The cold hit her like a slap. It was like a meat locker down here. The gap between the elevated subway’s support beams and the stone retaining wall, which kept back the hill that had been cut in half to build the track originally, was sheltered from the famous Chicago wind—but the shadow from the track above meant that no sunlight could get down to warm it up. Even here at the front, the alley leading back into the underpass was a good ten degrees colder than the street beside it. If Lenny stayed down here, death from exposure became a “when,” not an “if,” and that knowledge gave Lauryn the push she needed to keep going, walking farther into the dark below the bridge toward he sheltered nook at the back where her patient was lying motionless.
“Come on, Lenny,” she said, squatting down to grab his shoulder. “Time to wake—”
She let go with a gasp, snatching her hand back. She hadn’t seen anything in the dark, but the moment she’d touched his faded jacket, something slimy and cold had coated her bare fingers. It was still there, a thick, viscous liquid that shone sickly green when she held her hand under the light of her phone’s screen, and Lauryn shot back to her feet with a curse. How could she have been so stupid? Touching an unassessed, unconscious patient without gloves was a newbie mistake, and now her bare fingers were coated in an unidentified slime that smelled like a mix of rotten-egg sulfur and the sickly sweet reek of decaying wounds.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” she muttered, wiping her hand on the cement wall beside her while frantically dialing 911 with the other.
It took three rings for Dispatch to pick up. When the girl finally answered, Lauryn didn’t give her the chance to finish asking “what is the nature of your emergency?” before launching into doctor mode.
“This is Dr. Jefferson from Mercy Hospital,” she said, crouching down beside Lenny. “I’ve got an unconscious male down across the street from the Indiana CTA station. Early sixties, known mental illness, currently unresponsive to voice and touch. I’m going to need—”
A horrible, inhuman shriek cut her off as Lenny’s whole body seized, jerking up off the pavement like his belt was attached to a string someone had just pulled tight. The sudden movement made Lauryn jump as well, and she nearly dropped her phone in the process. Luckily she held on, but just as she was sucking in a breath to yell at the dispatcher that he was seizing and she needed that ambulance STAT, Lenny started to…
Change.
Despite only getting her actual degree six months ago, Lauryn had already seen plenty of seizures in her career. She’d seen drug addicts spaz off their beds in the heights of violent overdose and patients arch bad enough to throw out their backs during cardiac arrest. But she’d never seen anything like this.
Lenny was bouncing off the pavement like water on a hot griddle. With every violent jerk, the blood was visibly draining from his pain-twisted face, leaving his normally dark skin a morbid shade of gray. His eyes, previously closed, were now wide open and bulging, the blood vessels bursting as Lauryn watched, leaving his corneas a solid wall of red.
After that, Lauryn didn’t care about the green crap. She dropped her phone and grabbed Lenny’s shoulders, forcing him back down to the ground with all her weight. “I need that ambulance!” she yelled at her phone on the pavement. “How long until—”
Lenny lashed out with both arms, throwing her off him and knocking her phone clear across the alley. Lauryn scrambled to stay on her feet, but he continued to flail his limbs, slamming his elbow into her chest. As soon as she felt the blow connect, Lauryn knew it was going to hurt, but what she didn’t expect was for the hit to send her flying, launching her backwards across the alley and into the chain-link fence that separated Lenny’s hiding spot from the rest of the bridge’s support structure.
The metal mesh caught her like a net, bouncing her face-first onto the asphalt below. She caught herself with her hands at the last second, nearly breaking her wrist as she went down hard, but the pain barely registered through Lauryn’s adrenaline rush. So the moment she landed, she shoved herself back up, hands raised and ready to defend herself as she looked around for Lenny.
He wasn’t hard to find. In the time it had taken Lauryn to get back to her feet, Lenny’s jerking body had pulled itself upright. Considering he’d been unconscious when she’d found him, Lauryn wasn’t even sure how that was possible, but he was most definitely standing… and his bloody eyes glinted in the low light as they locked on hers.
The look was enough to send the frantic breaths whooshing right out of her lungs. Until this point, everything Lenny had done had been bizarre and terrifying, but still inside the realm of medically possible. Looking at him now, though, all Lauryn could think was that the person standing in front of her didn’t look anything like the homeless man she’d come here to help.
And that made no sense to her trained, rational mind.
The Lenny she knew was a wiry old veteran with slumped shoulders and hooded eyes that had seen too much. This thing—the man-shaped shadow looming over her in the dark—was a good half foot taller, with shoulders that barely fit inside Lenny’s ratty old clothes. His limbs looked too long for his body, and his raised hands were veiny and gnarled, the lengthened nails looking almost like claws. As awful as all that was, though, his face was the worst, because when he looked at Lauryn with his bloody eyes, his lips curled up to reveal a wall of yellowed teeth below his horrifying grayish-blue-tinged gums. This wasn’t Lenny anymore.
She wasn’t sure it was even still human.
Lauryn was a first-response emergency room doctor. It took a lot to spook her, and even more to make her panic. But the sight of Lenny’s horrible, inhuman face lifting into a snarl did the job. She screamed at the top of her lungs, her body moving faster than ever before as she launched herself back toward the lit street and, hopefully, safety. She was halfway through the squeeze between the wall and the support beam when Lenny’s gnarled hand grabbed her arm, closing down on it like a bear trap.
This time, Lauryn didn’t even get a chance to scream. He yanked her back into the alley, nearly snapping her neck as he threw her hard down on the bed of newspapers where he’d been lying when she’d found him. The padding softened the blow a little, but the impact was still enough to knock the air out of her lungs. Gasping, Lauryn scrambled through the greasy sheets of newsprint toward the cement wall. But when she put her back against the stone and whipped around to face her attacker, the violent monster who had been Lenny froze.
The change was so sudden, so complete, Lauryn’s first thought was that she’d imagined it. But while his body was still facing her, Lenny’s head was turned over his now massive shoulder, his bloody eyes fixed on the alley’s entrance, where a new figure—a tall shape in a long winter coat—stood framed against the glare of the floodlights from the train station across the street.
Crouched down against the wall at the back of the tiny alley, Lauryn couldn’t see the newcomer’s face. With the lights behind them, she couldn’t even tell for sure if it was a man or a woman.
Whatever it was, Lauryn didn’t care. She’d never been so happy to see another human being in her life, and the moment she got over her shock, she screamed at the top of her lungs once more.
It wasn’t the most articulate cry for help, but it must have been enough. The moment she yelled, the newcomer charged Lenny like a linebacker, knocking him to the ground. Lauryn barely managed to move out of the way before the man—for it was obvious now that her savior was a middle-aged dark-skinned man under that bulky, well-worn winter coat—grabbed her arm and pulled, lifting her back to her feet like she weighed nothing at all.