mind kept balking. All he saw was the blood. God, you so quickly got used to blood in an ER, but this...the sheer quantity. It had sprayed everywhere, Pollacking the walls and soaking the privacy curtains and sluicing down to join the pools--
pools
--on the floor.

And that thing...it had come in as Mortimer Moorecook in cardiac arrest, as good as dead until he'd applied the paddles. No, not as good as dead--way dead. But he couldn't bill for a resuscitation without at least one defib jolt, so he'd hit him with 300 joules and the guy had come off the table like some wild--

The screams reached him then, and a woman's voice, close by, shouting, "Kurt! Kurt!"

He looked and saw skinny little Janine Winslow at his shoulder, nurse's uniform splattered with red, eyes bulging, skin chalky, chattering away at ninety miles an hour.

"That's
Doctor
Lanz, Winslow."

Hell, he didn't even think of
himself
as "Kurt." He wasn't about to let this mosquito of a woman do it, even if she had given him head a couple of times when he first arrived. Proper respect was integral to proper functioning.

Not that you could expect proper anything at Blessed fucking Crucifixion Hospital. How the hell had he wound up here?

Oh, right.

Money.

Nobody with decent chops wanted to practice out here in the middle of nowhere. So hick hospitals like Blessed Crucifixion put a lot on the table--nearly twice what big metro hospitals offered. Lanz had owed six figures worth of education loans coming out of training. This was an offer he couldn't refuse.

He knew what the hospital was thinking: Get the sucker out here, seduce him with our country charm, let him put down a few roots, and he's ours for life.

No fucking way. He'd suffer in silence and sock away for a few years, then get the hell out of debt and the fuck out of town. To tell the God's honest truth, Blessed Crucifixion was lucky to have him. He was way over-trained for a hick community ER. Like hiring Picasso to teach a ladies' auxiliary art class.

Winslow kept going. "Oh my god! Oh, my god! What do we do? This is awful! I've never seen--"

He grabbed her bony shoulder and shook her. "You shut up and get a grip, that's what you do!"

That seemed to break through and she quieted. Good. Now...time for
him
to get a grip. He looked around again, focusing.

The good news was that the thing that had been Moorecook was gone; the bad news was that it had escaped into the hospital instead of the parking lot. But at least it was out of here.

An inpatient--a big guy in a hospital gown--was limping out the exit. Smart fellow. If Moorecook came back, Lanz would be right on his heels.

The little girl was kneeling on the floor by her mother and screaming. With good reason: Not only had her left arm sustained a deep gash, but her mom lay flat on her back with her intestines spread over her torn abdomen like a wormy apron. She stared blindly at the ceiling as one leg gave a weak kick or two.

The clown lay unmoving in a huge pool of red.

The EMT who'd brought in Moorecook stood behind Winslow. A new LPN and two orderlies--Ralph and Benjamin--stood behind him. All awaiting instructions. That insubordinate bitch-nurse Jenny Bolton stood back, looking horrified. He'd deal with her later.