“Doc?”
Lauryn tore her eyes off her patient to see Manny Ortega, one of her favorite paramedics, walking over with a first aid kit. “Your turn,” he said, holding up the kit.
“No need,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m fine, really. But can I catch a ride back to Mercy with you guys?”
Manny gave her a funny look. “You want to go back? But I thought you just got off shift.”
She had, in fact, just gotten off a twelve-hour shift. And she was less than a block from the apartment she shared with Naree. But sleep was impossible given everything that had just happened, and she’d be damned if she let Lenny go into the cattle call that was the general emergency room after all that.
“Just give me a lift. I’m already acting as attending physician. Might as well see it through. I can sleep when I’m done.”
“Why is it doctors make the worst patients?” Manny said, shaking his head. “Fine. You can ride along, but only if you let me patch you up. For the love of God, Lauryn, I can see the burns on your hand from here. What did you do, grab the crack pipe out of his mouth?”
“It wasn’t like that,” Lauryn said irritably, shoving her burned hands into her pockets. “Lenny doesn’t do drugs. I can’t even get him to take his prescriptions.”
“No drugs,” Manny repeated, turning to look at Lenny, who was still shouting at the top of his lungs about the end of days. “You sure about that?”
Lauryn wanted to say yes, that the Lenny she knew wouldn’t have touched a street drug if his life depended on it. But she couldn’t, because this—not the monster who’d attacked her earlier, but the raving madman being tied down now—wasn’t the Lenny she knew. Now that she was back in the familiar medical world, the strangeness of everything that had gone down under the bridge was finally starting to hit, and as much as Lauryn hated to admit it, Manny was right. Drugs were the most likely explanation.
“Come on,” Manny said, hopping up into the back of his truck. “You can tell me the rest while I deal with your hand.”
With a defeated sigh, Lauryn climbed into the ambulance beside Lenny. When she was safely strapped into the little fold-down seat, Manny banged on the door to signal his partner, and the ambulance pulled out, the sirens kicking up as they started down the street toward the hospital.
“So,” he said, gently taking her injured hand. “What happened? Really.”
“To be honest, I’m not sure,” Lauryn admitted, wincing as he started smearing the freezing cold burn salve all over her fingers. “I was on my way home when I saw Lenny down at the end of the alley, so I came over to help. When I touched him, he had some kind of slime all over his face and shoulders.”
“Is that what got your hands?”
Lauryn nodded. “I wiped it off as best I could, but not well enough apparently. He didn’t respond to his name, so I called you guys. He attacked me immediately after.”
Manny shook his head in disbelief, which was exactly how Lauryn felt. Manny’d worked this route for years, and he’d picked up Lenny before. She wasn’t sure how well they knew each other, but anyone who’d spent time with Lenny knew the old man was terrified of violence since the war. “It’s gotta be drugs, then. Poor bastard wouldn’t hurt a fly otherwise.” He shook his head again and turned back to her. “What about you? You look a little freaked, and I’m not talking upset. Do you think you could have been exposed, too?”
Lauryn dropped her eyes. She’d been trying very hard not to think about it, but given how all the weird stuff she’d seen tonight—Lenny’s transformation, the fight, the Bible-obsessed stranger with his sword and burning water—had happened after she’d gotten the green goop on her skin, Manny’s theory made way more sense than she liked. She’d never heard of a hallucinogenic drug that took effect instantly and could be absorbed through the skin, but toxicology wasn’t her area of expertise. Plus, however much she hated it, the idea that she’d been accidentally tripping made a lot more sense than Lenny actually turning into a monster.
She must have looked horrified, because Manny patted her arm reassuringly. “Don’t worry, Doc,” he said. “We’ll get you taken care of. To be honest, though, I knew it was drugs the moment you told me about the slime.”
Lauryn’s head shot up. “What do you mean? I’ve never even heard of a drug like this, and you know we get the full spectrum in the ER.”
“You wouldn’t have heard of this one ’cause it’s brand-new,” Manny said as he finished wrapping the bandage around her fingers. “I don’t even know what they’re calling it yet, but Lenny’s the second druggie gone loco we’ve picked up tonight. First guy had green slime all down his front, too. He also attacked someone who tried to help, but his rescuer wasn’t as lucky as you. By the time we got on site, he’d torn her into confetti.”
That description was enough to make even Lauryn’s iron stomach turn. “That can’t be a coincidence, can it? The green slime?”
“Don’t know,” Manny said with a shrug as he tied off her bandage. “Cops wouldn’t tell us nothing, but my buddy in Dispatch says everyone’s going nuts about some new drug on the streets. A bad one. Don’t know what it does, but the police are freaked real good.” He gave her a worried look. “I really hope you didn’t stick your hand in a hornet’s nest, but just in case, I’m going to have to ask you to put this on for the rest of the ride.”
He reached up to grab the restraint straps hanging from the wall of the ambulance, and Lauryn’s heart began to sink. “I’m not hallucinating.”
“I know,” he said. “But better safe than sorry, no?”
Lauryn couldn’t argue with that. Cover Your Ass was the mantra of modern medical work, and that was all Manny was doing. It was what she should have done in the alley, and so, with a sigh, Lauryn dutifully put her wrists behind her back, letting him bind her to the steel wall of the vehicle as the ambulance careened down the snowy street toward the bright glowing tower of Mercy Hospital.
And this was how, twenty minutes later, Lauryn ended up a patient in her own hospital.
She felt like the main show at the circus. Even though she was technically only there for observation, her room was a nonstop stream of visitors. Everyone she’d met over her two-year internship at Mercy, from nurses to tech staff to desk workers, seemed to have found a reason to drop in and ask how she was doing.
All the attention would have been touching if Lauryn hadn’t been well acquainted with how hospital gossip worked. She was the interesting case of the evening, and she was the new doctor. Combine the two, and everyone on staff was itching to get all the gory details firsthand so they could tell the others later. Even her boss stopped by, though he was only there to bitch her out for saddling them with Lenny, a known write-off patient who could never be expected to pay for his treatment. He also wanted to make sure she was going to show up on time for her shift tomorrow, something Lauryn was also wondering about, because despite all the uproar, she felt fine. Sure, her hand hurt, and she was bruised all along the side where Lenny had thrown her on the pavement, but none of that required her to be in a bed hooked up to the full diagnostic suite. Constant monitoring was part of standard drug-reaction observational procedure, and until her blood work came back from the lab to prove exposure one way or the other, there was nothing Lauryn could do but wait.
Lauryn hated waiting. She was well aware of the irony, since waiting for test results and transport and rooms to open up was a core part of working at a hospital, but at least when she was on duty, there always some kind of task to keep her busy. As a patient, though, Lauryn was stuck. All she could do was sit in her bed and wait for the labs she’d ordered to finish processing. In an effort to speed things up, she’d asked for all the results to be sent straight to her, but she couldn’t do anything about the number of tests in line before her or how long each one actually took to run. Given how late it was getting, she supposed she could have slept, but even that was impossible thanks to the parade of nosy coworkers—not to mention the thoughts flying through her mind at a thousand miles per hour.