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.”
Lanz
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.