“Jesus Christ,” Charles said, and started to run for the injured man. I ran after him.
CHAPTER TWO
“I’ve already called nine-one-one!” yelled a bystander. I could hear someone retching behind me as we reached the man’s still form.
“Everybody back! We’re nurses!” Charles yelled.
Fuck me fuck me fuck me. I was no paramedic. I was used to people whom the emergency department had already cleaned up and put tubes and lines in. He was so injured—where to even begin? Charles knelt down, putting his fingers on the man’s neck. “He’s got a pulse. He’s breathing.” I knelt down beside him. Dark bruises were blossoming around both the man’s eyes.
“Raccoon eyes,” I whispered, having only seen it once before, on a trauma test in nursing school.
“Brain shear, go figure.” Charles spared me a dark glance.
We had no supplies. We couldn’t move him and risk his spine. One of the man’s legs was twisted the wrong way, denim torn open, exposing meat and bone below. A moment earlier, and we’d have seen the stuffing of him, ragged edges of skin, yellow-white subcutaneous fat, red stripes of muscle tissue. But that moment had let his blood catch up with his injuries, and now it welled out from arteries and leaked from veins. It filled up his wounds, overflowing their edges and spilling out like oil onto the ground. When it began to ebb, I gritted my teeth and reached in, pushing against his broken leg’s femoral artery. Blood wicked through the fabric of my glove and was hot against my hand.
“Here’s an old-timer trick.” Charles knelt straight into the stranger’s thigh, his knee almost into the groin, only pausing for me to pull my hands out of the way. The blood leaching out of the man’s leg subsided—although that might’ve been because there wasn’t much left. “It’ll clamp down the artery completely.”
I inhaled to complain now was not a good time for class—but I stopped when I realized teaching was what Charles did to cope. Our patient groaned and tried to move his head. I crawled through the gravel and broken glass up to the man’s head. “Sir, you can’t move right now. There’s been a bad accident.” I put my hands on either side of his head. His snow cap had been peeled off, along with part of his scalp, and his wispy white hair was sticky with blood. “I’m so sorry, just please stay still.”
“Aren’t you going to breathe for him?” someone behind me asked. I glanced back and saw a man with a cell phone jutting forward.
“What is wrong with you?” I swatted the phone out of his hand, sent it skittering into a slick of blood stained snow by the curb. “Show some respect!”
“Hey! That’s my new phone!” The bystander started pawing gloved hands through the grimy snow to get what was his. There was a shadow there, cast by the man himself, and I saw it shudder, swallowing the phone inside its blackness like a throat. I wondered if it’d been a trick of the light.
The injured man moved again, reaching up a hand to fight me. “No no no no no,” I said, but he continued to clutch my wrist with the strength of someone who had nothing left to lose. “Stay still, okay? It’s all going to be fine,” I said, knowing I was lying. “Just stay still.”
He groaned and the shape of his jaw shifted, becoming narrow and more angular. His teeth pressed forward, stretching against the limits of his lips, lengthening, showing yellow enamel. His beard began to grow—just like fur. “Charles?” I asked, my voice rising in pitch. It was daytime, on a cloudy December day—but I looked over my shoulder and saw Charles’s face turn dusky, like the surrounding gray sky.
“Code Fur, Edie. We need Domitor, now.” He fished in his coat pocket for a phone. “I’m calling the floor.” The sound of a distant ambulance began in the background. “Get back here before they do.”
I stood, found my footing in the ice and blood, then I was gone.
I froggered through the rubberneckers on either side of the highway, then hit the edge of the hospital grounds, my feet pounding against cement. Fortunately we de-iced the sidewalks as a courtesy to our patient population, who frequently had to crutch, walker, or wheelchair themselves in. The frozen dead lawn was too slick and treacherous to run on.
I ran past the office complexes that kept our bureaucracy running, between twenty rows of cars in an employee parking lot, around the edge of our loading docks, and made a beeline for the main hospital doors.
Running through the hospital as a nurse in scrubs is easy—people get the hell out of your way, assuming you’ve got someplace important to be. Running into the lobby in civilian gear covered in blood, however—
“What’s going on?” Our officer-guard held his hand up and looked behind me for pursuit.
“Emer-gen-cy—” I gasped. I yanked my badge out of my back pocket, dangling it for inspection as I brushed past him. “Gotta go—”
“Not so fast—”
“Gotta go!” I yelled and ducked down the next hallway, running for the stairs.
I wasn’t in shape at the best of times, and working at Y4 didn’t pay enough for me to have a gym membership—and ever since I’d started working there, getting to the gym had been less of a priority than staying alive. But I raced as fast as I could, my knees and chest screaming—because I’d left Charles out there with a werewolf, in the middle of who knew how many gathering civilians, himself a prior victim of a werewolf attack.
* * *There was a warren of hallways that led to my elevator. I took all of them at speed, and seemed to have lost the security officer behind me. I reached the elevator that led to Y4—running into it to stop myself. I swept my badge over the access pad, then braced my hands on my thighs and panted for air. Tiny electrical shocks were running up and down my hamstrings, and my knees kept trying to melt.
The elevator doors didn’t open. I ran my badge over the access pad again. The light went green, but there was no opening sound.
“Come on.” I flashed my badge a few more times, then scanned the recesses in the ceiling for the Shadows, the creatures that acted as the gatekeepers for our floor. “I know you’re watching this. Hurry up!”
There was an audible metal thunk as the elevator arrived. The orange doors opened and a Y4 day-shift nurse I recognized handed a 60cc syringe out to me, with one alcohol wipe.
“Tell Dr. Carlson to get ready—” I told her as I snatched them from her.
“Will do.”
I turned around and started running back down the hall, before spinning around again. “IV or IM?” I yelled out. I wasn’t one of the vets on staff, how the hell should I know how we gave this med?
“Intramuscular!” she yelled back at me before the closing elevator doors cut her off.
* * *
I raced back outside. My lungs were on fire now. Each slap of my shoes against the pavement sent lightning bolts up my shins. I ran through a shadow, hit a patch of black ice and tripped, sprawling out of control on the ground. I curled around the medicine as I fell, protecting it, glad that the needle had a safety cap on—if I injected myself with a werewolf’s dose of Domitor, I’d die, no doubt. I slid onto the grass, staining myself with water from the snow I’d melted. I was stunned for a second, then scrambled back to my feet and stepped onto the cement unsteady as a newborn calf. My knees were throbbing and an ankle felt twisted, but the medication was still in my hand, the syringe still full, the cap still on, and I had just a block and a half to go.
Amplified commands to Pull Over! fought with sirens, and traffic had slowed to open up the ambulance’s path. I raced around the same cars I’d dodged originally, finally reaching Charles and handing him the syringe like a baton.
Then I dropped to my knees gasping for air, gulping in exhaust fumes from the cars dithering around us. My knee was in the stranger’s cold blood, which didn’t feel much different from the sweat freezing against my back. The stranger was still prone, still dying, brown eyes fixed in eye sockets that were black and blue.
“IM,” I panted.
“Thanks.” Charles uncapped the syringe and hunched over the man, covering his actions with his body. He sank the needle deep into the victim’s good thigh, and the man spasmed. I grabbed his nearer hand and felt the strength surge through him as his change began, his nails growing to claw at my skin. I leaned forward, holding my badge between us. “We’ve got you. We know what you are. We’re noncombatants. But there’s a lot of civilians around here. Behave, okay?”
His shallow breathing continued. Just as his nails were about to break skin, the Domitor hit him, and his body went slack.
Charles turned to another person with their cell phone out, flicking blood in their direction. “What part of don’t take pictures do you not understand?”
The offender sprang back away from the flow, into the slow-moving traffic, and got honked at. Just what we needed, someone else getting hit—
“Put your phone down, sir,” said a cop, and the sullen bystander put his cell phone away.
The ambulance arrived. Paramedics scrambled out—the first one gestured me away. “Ma’am, you should step—”
“We’re nurses. We tried to stop the bleeding,” Charles said, pointing at his knee, still wedged into the werewolf’s thigh.
“What happened?”
“Hit by a truck,” I said. “Head and leg injury, I think.” Diagnosis of the century there, Nurse Spence.
The paramedic reached back into the ambulance cab to grab the safety mover and a neck brace. The injured man was breathing even more shallowly now. Domitor, or impending death?
“Doesn’t look good,” the paramedic said, taking a spot by the man’s neck, setting the brace against it.
I couldn’t disagree.
CHAPTER THREE
There was no way to escape the feel of blood drying against my hands. I could take my gloves off, but then my hands would be cold—colder—and the gloves were biohazards, so where would I put them? I couldn’t just litter them here, although that’s what the EMS crew was doing, shedding paper and plastic all over the ground, small pieces getting caught up by the wind of passing cars like candy wrappers. The paramedics worked over the werewolf, efficiently doing what they could, straightening, rolling, scraping him up like he was a huge piece of dough. I stood stiffly, holding my gory hands out away from myself, watching them.