Draculas: A Novel of Terror

DRACULAS

a novel of terror by

Blake Crouch

Jack Kilborn

Jeff Strand

F. Paul Wilson

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction by J.A. Konrath

Dedication

Draculas — A Novel of Terror

Bonus Material

Interview with Crouch, Konrath, Strand and Wilson

“Cub Scout Gore Feast” by Konrath and Strand

“Serial” by Crouch and Kilborn

“A Sound of Blunder” by Konrath and Wilson

Draculas Deleted and Alternate Scenes

Excerpt of Crouch’s Desert Places

Excerpt of Strand’s Dweller

Excerpt of Wilson’s The Keep

Excerpt of Konrath’s Shaken

Biographies of Crouch, Konrath, Strand and Wilson

Bibliographies of Crouch, Konrath, Strand and Wilson

Exclusive Behind-the-Scenes Making of Draculas

Acknowledgments

Coming in 2011

INTRODUCTION

I grew up reading books where vampires were scary.

This novel is an attempt to make them scary again.

When I thought of the premise that became DRACULAS, I knew it needed to be a group project. Take four well-known horror authors, let them each create their own unique characters, and have them fight for their lives during a vampire outbreak at a secluded, rural hospital.

This is NOT a collection of short stories. It’s a single, complete novel.

And it’s going to freak you out.

If you’re easily disturbed, have a weak stomach, or are prone to nightmares, stop reading right now. There are no sexy teen heartthrobs herein.

You have been warned.

Joe Konrath

October, 2010

For Bram Stoker, with deepest apologies

DRACULAS

DRACULA’S SKULL UNEARTHED IN TRANSYLVANIA! A Romanian farmer discovered a skull with unusual properties while plowing his field near the town of Brasov. The relic, which appears to be ancient and human, has thirty-two elongated, razor-sharp teeth.

—NATIONAL TATTLER

VAMPIRE SKULL A HOAX? Discovered in Transylvania, the humanoid skull with sharp fangs is considered by many to be a fake. Fueling this speculation is the owner’s refusal to let scientists analyze the discovery, claiming it embodies an ancient curse.

—THE INQUISITOR STAR

MILLIONAIRE BUYS DRAC’S HEAD! Eccentric recluse Mortimer Moorecook of Durango, Colorado, has apparently purchased the so-called “Dracula skull” for an undisclosed sum, from the Transylvanian farmer who unearthed it a week ago. It isn’t known what Moorecook, who made his fortune on Wall Street during the late 80s, plans to do with the skull, though many are hoping it will be turned over to scientists for study. Moorecook, who was recently diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, couldn’t be reached for comment.

—THE DRUDGE REPORT

Moorecook

MORTIMER Moorecook opened the massive oak door of his hilltop mansion just as the FedEx deliveryman was reaching for the doorbell.

“Hi, Mr. Moorecook, I have—”

“You have my package.”

“Yeah. Must be special. Only thing on my truck. Never been called out on a Sunday evening before.”

Mortimer looked at the cardboard box, covered in FRAGILE HANDLE WITH CARE stickers and some Romanian customs scrawl. His mouth went dry, and his already bowed knees threatened to stop supporting him.

Finally.

“Mr. Moorecook?”

The old man glanced up at the buff FedEx driver, thinking how he’d once been that young and vital. Never could’ve imagined how quickly and completely that sense of immortality deserts you. So much taken for granted.

“What?”

“Just need you to sign for it so I can keep my job.”

Taking the pen in his trembling grasp, Mortimer scribbled in the window of the electronic tracker. Then the box was in his hands. It barely weighed three pounds, but the magnitude of its contents made his arms shake.

“Shanna! It’s here! It’s here!”

Mortimer limped through the atrium as quickly as his thin, frail legs could manage, breathless by the time he reached the study. He set the box down on the coffee table in front of the hearth and eased back onto the leather couch just as his legs were about to give out.

His hospice nurse—a zaftig, forty-something woman named Jenny—rolled his IV bag into the study and plugged the line into his arm.

“Oh, stop it!” He swatted air in her general direction. “I ought to get a restraining order against you people. Everywhere I go, you’re always stalking me with that thing!”

But even as he spoke, he could feel the morphine-push flooding his system like a good, wet dream.

“Mr. Moorecook, you know what happens if we have any lapses between dosages.”

“Yeah, I might actually feel something.”

“Is writhing around on the ground in unimaginable pain the kind of feeling you want?”

Of course not, he thought. That’s the reason I…

“Mortimer!” Shanna appeared in the doorway of the study. “It’s really here?”

He nodded, eyes twinkling, then turning cold again as he glanced toward Jenny. “Leave us.”

Shanna walked past the nurse and came around the sofa. Mortimer could smell whatever body wash she’d used in the shower that morning as she sat down beside him, her brown curls bouncing off her shoulders like an honest-to-god shampoo commercial. She was thirty-five, had been single when she moved out to Durango at Mortimer’s request, but in the eight weeks she’d been here, she’d met a sheriff’s deputy and inexplicably fallen for him. It remained beyond Mortimer’s comprehension how this gorgeous biological anthropologist had seen anything in that redneck, who, as far as Mortimer could tell, was the epitome of what made the world throw-up in its mouth when it thought of Red State America.

Then again, he was old and dying, and maybe just a little bit jealous.

“Help me up, Shanna.”

With the morphine flowing, it felt like he floated over to his desk.

He opened the middle drawer, glancing out the big windows into the San Juan Mountains beyond a gaping canyon. The peaks were flushed with alpenglow, the snowfields pink as the sun dropped over southwest Colorado.

Lost in thought, Mortimer hitched up his tailored black pants—so loose now he had taken to wearing the gold-buckled belt left to him by his father—and ran his fingers over the Ouroboros insignia sewn into the breast of his red, silk robe. Then he reached into his desk drawer and took out the bottle he’d been waiting years to open, fighting a moment with the wrapper and cork. At last, he splashed a little of the rosewood-colored liquid into two tumblers.

“I’m not really much of a whiskey drinker,” Shanna protested.

“Humor me.”

Mortimer raised his glass, already catching whiffs of the fierce dried fruits and peat wafting toward him.

“To you, Shanna,” he said. “Thanks for spending these last few weeks with me. I haven’t been this happy since my Wall Street days, raiding companies. I ever tell you—”

“Many times.”

They clinked glasses and drank.

“That’s disgusting,” Shanna said, setting her glass down.

Mortimer shook his head.

“What?” she said.

“Nothing, it’s just that this is a fifty-five year Macallan. I paid $17,000 for that bottle many years ago, knowing I wouldn’t crack it until a night like this came along.”

“You paid too much,” she said.

“Some things are worth the price. Shall we?”

They returned to the couch, and Mortimer sat down and dug the Swiss Army knife out of the patch pocket of his linen shirt. It shook in his hands as he opened one of the smaller blades.

“Let me,” Shanna said, reaching for the knife.

He recoiled. “No!”

Mortimer inserted the blade and gently tugged it through the tape. He put the knife away and opened the box, pulling out wads of crumpled, foreign newsprint until he felt the smaller box within the larger. He lifted it out, set it on the glass.

It was some kind of black composite, sealed with a steel hasp on each side. He’d had the box specially made, then sent it to the farmer to ensure safe delivery of the item. Its key hung around his neck on a gold chain.

He unlocked the hasps and flipped them open, gingerly lifting off the top half of the box, bringing it onto his lap as Shanna leaned in. They could only see the back of the skull, the bone deep brown, heavily calcified, full of hairline fractures and several larger cracks, one square-inch piece missing entirely. He worked his fingers down into the hard black foam that had protected the skull on its journey across the ocean, and carefully lifted it out.

Shanna said, “Oh my God.”

Mortimer stared into the hollowed eye sockets, and then the teeth, which more resembled the dental architecture of a shark than a human being.

Not at all what he’d been expecting, and it didn’t match the artist’ conceptions in any of the scandal rags. This wasn’t a skull from an old Christopher Lee Hammer film. This was an affront against nature. Mortimer found it difficult to breathe. But he also registered something else, something he hadn’t felt since his diagnosis.

Excitement.

“May I?” Shanna asked.

Reluctantly, Mortimer handed Shanna the skull. He didn’t like it leaving his grasp, had to remind himself that this was what he’d been paying her so handsomely for.

Shanna examined one of the yellowed teeth.

“Coffee-drinker,” she quipped, and then her eyes narrowed and Mortimer watched as her inner-scientist took over. “They’re at least an inch and a half long, every one of them, even the molars. Huh, weird.”

“What?”

“These canines are hollowed.”

“What’s the significance?”

“I don’t know. It’s not dissimilar to venomous snakes.” She opened the mandible. “Look at the articulation. That range of motion is unbelievable. The jaw structure is…reptilian. There are literally too many teeth to fit in this mouth. See how they overlap? They would’ve shredded the lips off, most of the cheek, exploded the gums, ripped apart the ligaments in the mandible.”

“What are you saying? It’s fake?”

“It looks real. No doubt. But it’s just anatomically impossible.”

Mortimer leaned closer. “Is it human?”

“Does this look human to you?”

Shanna’s words hung in the air like a crooked painting.

“So…what is it?” Mortimer whispered.

“It’s certainly hominoid. But unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Nothing like this exists in the fossil record. This shouldn’t exist.”

“But it does exist. It must be real.”

“Look, we’ll have it tested. It’s possible the skull is authentic, but the teeth have to have been implanted.”

“Do you know what I paid for this?”

“No, what?”

“Just give it back.”

Shanna handed Mortimer the skull and stood up, smoothing out her slacks.

“Mort, I’m really excited for you. Really. And I can’t wait to get started studying this.”

Mortimer’s eyes went wide with surprise. “You’re…going? Now?”

“I want to stay. But I promised Clay. He wants to take me—wait for it—to the Tanner Gun Show in Denver. We’re supposed to hit the road tonight.”

“Jesus Christ. He must have elephantine genitalia.”

“Mortimer!” She gave him a playful bump on the shoulder.

“What? There’s no other explanation. I mean, really? Another gun show?”

“Maybe not.”

Something in her eyes…trouble in paradise? He hoped so.

He held up the skull, cradling it in both palms. “This is the reason you’re here, Shanna. This is what we’ve been waiting for.”

The mandible was still open. The old man grazed one of his liver-spotted fingers across the points of the teeth—razor sharp. He was sure he was only imagining it, but they seemed to send an electrical current through his body.

“Mort? You gonna be all right?”

He looked up at Shanna. Beautiful, youthful, Shanna.

To be young enough again to satisfy a woman like that.

Mortimer smiled. “I hope so.”

Then he pulled the skull into his neck, clamped shut the ancient jaw, and the last thing he felt before losing consciousness were those razor teeth sinking through the paper-thin flesh of his throat.

Shanna

JENNY, the hospice nurse, had acted quickly and professionally. Within two minutes, she had bandaged the wound and controlled the bleeding, but that was the least of Mort’s problems. Seconds after stabbing himself with those horrid fangs, he’d dropped to the floor in a violent seizure. Shanna had been ordered to stick something between his chattering teeth to prevent him from biting off his own tongue. She’d tried to use a ball point pen, but her benefactor had snapped it in half, blue ink mixing with the white foam that churned between his lips.

“Get something under his head,” Jenny told her, her voice up an octave. Shanna removed her jean jacket—a gift from Clayton—and balled it up for Mort to use as a pillow. Mortimer’s hand shot out, grabbing Shanna’s shirt. She yelped in surprise, pawing at his wrist, trying to free herself, but Mort had a grip like stone.

The warm, acrid smell of urine wafted up as he wet his pants, and the convulsions intensified, his limbs banging against the hardwood floor with enough force to split his skin.

When the seizure refused to abate after two minutes, the nurse scurried off to call an ambulance.

When it passed the five-minute mark, Jenny shot Mort full of sedatives and anticonvulsants. At ten minutes, Jenny was practically crying in despair, Shanna right there with her. They each had their full body weight on Mort, trying to pin his bloody hands and feet, but they could barely keep him down, Mort choking and gagging on his own blood, coughing out bits of his lips and tongue that he’d chewed off.

Twenty-three minutes later, when the ambulance finally arrived, the nurse and Shanna had to assist two burly paramedics to get Mort strapped to a gurney, where they finally jammed a rubber bit between his snapping jaws.

The ride to the hospital was a blur, Shanna physically and emotionally drained. She managed to call Clay, but got his voicemail and had to listen to his outgoing message of Clint Eastwood saying, “Go ahead…make my day. BEEEEP!”

She left a monotone message that Mort had had an accident. She was on her way to Blessed Crucifixion Hospital, and he’d have to pick her up there.

Then she wept.

Arriving in Durango two months ago, Shanna had thought she’d landed her dream job. Being paid—and extremely well—for pure research. While many of her contemporaries loved field work, Shanna got off on studying what others had found. She was an expert on the evolution of primates, and when the so-called “Dracula skull” had been discovered four months ago, she’d regarded it with the same blanket skepticism as the rest of her colleagues.

When Mortimer had hired her to research the Dracula skull, searching for its pedigree, she’d had no idea he’d actually bought the thing. For the past two months, Shanna had been poring over research materials, trying to make a case for a human skull with vampire teeth. Other primates had oversize canines, but within the Homo genus, from australopithecine to modern humans, evolution had reduced tooth size with every subsequent speciation. She’d followed various fossil trails, even the barest and flimsiest of leads, but kept coming back to that same conclusion.

Mort had taken her failures in stride, encouraging Shanna to follow historical and genealogical lines, even though that wasn’t her expertise. Between bouts of sitting with Mort and enduring his endless stories, she had managed to find a few more leads. The latest and most promising dated back to the Middle Ages—the Wallachian Order of the Dragon and its founder, Oswald von Wolkenstein. Supposedly, Oswald had a son with severe birth defects, which might have included dental deformities. There was scant historical evidence to support that rumor, but when combined with some other facts about the era…

Mort jerked against his restraints, making the cart rattle. The paramedics had pumped enough drugs into him to kill an elephant, but the convulsions hadn’t abated. Shanna wiped away another tear, wondering if she should have seen this coming.

How could he have done something so ghastly? Senile dementia? Reduced mental capacity because of the morphine? Or had the old man planned to bite himself all along?

The whine of the ambulance siren faded as the vehicle shuddered to a stop. An intern opened the rear doors and slid out the gurney with one of the paramedics. Jenny, Shanna, and the remaining paramedic stayed behind.

Jenny touched Shanna’s hand. “You okay?” she asked.

Shanna nodded, regarding the older, shapely nurse.

“I’ve been doing this for a decade,” Jenny said. “Never saw anything like that before. You did good.”

Shanna took little comfort in her words, but she managed a weak smile. “Did I have a choice?”

“You could’ve fallen apart.” Jenny looked around. “Deputy Dawg coming to pick you up?”

“His name is Clay.”

“No offense. That’s just what my ex used to call him. No love lost between those two, let me tell you.”

“I had no idea.”

“Before your time. Randall would drink too much in town, and I’d wind up bailing him out, seemed like every other week. Think Clay’ll give me a lift back to Mort’s? I need my car.”

“I’m sure he will.”

And then what? Shanna wondered. She’d been planning to break it off with Clay tonight. He was a good guy and they connected—really connected—on a visceral level. But once the heady rush of novelty waned, reality had set in. The more time they spent outside the bedroom, the more she realized how little they had in common.

But she felt so drained right now. She didn’t know if she had the energy to tell him. Or was she just making an excuse?

Maybe. Because Clayton Theel was one of the good guys, and she knew he genuinely cared for her. The last thing she wanted to do was hurt him. But their heads were in such different places. The gun thing, for instance. Guns frightened the hell out of her. But Clay loved them—lived for them. If he wasn’t shooting one, he was modifying one or inventing one. She could not take another gun show, and she might claw her own eyes out if she had to watch Dirty Harry or Unforgiven again.

“Son of a bitch.”

Both women turned to the paramedic, who was squinting at his finger.

“What’s wrong?” Jenny asked.

“I think the old bastard bit me.”

Jenny

JENNY Bolton entered the ER through the automatic doors four steps behind the paramedics pushing Mortimer’s gurney. Though Jenny knew she was tough, she hadn’t yet steeled herself to Mortimer’s eventual demise. Being a hospice nurse meant losing patients—it was how the story ended every time. Much as she tried not to get attached—and then have to deal with the inevitable depression when they passed—Jenny wound up admiring, and even liking, most of the terminal people she cared for.

Seeing Mort so near death, weeks before his diagnosed time, brought a lump to her throat. This lump was made even bigger by her uncomfortable surroundings.

Once upon a time, Jenny had worked in this facility, in this emergency room. She’d loved the job, and since Blessed Crucifixion was the only hospital within sixty miles, it had been her sole option for being a fulltime caregiver.

But last year she’d gotten into a disagreement with one of the holier-than-thou physicians on staff, and his lies and bullshit had led to her dismissal.

God, she hoped that prick Dr. Lanz wasn’t working tonight.

“Dr. Lanz! Code blue!” the intercom blared.

Shit.

Jenny kept her head down as the six-foot, broad-shouldered Kurt Lanz, M.D. paraded past, looking every bit as self-important as the day he’d gotten her fired. She knew he would have her escorted out of the hospital if he spotted her.

While Lanz barked orders at his cringing staff, Jenny slunk over to a nearby house phone.

She reached for the handset, then paused.

Should I call him?

Her ex-husband, Randall, had left no fewer than thirty-eight messages on her cell phone since being admitted two days ago for a job-related injury. Her brain-deficient, former significant other—a lumberjack—had somehow managed to cut the back of his own leg with a chainsaw. She wondered if he’d been drinking on the job. He’d fallen into drinking far too much off the job. Drunk on the job seemed the natural next step. He’d sworn time and again that he was off the sauce, but he’d made many such promises during their marriage, only to relapse.

Aside from the occasional glimpse of his bright red Dodge Ram Hemi driving through town, she hadn’t seen Randall since their divorce was made final two years ago. Jenny hadn’t been responding to his messages, even though they were increasing in frequency and urgency. But now, stuck in the hospital with Randall only two floors above, she might as well bite the bullet.

Her thoughts were interrupted when the automatic doors opened and a clown entered the ER. At first, Jenny assumed it was a candy striper come to entertain the ill. But then she saw he had a child attached—by the mouth—to his left hand. The girl was screaming through clenched teeth, blood dribbling down her chin.

A distressed woman followed the clown and the child, patting the girl’s back, and when she locked eyes on Jenny she said, “There’s a nurse!”

Jenny glanced down at her white uniform. She was about to correct the woman’s assumption with an, “I don’t work here,” but noticed the entire ER staff had surrounded Mortimer, who was coding.

“You have to help my daughter,” the mother demanded.

Jenny looked at the little girl, whose teeth were embedded in the skin of the clown’s left hand.

“Oasis’s braces are stuck,” the woman said.

“Oasis?”

“Oasis. My precious little girl. This horrible clown ruined her eighth birthday party, and now he’s going to ruin five thousand dollars’ worth of orthodontia.”

Jenny appraised the clown. A very sad clown, despite his painted-on red smile and matching rubber nose. He stood six feet tall, six-six with the green fright wig. His green and red polka dot clown suit bulged at the middle—a pot belly, not a pillow—and his size twenty-eight shoes squeaked like a chew toy when he walked. A large, metal button, opposite the fake flower on his lapel, read “Benny the Clown Says ‘Let’s Have Fun!’ “

In a low, shaky voice barely above a whisper, Benny the Clown said, “Please help me.”

Jenny fought to conceal her smirk. “What happened?”

“This terrible clown squirted my little girl and she defended herself. Now she’s stuck on his filthy clown hand.”

The little girl said something that came out like, “Mmmmhhhggggggggg.”

“I was making the birthday princess a balloon poodle,” Benny the Clown said, “and she reached up and squeezed my nose. That activated the flower.” Benny the Clown pressed his rubber proboscis and turned his head. A stream of water shot out of the center of the flower, sprinkling onto the tiled floor. “When the birthday princess got squirted, she locked her precious little birthday chompers onto my hand.” Benny the Clown leaned closer to Jenny. “You can’t tell because I have a smile on my face, but I can feel the wire digging into my bone.”

Jenny nodded, trying to appear sympathetic. “I wish I could help, but I don’t work at this hospital. I’m just here with one of my hospice patients.” She pointed toward the gurney where doctors and nurses swarmed around Mortimer. “You’ll have to check in at the front desk.”

Even with the painted-on grin, Benny the Clown looked suicidal.

Jenny hated to turn away any patient in need, but she could be sued for administering care in a facility she’d been fired from. She watched them trudge off, then turned her attention back to the phone.

Just do it. Get it over with.

Jenny picked up the receiver and dialed Room 318. She knew it was 318, because every one of the thirty-eight messages she’d received from Randall had begun with, “Hi, Jen, it’s Randall, I’m in Room Three-One-Eight.”

Before the first ring ended, Randall was on the line. “Jen, is that you?”

The last thing she expected—or wanted—to feel was comfort at the sound of his voice, especially with all the chaos going on around her. But it was so familiar, like they’d just spoken yesterday. The comfort died in a surge of anger at the memory of all the heartache his drinking had put her through.

“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.”

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.

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.

Okay. This was his ship and he was captain. He pointed to the orderlies, then to the mom and the clown.

“Get gurneys ready to move those two to the morgue.”

“But they ain’t been pronounced,” one said. Ralph? Benjamin? He never could tell them apart.

“They will be in a minute.” To the LPN: “Get the little girl’s wound cleaned up and ready for suturing.” To the EMT: “Help her.”

“Hey, I don’t work here.”

“Then get lost.”

The EMT held up a finger, showing a puncture that had already stopped bleeding. “But the old guy bit me. I need a tetanus. And penicillin. And hepatitis. And rabies. Did you see that goddamn guy? Fucking give me every shot you got!”

“You’ve got a forty-eight-hour window to get boosters. Make yourself useful or get lost.” He turned to Winslow. “Call security and get everyone down here, then call the sheriff. I need to speak to him.”

He wanted armed guards here in case Moorecook returned. He’d have them kick Jenny Bolton out too.

He stalked over to the clown. Glazing eyes stared out of his white-face makeup. His throat was a gaping, red ruin. His costume was soaked but Lanz could still read Benny the Clown Says “Let’s Have Fun!” on the big button.

Not a lot of fun going on here.

He closed Benny’s eyes and motioned to the orderly. “To the cooler.”

He heard the little girl start to scream and saw the EMT and the LPN dragging her to the treatment room. Her kicks and screams grew more frantic the farther she was moved away from her mother.

Sorry, kid, but that wound needs closing.

He looked down at the mother: as dead as Benny.

He still wore the latex gloves he’d donned at the start of Moorecook’s code blue. Ignoring the fecal smell from the torn intestines, he parted the loops. The abdominal cavity was filled with blood.

“Good lord,” said a woman’s voice. “Did he get the aorta? How could he bite that deep?”

He looked up at Jenny Bolton. “What the hell are you still doing here?”

“My patient is still here.”

“Your patient is a goddamn monster.”

“What happened to him?”

“You tell me.”

“I have no idea.”

“Then you’re of no use to me. You’re a GOOMER.”

Even though the acronym referred to annoying, unwanted patients—Get Out Of My Emergency Room—he figured she’d catch his meaning.

“I’m waiting for my husband—ex-husband.”

“Then wait outside. I—”

The doors flew back and Lanz almost screamed, fearing Moorecook’s return. But he managed to bite it back when he saw the two fat softball players stagger into the ER. Both were blood soaked. The bearded one was limping as he half-carried the younger blond guy.

“Oh, God!” Jenny said.

Then Lanz saw why: The blond guy’s left arm was missing at the elbow. He was squeezing the stump, trying to stanch the hemorrhage.

“He bit his arm off, doc!” the bearded one said. “That animal bit his fucking arm off! And he bit me in the ass!”

As the pair struggled past, Lanz saw that the man’s ample right buttock was missing a sizable chunk—mostly fat, but a little of the gluteus was exposed.

Lanz looked around to find Bolton staring at him. “Still want me to wait outside?”

He was about to tell her exactly what she could do when Winslow called from the nurse’s station.

“Doctor Lanz! Sheriff’s on the phone!”

Shit!

If he turned down an offer of skilled help, fired employee or not, and anyone died, some lawyer would have his ass.

Lanz pointed to the ball players. “Take care of that arm.”

He stripped off his bloody gloves and took the phone from Winslow.

“Sheriff, we’ve got one hell of a problem here.”

“Well, doc, I’ve got one hell of a problem myself. Let’s compare. You first.”

Bet you mine is bigger than yours? Was that how they were going to play this? Fine. He’d lay it on with a trowel. Christ, he hated these hicks.

“We’ve suffered what can only be described as a terrorist attack. I’ve got two dead and three wounded, one of whom has lost an arm. The terrorist is still loose in the hospital wreaking God knows what kind of havoc. I need a SWAT team here.”

The sheriff put on an aw-shucks tone. “Now, doc, I’m sure it ain’t that bad, and you know we ain’t got no SWAT team—”

“Then call in the fucking National Guard! This is no joke!”

“Well, even if I did call in the Guard, no way they could get to you. One of Joe Loveland’s cows wandered onto the tracks and got hit by the four-seventeen freight.”

“Who cares whose cow it was! It’s a fucking cow! I’ve got dead and wounded people here, and maybe more on the way!”

“Now hold on. You’re not letting me finish. The collision occurred in such a matter of fashion that the train jumped the tracks and came to a stop flat on its side across the highway.”

The collision occurred in such a matter of fashion…who talked like that?

“Sheriff—”

“Thank the Lord, nobody got hurt, it being a freight train and all, but let me tell you, we’ve got one hell of a mess out here.”

“Just send me some deputies, goddamn it!”

“Well, that’s just it. Dave Howard’s off on vacation to Navajo Lake and Clay Theel’s got the weekend off and he’s on his way to a gun show in Denver. You got security there at BC. I know those boys. They’re good. Turn ’em loose and they’ll keep the lid on till we can get somebody over. Gotta go.”

“But—”

The line clicked dead.

You got security there…was he kidding? Blessed Crucifixion security was some good old boys who got off on wearing uniforms and carrying guns. They might, just might, have the cojones to eject Jenny Bolton, but they weren’t going to handle the Moorecook thing.

Okay…stabilize these people, get them admitted, then get the hell out of here. First, the softballers.

He turned to Winslow. “What orthopedist and general surgeon are on tap?”

She checked the call list. “Manetti and Schwartz.”

“Get them. Tell Manetti we’ve got a traumatic amputation for him and a major avulsion laceration for Schwartz.”

He walked over to the softballers. Jenny had stabilized the amputee. Bleeding had stopped but the guy was as white as his uniform used to be and looking shocky.

“Want me to start an IV?” she said, nodding to the amputee as she cleaned the butt wound on the other softballer, prone on a gurney.

He wanted her out of here but needed the help.

“D-five in NS. Open it up. Type and cross-match him.” He was going to need a transfusion. “I’ll be sewing up the kid.” He jabbed a finger at her. “Don’t do one goddamn thing without checking with me first. Understood?”

“Loud and clear,” she said with a defiant look. Then it crumbled. “What if Mortimer comes back?”

His worst fear, but he hid it. “We’ll handle it.”

“Oh, like before? Hiding behind the nurse’s station?”

He was about to tear her a new one when three rapid gunshots sounded from somewhere in the hospital. A pause, then two more.

“Oh, God,” Jenny whispered.

And then the doors burst open and two burly security guards backed in, each dragging two bloody bodies.

“What the fuck is going on?” one of the guards screamed, wide eyes showing white all around. “There’s some kind of creature going crazy in the lobby. We walked in and it was behind the snack bar. It ripped Ernie’s head off!”

Sure enough, one of the corpses had been decapitated.

The other guard said, “I shot that fucker five times—I know I had at least three killshots—but they hardly even slowed him!”

Lanz felt his knees go rubbery. He tried to speak but words wouldn’t come.

“We’ve got to evacuate.” Jenny said.

He glared at her as he found his tongue. “Evacuate where? We’re in the American equivalent of Outer Mon-fucking-golia. Plus the highway’s blocked. What do I do? March or carry a hundred and fifty patients out into the woods?”

That shut her up—almost.

“Okay, then. If the patients can’t leave, neither am I. When my ex comes back, we’re going up to pediatrics and make sure nothing happens to those kids.”

“Like hell you—”

And then he saw one of the guards start back into the hospital.

“Where are you going?”

“To get Ernie’s head. I ain’t leaving his head out there!”

Lanz wanted to scream not to leave him and that Ernie didn’t care about the location of his goddamn head at this point, but bit it back. He was the captain of this ship and he had to hold it together, despite the fact that this corner of the world had gone insane.

Shanna

SHANNA turned away as she saw the prissy doctor poised over Mortimer’s exposed chest, smearing a clear gel on the defibrillator paddles. She’d spent the last two months studying some of history’s worst atrocities. In fact she’d often perused accounts of mass impalings while eating lunch—no problem.

But this? Uh-uh.

She headed into the hospital proper. She’d been here once before, when they’d thought Mortimer had OD’d, and remembered a snack bar in the lobby. A cup of coffee would hit the spot, especially after that Scotch. She wasn’t used to hard liquor.

The short middle-age man with “Ernie” embroidered into his shirt hung by the coffee kiosk at the end of the snack bar.

“Latté?” he said as she approached.

“Just a regular coffee, please. Black.”

She glanced around the nearly deserted lobby. By this time the day’s surgeries were done, the second shift was ensconced, the doctors had left for their offices, the kitchen was readying to serve dinner, the day visitors were gone and the night visitors weren’t home from work yet.

Quiet. Like a morgue.

She grimaced. Probably not the best analogy for a hospital.

She paid Ernie for the coffee and pulled out her cell. She had to call Clay to make sure he’d received the message that she and Jenny needed a ride back to Mortimer’s for their cars.

And then what?

Clay was expecting her to spend the weekend with him in Denver. She didn’t see how she could do that without losing her mind. Another gun show. When not at the show, however…her pelvis tingled with warmth that coursed up through her abdomen and settled in her nipples. The non-show activities would almost be worth it.

Almost.

The sex…she’d miss the sex. They were so good in bed. But the parade of gun shows and all the machismo…she’d had her fill. She had to call a halt.

She checked her phone’s display: no bars. Then she saw the sign: No Cell Phones!

Did they really need that exclamation point?

She glanced back along the lengthy hallway to the ER, then toward the lobby entrance. That looked closer. She pushed through the heavy glass doors to the outside, found a bench, and sat. She tried a sip of her coffee and winced as bitterness stabbed her tongue. Yuck. When had this been made? This morning?

She’d have to have a word with Ernie. But right now…

She stared at the cell display. Still no bars. But tucked in the corner of the room was a pay phone.

So call.

And say what? How could she tell that big cuddly guy that it wasn’t working? That she needed more than the best sex she’d ever had in her life. She needed a life of the mind as well. He was extremely bright, but his focus was so narrow. Guns and action films and his job—he loved being a deputy sheriff, so much that a lot of other stuff in his life was pushed to the side.

She knew what would happen when she told him. He’d promise to change. Spend less time at work. Take her ballroom dancing.

At least she assumed that would happen. This was all new to her. What if he just said, “Okay. See you around.”

She almost wished he would. It would shake her to know she’d been that wrong about him, but at least she wouldn’t be hurting his feelings.

God, I’m such a coward.

Do it, Shanna.

She found some change in the bottom of her purse and plunked it into the payphone. Four rings and then his voicemail came on. Oh, no. She gritted her teeth and listened once again as Clint Eastwood said, “Go ahead…make my day. BEEEEP!”

She definitely had to break this off.

“Clay, it’s Shanna. Don’t know if you got my last message but Jenny Bolton and I had to rush Mortimer to the hospital. Our cars are still at his place. Could you swing by the hospital and give us a lift back?” She bit her lip. “And Clay…about this weekend…” No. She couldn’t. She owed him a face-to-face explanation. “Talk to you later.”

She hung up the receiver and thought about that. Face-to-face. How could she look into Clay’s warm brown eyes and tell him it was over?

A woman came out of the lobby and lit up a cigarette. The smoke drifted Shanna’s way. She thought about asking her to move downwind but decided to move herself instead. Shanna dumped her coffee and returned to the lobby. Ernie smiled at her as she passed. She wanted to tell him to brew some fresh coffee but decided against it. She wasn’t looking for conversation. She needed a quiet place to think, to rehearse what she was going to say to Clay.

She checked the time. She’d give the ER staff another ten minutes to deal with Mortimer, then she’d return. Poor guy. Such a kind man. He’d been so good to her. Why on Earth had he jabbed himself with those fangs?

As she passed the elevator she saw a plaque: CHAPEL 2ND FLOOR.

Not a bad idea. She wasn’t religious, but it would be quiet and no one would be smoking.

She hit the UP button and a pair of doors slid open immediately. She rode one stop and was stepping out onto the second floor when three sharp reports echoed faintly through the elevator shaft from somewhere in the hospital. She froze. They seemed to come from below. They almost sounded like…

No…couldn’t be.

The elevator doors pincered against her and retreated. Puzzled and curious, she stepped back into the cab and punched the LOBBY button. On the way down she heard two more reports, much closer now, and immediately wished she’d stayed on the second floor. Because she knew that sound—knew it all too well from all the shows she’d been to where dealers and collectors demonstrated their wares.

Gunshots.

Somebody was shooting up the lobby.

Her heart began to thud as she hammered her palm against the button bank, pushing them all, any floor, she didn’t care, just not the lobby. Wasn’t there a way to stop these things? No sooner had the thought cleared than she saw the red STOP button. But as she reached for it the doors slid open.

Ernie looked up at her from the floor just outside the doors.

No, not Ernie. Just his head.

She screamed and began banging on the floor buttons again. She caught a flash of movement beyond Ernie’s head. Someone racing for the elevator.

No—something. It was shaped like a man and dressed like a man, though its shirt was in tatters. But there the resemblance stopped. Splattered head to toe with blood and its face…a horror of bloody jutting fangs and black eyes.

And it was charging her!

Shanna screamed again. As the elevator doors began to slide toward each other, she pressed her palms against them and tried to speed their progress. Through the narrowing opening she saw the fanged monster with its arms extended, its taloned hands scoring the air as it raced toward her.

The doors…just a few more inches…an inch…

Steel met steel just as a heavy weight slammed against the other side. The cab began to rise.

Shanna sobbed with relief and slumped to the floor.

That thing…its wild, insane teeth resembled the skull Mortimer received earlier…the teeth that had pierced Mortimer’s throat.

And despite all the blood, Shanna had recognized the gold belt buckle on its pants.

She sobbed again, this time in disbelief.

“Mortimer?”

Lanz

“HER name’s Oasis,” the new LPN said from the head of the gurney.

Her nametag read Rodriguez and she was all dark eyes and mocha skin and black hair. Not bad looking if you went for the Hispanic thing. Lanz preferred blondes.

He shook his head. Oasis…was that who her mother was listening to when she conceived her? He brushed the question away and tried to focus on the girl’s arm.

Not an easy thing. But at least the ER was secured. The guard had returned Ernie’s head to his body, Winslow was escorting the orderlies and the four new corpses down to the cooler, and two gun-toting uniforms were ready for trouble.

Okay. Now to Oasis. The kid was sedated with a little diazepam but strapped down anyway. She had five tears in her forearm where she’d been bitten. The EMT stood by to help restrain her if she started struggling.

Lanz held out his hand. “Lido.”

Rodriguez placed a syringe of local anesthetic on his palm. He was about to begin injecting when the EMT backed away.

“Ooh, man.”

Lanz glanced up at him. He wore a strange look.

“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of needles.”

“No, man.” His voice was slurred. “I stick ’em in people alla time. I just feel like shit alla sudden.”

He rubbed a hand across his face and Lanz noticed that one of his fingers was red and swollen to twice its size. Hadn’t he said he’d been bitten by Moorecook? Cellulitis already?

“Sit down before you fall down.”

Christ, was the EMT going to wind up a patient too? What else could go wrong?

He turned back to the kid. She began squirming as he injected the local—burned like hell for a few seconds going in, then the area went numb. He heard a hiss off to his right and glanced over to where the EMT slumped in a chair with his head lolling back. His mouth hung open and he was breathing funny.

Lanz had heard that sound before…just a little while ago—

Suddenly the EMT choked and bent forward. He hacked and spit. Not mucous.

Teeth.

He looked up at Lanz, his eyes tortured…and red. “Doc, I feel like sh—aaagh”

A claw exploded from his infected fingertip, and then his other fingers followed.

Just like with Moorecook.

And then huge fangs extruded from his jaws, ripping through his cheeks and lips.

Just like Moorecook.

Oh, Christ, was it contagious?

Another hiss, closer. He looked down at the girl. Her red-rimmed ebony eyes were wide open, and she was spitting teeth, but rows at a time, the braces linking them like bloody little fence posts.

Lanz backed away. Both bitten, both changing. It was contagious.

Oasis ripped her clawed hands free of the restraints as fangs ripped through her face. The EMT was up now, approaching the gurney as Oasis sat up. Both had their eyes fixed on Lanz and Rodriguez. The LPN was backing away too. She bumped into Lanz. Instinctively he grabbed her and shoved her toward the gurney. She screamed horribly when the claws pulled her forward and fangs tore her flesh. As blood sprayed, Lanz turned and ran.

Out of the treatment room, into the ER proper. Ignore the terrified, questioning faces. Find a place to hide. A door—SUPPLIES. The handle won’t turn. Locked. Of course. But he has a key. He fumbles it free, unlocks the steel door, ducks inside, closes and locks it behind him.

Safe! OhgoodChrist, safe!

Lanz slumped to the floor and leaned with his back against some shelving. Gradually he controlled his breathing, felt his heart slow.

He got a grip. He had control.

Okay. Assess the problem.

Some sort of contagious agent—viral, chemical, whatever—had invaded the hospital. Moorecook seemed to be patient zero, at least in Blessed Crucifixion. The two who’d changed had been bitten by him, which was a good indicator it was blood or saliva borne.

He quickly checked himself for cuts or scratches. None. Good. He was infection free. He had a steel door between him and the contaminated. He—

Something in his mouth. He spit it out.

A tooth.

No!

Randall

AS Randall marched down the corridor, it occurred to him that limping out to his truck to retrieve a chainsaw in order to cut up a feral beast that gobbled intestines was exactly the kind of “acting without thinking” behavior that had caused so many problems in his marriage. Well, that and the drinking.

He was in no shape to be walking around like this—he was, after all, hospitalized with a severe leg injury. He didn’t actually need his chainsaw—it was a hospital, so they probably had giant bone saws or other tools for dismemberment that were closer than the parking lot. Not to mention that by the time he actually limped out there, got his chainsaw, and limped all the way back, somebody else probably would have already dealt with the dracula creature issue. And hospital security was probably not inclined to let a gown-wearing, stitched-up lumberjack enter the facility with a chainsaw, even in a time of crisis.

But when Randall got set on an idea, he saw it through. No matter what. He wasn’t going to turn around and sheepishly say, “Ummmm, changed my mind.” Jenny had little enough respect for him as it was. Whatever respect he’d earned before their marriage he’d pissed away during it. He’d let the booze turn him into someone he’d never choose to be, someone he never wanted to be again.

But when Randall Bolton started something, he finished it, whether it was building a treehouse for the son that he hoped to have someday or sitting through an entire wedding for somebody he didn’t know because he’d gone to the wrong church.

And if he did manage to protect his ex-wife with his chainsaw, maybe he’d regain some of his dignity. He loved his chainsaw. Loved being a lumberjack, even if other people liked to sing that cross-dressing song by those British assholes. Loved the sound of falling trees smashing to the ground. Loved the outdoors. Even loved the word “lumberjack,” despite the fact that a couple of his buddies insisted on being called “arborists.”

But the day before yesterday, he’d been humiliated. Oh, sure, he could see where it would be funny to the other lumberjacks—he would’ve been laughing his ass off if it happened to somebody else—but his face burned red just thinking about it. He knew people thought he’d fallen off the wagon, but he hadn’t touched a drop in almost a hundred days. And you know, it used to be a struggle—that whole one-day-at-a-time thing—but now it felt good to be sober.

The accident wasn’t his fault. Really. He hadn’t done anything stupid or careless. He’d been happily chainsawing away, and as the tree started to wobble a squirrel was dislodged from the branches, landing on his hard hat and then scampering down his back. He hadn’t shrieked like a girl or anything, but anybody would yelp if a goddamn squirrel dropped on their head from thirty feet. Randall flinched, twisted around, and his chainsaw blade hit the back of his leg.

He couldn’t hear his buddies laughing over the chainsaw motor, but oh, they were in hysterics. Blood was gushing from his shredded flesh and they were having themselves a great big ol’ guffaw. Again, he would’ve laughed too…but still, fuck those guys.

He refused to let them drive him to the hospital. He’d drive there his goddamn self. He only needed one good leg to drive, so those giggling bastards could burn in hell for all he cared.

Of course, he’d started to get dizzy as he drove, and realized that because of his stubbornness he was bleeding all over his own truck instead of somebody else’s. But he didn’t pull over. He drove all the way to the hospital (while Jack and Frank drove behind him, presumably to make sure he didn’t pass out at the wheel) and checked himself in.

Randall desperately wanted to make peace with his chainsaw.

Putting it through the head of a dracula would do just fine.

He picked up his pace as he walked out of that big room where they made you wait. A nurse covered in blood was having a panic attack while a doctor shook her. Randall didn’t like seeing that kind of shit—you didn’t put your hand on a woman like that even if she was freaking out—but he had to focus. Ignore the chaos. Think only of Jenny and his chainsaw.

He exited the hospital, half-expecting somebody to say “Hey! That gown is hospital property!” He’d grabbed his shoes on his way out of his room and put them on during the elevator ride down, but hadn’t taken the time to grab his pants. He wished he had them. His chainsaw-the-monster redemption would be a lot better if his ass wasn’t hanging out.

Unfortunately, he hadn’t parked close. By the time he’d driven to the hospital, woozy from blood loss, he’d misjudged the distance to the building by over a hundred yards. He had a vague recollection of Jack and Frank helping him get into the ER, but couldn’t for the life of him remember where he’d left his Dodge. The lot was full, and apparently every other driver in the county owned a red pick-up. He weaved through the rows, wishing he had one of those little clicky-things he could press to make his horn honk.

When he finally caught sight of his Dodge, he picked up the pace even more, but that seemed to pull at his stitches and he slowed his pace again to something that wouldn’t rip his leg back open.

It never occurred to him to just get in the truck and drive away. It occurred to him that maybe he should think about that, but no way in hell was Randall going to abandon Jenny. He had more flaws than he had stitches in his leg, but fear was not one of them. Jenny could be a complete bitch to him—and probably would be—but he’d make sure she got out of there safely.

Of course, you could have done that better by staying with her, instead of limping out here to get a chainsaw…

Fuck you, brain.

Thirty-eight calls. Wow. He’d thought it was more like ten. He could blame about thirty-five of them on the heavy-duty painkillers, but the last three…well, he’d just really wanted to talk to Jenny. He wouldn’t have minded if she laughed about the squirrel. At least he’d hear her laugh. He missed her laugh. They used to laugh a lot, but he’d killed that.

Focus. He needed to focus.

He walked up to his truck. The chainsaw rested there on the seat where he’d left it. (Normally it went in the back, but it hadn’t been a normal day. And would Jack and Frank have brought along their chainsaw if it cut open their leg? Hell no, they wouldn’t have. They could laugh all they wanted, but the proof of his manly nature was right there.)

There was dried blood all over the seat. It was going to cost a fortune to have that cleaned, assuming it could be cleaned. He might have to just rip the seat out and have it replaced. Shit.

He focused again.

Then he cursed as he realized that the truck door was locked. His keys were in his hospital room on the third floor. Son of a bitch.

He let out an angry sigh. No possible way was he returning to that hospital without a chainsaw. Not a chance. He walked to the back of the truck and picked up his metal toolbox. There were plenty of other tools in the back, including a hatchet, but he’d rather have a broken window and his chainsaw. If he were wearing actual pants, he could’ve wedged the hatchet into the waist, but the gown left little opportunity to…

No, wait. He had a utility belt. He quickly lifted his gown and put on the thick belt, which had a nice assortment of tools, then slid the hatchet in there. Cool. He looked absolutely ridiculous, but he had lots of toys now.

He returned to the passenger-side door, turned his head to avoid getting glass chunks in his eyes, and used the toolbox to smash through the window. He unlocked the door, opened it, and grabbed the chainsaw. Yes!

It still had his blood on the blade. He kind of liked that.

He limped back toward the building.

Screams from inside. Lots of them.

What the hell was going on?

He’d seen that Dracula movie when he was a kid, but that slick-haired guy didn’t do anything like this.

Randall walked back inside. The room (it was the Emergency Room, right? Or did they take people to the Emergency Room after they waited in this room?) was absolute chaos. He could barely process it all. People were screaming and panicking and getting ripped apart and eaten. He’d known that things were bad when he left…but he’d only gone to the parking lot for a few minutes!

“Jenny!” he called out.

A small, scrawny teenaged kid in a hospital gown noticed Randall. His chest was covered with red as if he’d just enjoyed a messy Italian meal, but it was blood not sauce, and the blood seemed to be his own, the result of the lower, non-pimply half of his goddamn face being mangled. He had huge, sharp teeth, and it looked like they’d ripped right through the skin.

Okay, maybe Randall was feeling some fear now. That was fine.

The dracula smiled—as well as you can smile when the lower half of your face is a pulpy, bloody mess—and rushed at him.

Randall tugged the cord of the chainsaw. It roared to life.

He raised the tool—now a glorious weapon—in front of him, absolutely loving the feeling.

The chainsaw sputtered and died.

Out of gas.

And then the teenaged dracula was upon him, mouth open wide. Randall screamed with rage and bashed the chainsaw into its face as hard as he could. Randall, who was lumberjack-sized, had a good eighteen inches and a hundred pounds on the little monster, and the impact was severe. Blood sprayed.

A second hit and the creature dropped to the floor.

Randall smashed the chainsaw into its head, over and over, as the dracula kept thrashing and trying to grab him. The chainsaw held together fine—Randall didn’t buy cheap chainsaws—and after a good dozen or so blows the dracula stopped moving.

Randall wiped the gore from his face. He hoped the hospital security cameras had caught that.

There was still chaos everywhere, and people who needed help, but once again Randall had to focus. He stood back up, wincing, and forced himself to get moving again. Though there were probably much better options for bashing draculas to death than his chainsaw and it would just weigh him down, he couldn’t bear to leave it behind.

Time to find Jenny.

Moorecook

BLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOOD

SOURCE!

He crouched, felt the new power coursing through his system, and then he was soaring through the lobby, everything slow and fast all at once, and he came down on the shoulders of a man behind the snack bar—the smell of his blood so pure and rich—and as the man screamed, he took his head between his claws and twisted and ripped until a geyser of glorious red erupted in two ropes and he drank from the larger of the two like a water fountain. Had tasted nothing better in his seventy-six years, not even the Macallan fifty-five, not the models he’d fucked back when he could still get it up. The taste of it he couldn’t begin to explain, only how it made him feel, each drop running down his throat—sweet warm salty rust. Like he’d never breathed before until this moment and had finally taken his first hit of oxygen, knowing the more he drank the better…

FUCKFUCK FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK

Already the blood flow was ebbing. He had to lick it off the floor now, where it was cooling and congealing, and that beautiful euphoric push had begun to pull away, leaving something black and terrible in its place.

A headache descended, like someone driving an ice pick through his frontal lobe.

Something stung his shoulder. He jumped up onto the snack bar, fire blooming down the corridor, streaking toward the doors to the ER, men screaming at him, the gunshots distant, like he heard them from underwater, and with some of the lights came a brief but violent sting, and he could smell blood, his blood and their blood, still muted under their clothes and skin but it was there, calling to him, and he was moving toward them before he realized what he was doing, the men retreating, yelling, more points of light opening and dying like fireflies.

He stopped.

These men would fight him.

He didn’t want to fight.

He just wanted to drink, and there must be a hundred or more of these blood containers on the floors above him.

Sick. Drugged. Helpless.

He leapt off the snack counter and bounded through the lobby toward the elevators.

Jenny

RATHER than dwell on why this was happening—which wouldn’t help things make any more sense—Jenny fell back on her training. After applying antiseptic, lidocaine cream, and a compress to the claw wound on her hip (which thankfully wasn’t serious), she administered a cryoprecipitate IV to a softball player with a transradial amputation of the forearm, and put a Celox compression on the stump to control bleeding. Jenny repeated the procedure with his friend who was missing half his ass, and also gave him a shot of synthetic morphine because the guy was screaming so loud it made her ears ring. Once both patients were stabilized, she allowed herself a bit of pride at her efforts.

This was the reason she’d become a nurse. To help save lives.

Focusing on that, she turned her attention to the hallway, remembering how close the pediatric ward was. Jenny Bolton had no idea what Mortimer had become. But if he got to the children…

Screams, from behind her. She spun and stared in disbelief. The ER had become a war zone.

Somehow, Mortimer’s affliction had spread, infecting others. Jenny counted three—no, four—of the fanged creatures, and a fifth in mid-transformation, spitting out teeth as longer ones grew in. Those still human tried to make it to the exit, but the EMT Jenny had ridden here with was blocking the doors, snapping and slashing at anyone who came close.

That a-hole Lanz was nowhere to be seen, but bending over one of the infected, smashing its head in with a chainsaw, was…

“Randall!”

“Jen?”

Her ex-husband’s neck craned up at the sound of her voice, and he caught Jenny’s eyes and smiled at her, big and stupid.

That’s what Randall was, at his core. Big and stupid. But despite all he’d put her through, seeing him there, alert and sober amid the horror and the chaos, gave Jenny a burst of hope. More than anything, she wanted him to spirit them both out of here.

But they couldn’t leave. Especially now. With more of these…things…in the hospital, someone had to protect the children.

Randall limped over to her, that familiar, lopsided grin on his face, as Dante’s Inferno raged around them. She met him halfway, and when his huge, hairy arms closed around her in a hug, she endured it.

Hell, against her better instincts, she welcomed it.

“We’ve got ourselves a dracula outbreak,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

Jenny pulled away. “I can’t leave. There are kids in this hospital. Sick kids. They won’t have a chance on their own.”

Randall’s brow furrowed, and he pursed his lips. “Okay. I’ll take you to the truck, then I’ll come back and—”

“No time. I have to go now.”

“It’s too dangerous, Jen. Let me do it.”

“Do you even know where pediatrics is, Randall? Can you even spell pediatrics?”

Randall frowned. “That’s low.”

He was right. And Jenny wanted more than anything for Randall to come with her. But she couldn’t ask that of him. She’d divorced him, kicked him out. Even if he had sobered up, she couldn’t ask him to risk his neck in such a deadly situation.

During their courtship, their engagement, the early years of their marriage, Randall had been the sweetest man on Earth, a big, loyal puppy dog. Not the brightest bulb in the box—really, she could do the New York Times crossword while Randall couldn’t even spell crossword—but that didn’t matter. Randall was…Randall—insanely devoted, who always had her back. Here was a guy who was there for her.

Until he started drinking. Then a new Randall emerged. Violent. He never touched her, never even raised a hand to her. But he’d break things and pick fights with other people. She’d finally given him an ultimatum: Jenny or the bottle. He chose her—or rather said he did, but kept sneaking drinks on the side. Finally she’d called it quits.

Now he seemed more like the man she’d fallen in love with.

“Get out of here, Randall. Save yourself.”

“I’m not going anywhere, Jen. You know that. Let’s go save those sick kids.”

Jenny shook her head. “Don’t do this for me,” she heard herself say. And at the same time, part of her hoped he was doing it for her. She still loved him. After all, she’d never been able to bring herself to go back to her maiden name.

“Of course it’s for you. But it’s also so those little diseased children don’t become dracula snacks. We need to get them safe so they can be sick and die in peace.”

A dracula launched itself at the duo, and Randall pushed Jenny away and swung the chainsaw at its head. Though the saw wasn’t running, the blade hit with such force Jenny heard the creature’s neck snap as it fell to the side. When the dracula hit the floor it thrashed and kicked and screamed, its head gyrating at an odd angle.

“Come on!”

Randall grabbed Jenny’s arm and marched her through the double doors into the depths of the hospital. After a few steps, Jenny took the lead, pulling him to the stairwell, tugging open the door.

“Maybe an elevator?” Randall said. He stared down at his leg, which was dripping blood from torn stitches.

“Aw, Randall…”

Dropping to her knees, Jenny tore at the hem of his hospital gown and began to wrap it around his leg to stop the bleeding. As she was tying off the cloth, she noticed Randall’s gown beginning to extend in front.

“Randall!”

“Sorry,” he said, turning red. “Ain’t been with anyone since you left.”

“Really?” Randall wasn’t smart, but he was handsome and charming, and he’d had a steady stream of girlfriends before they met. Though Jenny was comfortable with her could-stand-to-lose-a-few-pounds body, she’d known that Randall usually dated much hotter, thinner women. If he truly hadn’t had sex with anyone, he’d definitely turned down some offers.

“Well, five-finger Mary, if you know what I’m saying.”

Jenny did. She’d been celibate herself—Randall had left her more than a little bitter about the opposite sex. Still, she had a sudden, completely irrational urge to reach up under his gown and grab him.

Or maybe it wasn’t so irrational. In times of stress, humans often regressed to base behaviors.

“Have, uh…you?” he asked.

“What?”

“Been with anyone since the divorce?”

“That’s not your business, Randall.”

“Yeah.” He looked away. “Sorry.”

Jenny stood up. “We need to get to pediatrics. The elevator is this way.”

He moped along behind, and when they reached the elevator, Jenny pressed the call button. For all the commotion in the ER, the hall was disproportionately quiet. Perhaps some people had already evacuated, despite Dr. Lanz’s proclamation that there wasn’t anywhere to go. Though this area of Durango was currently under development, with lots of new construction up and down the highway, the only other inhabited building within three miles was a gas station. But at the current rate this disease was spreading through the hospital, even the uninhabited woods at night would be preferable to staying here. Unless they were able to stop the infection, Jenny predicted everyone would be either dead or turned within a few hours.

The elevator dinged, and when the doors opened a dracula darted out, tackling Jenny.

She fell backward, the creature atop her, snarling and gnashing its horrible teeth. Jenny caught a quick glimpse of the nurse’s uniform, and the nametag, Fortescue, as she reached up to grab the dracula’s shoulders, keeping its fangs away. The snap snap snap of the jaws, like mousetraps going off, flecked blood and spittle all over Jenny’s face. She turned away, scrunched closed her eyes and mouth, worried more about getting the infection than being devoured.

Then, as quickly as she’d been pinned down, Jenny was free.

Randall had jerked Nurse Fortescue off Jenny and pinned the monster to the floor, his bare foot on her chest, his chainsaw tearing at her neck. He moved the saw up and down, a combination of weight and brute strength causing it to tear through the dracula’s throat, blood spraying out three-hundred and sixty degrees like a lawn sprinkler.

The thing that was once Fortescue thrashed and hissed, and Randall dropped his big knee onto the monster’s ribcage, pressing on the edge of the blade with both his palms, shaking it back and forth until Jenny heard the audible pop of the spinal cord severing.

Still, the teeth gnashed and feet—claws bursting out through the gym shoes—continued to kick and writhe. It wasn’t until Randall had the head completely severed and pushed away from the body, that the monster was finally still.

“You okay?” he asked, staring up at his ex-wife.

“Wouldn’t it be easier if you turned the saw on?”

“Outta gas. Still works pretty good, though.”

Jenny carefully wiped some blood from her face, avoiding getting any in her eyes, nose, or mouth, and then walked over to Randall.

“Nurse Fortescue is from pediatrics,” she said. “We need to move. Now.”

Lanz

SINGLY and in pairs, all but two teeth had fallen out of Dr. Kurt Lanz’s gums. He cupped them in his hands. He’d counted them.

He knew.

How? Why? He’d been racking his brain for a reason. He hadn’t been bitten or cut. He—

Oh no! Moorecook had been seizuring when Lanz arrived, spraying bloody saliva everywhere. Some had landed on his face. A fleck must have reached his lips. He’d been contaminated through his mucous membranes instead of directly into his blood. A tiny inoculum. A delayed reaction. A slower transformation.

Screams erupted on the far side of the door, followed by gunfire. He rose and pressed his ear against the steel. Sounded like chaos out there. Good thing—

Something slammed against the door. He jerked back as fists began pounding the other side and someone screamed to be let in.

No fucking way, Jose.

The pounding and screaming stopped abruptly. Shaken, Lanz sat again. If he could just hold out here till the cavalry rode in, he’d be—

The faint sound of a siren filtered through the door. Had the sheriff sent someone?

Okay…he could control this. Maybe not the physical aspects, but he refused to become a bloodthirsty beast like the others. He was a doctor, for fuck’s sake. He was educated. And he was certainly more intelligent than any dozen of these yokels combined.

His last two teeth dropped from his gums.

Didn’t matter. He was better than the rest. He’d beat this.

Sudden blasts of agony shrieked from his fingers and drove him to his knees as hooked claws burst from the tips.

And then indescribable pain from his jaws as the fangs erupted and tore through his cheeks and lips, like he’d forced his face into a wood chipper.

His vision blurred, then cleared. He saw everything in such detail now, like switching from a blurry black-and-white TV to hi-def. Same for his sense of smell. A delicious, mouth-watering odor was wafting through the door. He recognized it: blood. Beautiful, warm, red, delicious blood. He had to—

No! He was better than this. The cops were here. He’d heard the sirens. He’d stay in here and explain through the door what had happ—

Hungry! So hungry! That smell was driving him crazy.

His hand seemed to move of its own volition. Hard to turn the knob with those claws, but he managed. And when the door swung open the blood smell enveloped him, banishing every desire but to feed, every feeling but hunger.

He saw a pair of wary EMTs—fat woman pulling in front, middle-age guy pushing from behind—hesitantly wheeling a stretcher through the door. The siren hadn’t been police, it had been an ambulance.

Blood! Fresh blood!

Lanz leaped up on the nurse’s station and launched himself at them. The claws of his left hand pierced the side of the fat, lead EMT’s face as Lanz sailed by. The hooks caught and set. Lanz felt a tug and then a give as the face ripped free.

By then he was upon the second, sinking his fangs into his exposed throat, tearing the flesh, chugging the hot gush of blood as it rushed into his mouth. The guy went down, kicking and trying to scream but he had no throat so how could he scream? And then he stopped struggling and the blood stopped flowing.

So soon?

More!

Lanz turned and saw the fat EMT on her knees, screaming as she held her ripped face in place. He lunged at her and tore into her throat.

Again, the rush of the gush. For the first time in his life Lanz truly felt alive. He couldn’t stop. He wouldn’t stop!

Nurse Winslow

THE two big orderlies emerged from cold storage into the autopsy suite where Janine stood by one of the tables, gripping the stainless steel so her hands wouldn’t shake. She’d been head nurse at Blessed Crucifixion since Jenny Bolton had been fired, and nothing had rattled her up until now, not even the ten burn victims who’d come through her ER six months ago when the Doublespruce Hotel had gone up in flames.

But she’d just watched Ralph and Benjamin roll a man past her on a gurney whose head had been ripped off, and she didn’t have a filter for that. They’d set the victim’s head in his lap with his hands positioned so it appeared as though he was holding his own noggin, one of them cracking a joke about Ichabod Crane as they wheeled past, and she would’ve dressed them down right then and there, but it was all she could do to keep standing, her legs threatening to give out at any moment.

Nothing about this was right. They’d brought that rich old man in several weeks ago on a morphine OD scare, and he’d barely had the strength to get himself around without a walker.

She looked up. Ralph was standing in front of her.

“Anything else, Ms. Winslow?”

Low, booming voice. Bloodshot eyes suggesting a healthy marijuana habit.

“No, but go check with Dr. Lanz.”

She followed the orderlies to the entrance of the morgue. “I’m going to lock myself in,” she said. “Call me when they’ve caught the old man.”

She closed the door and turned the deadbolt, knew she should feel safe now—no way to open that door from the outside unless you had a key—but something about being down here in the basement with six corpses still unnerved her.

Janine drifted over to the coroner’s desk and eased down into the metal folding chair. God, she was tired. Her shift should’ve ended an hour ago. Couldn’t wait to get home, crack open that four-pack of Bartles and Jaymes Strawberry Daiquiri wine coolers, and watch the newest episode of House she’d TiVo’d last night.

Hugh Laurie.

Yum.

Even now, she felt that warmth between her legs. House would know how to handle a situation like this, no doubt. She’d never admitted it to anyone, but she often imagined that Lanz was House, and she was Dr. Cuddy, took the whole fantasy quite a bit farther than she was comfortable admitting, even to herself, especially after two or three wine coolers and her lounging in a bubble bath with her Natural Contours Personal Massager.

It had suddenly grown very quiet. She never liked coming down to the cooler. Not even in the middle of the day with the medical examiner and his team buzzing around. The chill that radiated out of cold storage just plain creeped her out.

She rubbed her arms, gooseflesh spreading across her skin.

Her navy scrubs wouldn’t keep her warm down here.

A sound perked her head up.

Soft, muffled. Sourced from cold storage.

Temperature gradient, she figured. The metal doors of the refrigerated morgue drawers contracting and expanding.

She glanced at her watch: 9:12 P.M.

She should be home by now, dammit, already into her second—

Another sound. Unmistakable. Like someone had thumped one of the drawers. She stood up. If Ralph and Benjamin were fucking with her, she’d make certain they were drug-tested next week. Would bet her next two paychecks they’d both come back with hot UAs.

She walked through the autopsy suite toward the large door to cold storage, which stood wide open.

From what she’d heard, practical jokes were a common occurrence down here, but she couldn’t believe even those two stoners would try to pull something on a night like this.

She stepped through into cold storage and put her ear to one of the drawers.

Sounded like fingernails scratching against metal.

The scratching stopped.

BANG.

She jumped back.

BANG. BANG.

What the hell?

BANG. BANG. BANG.

Janine stood facing the refrigerated nine-drawer cabinet, and she could see the metal vibrating.

The body in there was still alive.

Winslow rushed to it, fingers locking around the stainless steel handle.

Then she paused.

The woman was in there. The mother, who had her entire intestinal tract torn out. The orderlies had used a snow shovel to scoop her insides back into her body cavity.

How could she still be alive? There was no way.

The banging had stopped, and Winslow wondered if she’d somehow imagined the noise. Fear and stress could make the mind play tricks. After what she’d seen in the ER, Winslow might even be exhibiting symptoms of shock. Or post-traumatic stress disorder. Auditory hallucinations weren’t unheard of.

BANG!

The loudest yet, the handle vibrating so hard it stung her palm.

And it was accompanied by a scream. The loudest, rawest, most agonizing scream Winslow had ever heard.

My god! How can that poor woman still be alive?

Heart thumping, throat dry, Winslow tugged hard on the handle, putting her entire hundred and ten pounds behind it, the drawer sliding out with a metallic ring.

Yes, the poor woman was alive, her eyes wide, the pupils dilated. Her guts were strewn all over her body, and her head thrashed back and forth in unbearable pain.

No…not pain. It wasn’t pain at all.

The woman’s head shook because she was trying to chew her way through her own intestines.

She held a loop in both of her hands—her twisted, clawed hands—and her mouth tore at the tough, stretchy tissue of her transverse colon, which was still attached to the gaping hole in her abdomen.

The woman screamed again, her wide eyes locking onto Winslow’s.

Then she spat out her digestive tract and reached her horrible hands out for the nurse, her hideous, fang-filled mouth yawing open to an impossible size.

Winslow reacted instantly. She pushed the handle, leaning into it, her rubber soled nurse’s shoes squeaking against the polished tile floors as the drawer slid closed.

The mother creature rolled onto her chest, sliding off the drawer on a pool of her own blood, slipping out and plopping, face-first, onto the ground just as the door slammed shut.

Winslow backpedaled, tripping over her feet. The mother creature shrieked at her, scrambling across the floor, closing the distance between them. Janine opened her mouth to yell for help—the orderlies might still be near. But her throat had locked in fear, and she could only manage a soft squeak.

Crabwalking backward, Winslow felt and saw one of those claws grasp her shoe. Its grip was a vice, and its pointed finger bones dug into the thin flesh of Janine’s ankle. She kicked out with her other leg, trying to break free, her rubber soles bouncing harmlessly off the creature’s hand. Then it began to pull, its jaws snapping so hard and fast it almost sounded like a tap dancer.

Against her every impulse to pull away, Janine Winslow leaned forward instead, pawing at the Velcro straps on her shoe, ripping them free, then yanking her foot out of the mother-creature’s grasp and crawling into the corner of the room by the desk.

Catching her breath, filling her lungs, Nurse Winslow let loose with the loudest scream of her life.

“HEEELP!!!!”

The mother creature had Winslow’s shoe in its mouth, chewing the leather and rubber to shreds. Its wide nostrils flared, and it began to scurry toward Winslow once again.

Ten feet away.

“HELP ME!”

Five feet away.

“JESUS CHRIST HELP!”

Two feet away, its wicked claws reaching out, Winslow curled up fetal in the corner, her knees tucked into her chest.

Then the creature jerked to a stop and hissed. It writhed for a moment, its whole body shaking, but it didn’t come any closer.

Winslow saw why.

Its intestines. They’re caught in the drawer.

They stretched out the length of the morgue, a slimy, bloody rope keeping the creature away like a dog on a leash.

“Ms. Winslow? Holy fuck!”

Ralph. At the door, peering in through the small, square window. Winslow watched the knob shake, but not turn.

Locked. I locked myself in.

“Get the key from Kurt!” Winslow cried out.

Ralph nodded, then disappeared. Winslow faced her attacker, which had stopped trying to reach for her. Instead, the mother creature, eyes bulging, was chewing on its own hand, scarfing it down like it hadn’t eaten in weeks. Winslow watched the blood spurt, listened to the tiny bones crack and splinter, and then turned away from the spectacle, her attention zeroing in on the desk.

A weapon. I need a weapon.

She yanked open a drawer, pencils and desk supplies raining down on her. A stapler. Some Post-It notes. Paper clips. She picked up some child’s safety scissors with blunted tips, and stared at them incredulously.

It’s a morgue, goddamn it. Where’s a goddamn scalpel?

A choking sound from the creature. Winslow dared a glance. It had bitten off and eaten all of its fingers, and was jamming its own stump down its throat, gagging obscenely. Then, suddenly, it twisted around and began gnawing at the taut loop of intestines tethering it to the drawer.

Winslow got onto her knees, opening up another drawer.

There. A trocar.

It was heavy. Sharp. Formidable. A hefty metal tube, hollow and pointed on the end, used for aspirating body cavities. This was a large model, wide as a garden hose and close to eight inches long. Winslow gripped the base and faced the monster, which had gnawed its way through its own entrails and lunged toward Winslow, its mouth so wide it looked like it could almost swallow Winslow’s head.

She thrust the trocar upward, using both hands, punching the razor tip through the creature’s ribcage and into its heart.

Blood immediately sprayed out the base like a spigot, drenching Winslow’s clothes as the monster flopped onto her. But instead of latching onto Winslow’s neck, those hideous, snapping jaws kissed the floor, a mangled tongue lapping at the tile.

Blood. It’s licking up its own blood.

The creature hoovered it up as the red stuff pumped out of its own chest, smearing it across its face, sucking it in with a sound like slurping soup.

But it wasn’t quick enough. Winslow watched, horrified, transfixed, as the creature’s blood output overtook its input. The trocar was too big, pumping out blood faster than the mother could take it back in. The crimson pool grew ever wider, even as the thing’s frenzy increased.

Eventually, it toppled onto its face, limbs splayed out, tongue still licking feebly at the sticky floor, until finally even that was still.

BANG.

Winslow’s head spun at the sound.

Another drawer. Something alive inside.

BANG!

BANG BANG!

And another one.

BANG BANG BANG!

BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG!

BANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANG!

All of the drawers were shaking, rattling, the cacophony so loud it drowned out her wail of fear. Then the hissing started, spliced with that horrible shrieking, Nurse Winslow’s brain telling her to move, get out, but by the time her legs received the message the first door had burst open, and along with a blast of cold air, a clown popped out onto the floor, landing on all fours. Awful teeth, black eyes, fright wig, its fangs already chomping as it stared across the room at Winslow.

Now, finally, Janine’s legs were moving, and she was sprinting toward the exit. She collided into the door and jerked on the handle out of pure instinct, but it didn’t budge.

Behind her—

SQUEAK.

SQUEAK.

SQUEAK.

The clown, on its feet now, its comically oversized shoes fitted with joke squeakers, which got louder as it plodded closer.

Winslow’s fingers found the lock, and as she turned the deadbolt, pulling the door open, she heard a flurry of squeaks as the monster ran at her, crushing her with its bulk, and her last thought as its fangs sank into her face…

I’ve always hated clowns.

Benny the Clown

FOUR hours earlier, Benjamin Jamison Southwick had been sitting in a cheap motel room, a gun in his mouth. Most clowns were crying beneath their painted-on smiles, and Benny the Clown was flat-out suicidal under his.

After deciding that, yes, he was finally going to do it this time, Benny the Clown had spent a while trying to figure out if he should do it in his clown costume. It would get a lot more attention if he did. Local Clown Blows Brains Out, Declared Unfunny. But he came from a long line of clowns, and did he really want to disgrace the Southwick name?

He’d thought about it, weeping much of the time, and then decided that yes, he would kill himself in his clown suit.

But he couldn’t do it. Couldn’t pull the trigger.

Just like the last three times.

Finally he’d checked his watch. He was scheduled to do a birthday party in half an hour. Might as well keep his commitment.

Getting bit by the birthday girl made him sad.

Having her braces get stuck in him made him sadder.

Sitting in the hospital with the girl and her awful mother, Benny the Clown had never been so sad in his life. If he’d had the gun with him, he thought he could have pulled the trigger, no problem.

He didn’t remember any of that now. Because now, with the taste of blood in his mouth and much of the nurse’s cheek between his teeth and no thoughts beyond how to get more more more MORE MORE MORE, Benny the Clown was happier than he’d ever been.

Oasis

WHY had Mom never told her that people were filled with delicious red candy? It was better than jelly beans. Way better. She’d only gotten a taste of it, but she needed more. Right now. That mean, brown-skinned nurse had punched her in the face when she’d bitten her arm, and then everyone had rushed out, leaving Oasis alone in the treatment room.

She looked down at her hands—they weren’t really hands anymore. They looked like monster claws.

The pain in her face was going away.

She could hear a lot of screaming on the other side of the door.

Screaming meant people.

People meant warm red candy.

Oasis jumped down off the gurney and opened the door.

Candy everywhere! On the walls, the ceiling, people covered in it, and straight ahead, two monsters were licking it off the floor by the nurses’ station.

She bounded over and crouched between them, but she hadn’t even touched her long, spongy tongue to the puddle when one of the monsters hissed at her and swung its claw at her face.

The blow knocked her back into the wall, and Oasis screamed, It isn’t fair, you stupid dumbhead! But the words came out as a loud hiss, and now that monster was moving toward her.

She leapt away and exploded through a pair of double doors, sprinting now—faster than she’d ever run before, faster than she imagined possible—down a long corridor.

She came around a corner and skidded to a stop.

A man in pale blue scrubs stood before the closed elevator doors, pushing the UP button over and over and saying bad words.

When he noticed Oasis staring at him, he said, “Holy fucking shit,” and backed away.

Oasis asked him if he would share some of his candy, but again, her words came out hissing, and the man screamed, “Get the fuck away from me, little girl!”

She was moving toward him now. He was so tall and big she figured he probably contained more red candy than most. She could smell it through his skin, and the odor made her legs crouch, and before she’d even considered it, she was jumping toward him, her claws outstretched, screaming with pure joy at the thought of sinking her pretty new teeth into the man’s—

A metal trashcan connected with the side of her head and she slammed into the elevator doors.

She cry-hissed. Why was he—

The trashcan crashed into her head again.

She screamed, “Stop hurting me!”

The man hit her again.

Why was he beating her? She only wanted his—

That third blow was the hardest. Felt her skull crack open.

She blacked out and came back as the elevator doors were closing, the big candy-filled orderly gone.

All she could think about was her thirst for that candy, her head throbbing with her need for it.

She leapt to her feet.

Heard noise coming from the emergency room, and she wanted to go back, but it was full of adults.

Adults were strong and mean. They would fight her, maybe hurt or even kill her.

Her black eyes fell upon a placard between the elevators:

3rd FLOOR

Cardiovascular Services

Endoscopy Registration

The Birthplace

The words were too big for her to read except for the last line.

T-h-e B-i-r-t-h-p-l-a-c-e.

She smiled, and her huge teeth split her cheeks the rest of the way to her earlobes.

Maybe there would be babies there. Smaller, yes, not as brimming with red candy as adults, but…

How could they fight back?

Randall

AS the doors closed and the elevator began to ascend, Randall frowned.

“What’s wrong?” Jenny asked.

“The elevator music. I think it’s a Metallica cover.”

She listened for a moment, then nodded. “I think you’re right.”

“When did it become okay to do that to Metallica? There’s no more decency in the world.”

Jenny didn’t reply.

Honestly, Randall didn’t care about the elevator music—he was just trying to distract himself from the fact that his feelings were hurt.

Yes, in a hospital full of flesh-eating, blood-drinking creatures, moments after being responsible for a bludgeoning death and a decapitation, Randall’s feelings were hurt. So what if he couldn’t spell pediatrics? He could spell most of the word, and even in a time of crisis, even after he saved her life, Jenny seemed to go out of her way to make him feel dumb.

Of course, Jenny had never made fun of him before he started drinking. He guessed that was the only way she could get back at him. Since the divorce he’d tried to smarten up. He’d read books—real books—but he had to admit that while he sort of understood them while he was reading, the words weren’t staying in his brain.

But just like getting sober, he kept trying. Because he loved her.

He’d always love her.

And maybe someday—

The elevator doors opened.

Focus. Time to save the kids.

Randall held the non-running chainsaw out in front of him. He could hear screams coming from several different places, but at least there weren’t any draculas in the hallway.

A dracula ran around the corner into the hallway.

“Get behind me,” said Randall, though Jenny had already done that. The dracula was absolutely drenched in blood—it even dripped from his hair—and he wore a black leather jacket and a pair of jeans that you could sort of tell had once been blue. He clearly wasn’t a patient or a doctor; it was probably somebody visiting a friend or relative.

The dracula rushed down the hallway toward them, mouth wide open.

The elevator doors started to close. It was hard for Randall to believe that he was in a situation where he didn’t want heavy metal doors to close between him and a bloodthirsty monster, but those kids needed to be saved. He bumped the doors with his elbow and they slid back open.

The dracula extended his arms and opened its mouth even wider.

“Hold this,” said Randall, handing Jenny the chainsaw. As she took it from him, he slid the hatchet out of his belt. Though he wanted to shout a battle cry and rush to meet the creature, he couldn’t run on his injured leg, so he clutched the hatchet tightly in his fist and steeled himself for the creature’s approach.

He let out the battle cry.

The dracula let out an animalistic screech.

Randall stepped forward and swung the axe as hard as he could. Perhaps he couldn’t spell “arterial spray,” but he could sure as shit make it happen. The blade of the hatchet wasn’t large enough to completely sever the dracula’s head, but Randall’s aim and the force behind the swing were inarguably fantastic. The blade went completely through the dracula’s neck, bursting out the other side, and its head flopped to the left, dangling by a small strip of meat.

The dracula was knocked off its feet, landing hard on its back.

Randall slammed his good foot onto its head, crunching through its skull. Its body twitched. He stomped it again to make the twitching stop.

“F-U-C-K Y-O-U,” he spelled out.

So, the draculas had a weakness: they didn’t know how to duck out of the way of a goddamn hatchet.

He glanced over at Jenny to see whether she was amused, horrified, or impressed. She was horrified. Not because of the gore, but because two more draculas—one in a hospital gown, one in a dress shirt—were running toward them.

Randall stepped forward to keep Jenny out of harm’s way and out of the splash zone. He ignored the jolt of pain in his leg, let out another battle cry, and swung the hatchet so hard he thought he might have popped his shoulder out of socket. The blade slammed into the dracula’s chest and smashed the creature into the one behind it. The bloody handle popped out of Randall’s grasp as both draculas hit the floor.

The first dracula got up more quickly than Randall would have anticipated or hoped. It stood, blood pouring down its chest. Randall yanked a screwdriver out of his utility belt. A very small screwdriver. One designed for screws instead of skulls.

The second dracula grabbed the first dracula’s foot, pulling it to the ground. It wrenched the hatchet out of the first dracula’s chest wound, tossed the weapon aside, and then bit down into the bloody gash.

Randall knew that he shouldn’t be standing there, staring at them in horror, but he couldn’t help himself. Those bastards would drink each other’s blood, too? That was messed up.

Jenny nudged him forward. “Let’s go!”

As the two draculas wrestled on the ground, Randall and Jenny rushed past them, with Randall quickly grabbing his hatchet on the way. There would be more draculas to chop up, that was for sure.

He winced as they ran.

“How’s your leg?” Jenny asked.

“Crappy. But I’ll live. Where’re the kids?”

“Just around the corner.”

There was a terrible scream as they rounded the corner, but Randall couldn’t see the source. His leg was really, really starting to hurt. If he wasn’t careful, they’d have to find the place where the hospital kept its wheelchairs.

Jenny pushed open a door marked “Pediatrics.”

Randall was an optimist at heart, and he wasn’t one to envision ghastly scenes of carnage. That said, he fully expected to see a giant room full of child parts, tiny arms and legs strewn everywhere, bloody, ripped-off faces sliding down the walls, and a shredded teddy bear at his feet to drive home the tragedy of it all.

Instead, the first room in the wing was filled with sobbing children, but none of them were dead or even bleeding.

“We have to get them out of here,” Jenny said.

Randall shook his head. “You can’t lead that many kids through this place. We need to keep them here and defend them.”

“You’re right, you’re right, I’m not thinking straight.” Jenny squeezed her eyes shut, then re-opened them. They widened as she looked at something behind Randall, in the direction from which they’d come.

He spun and caught a glimpse of a dracula, a really old fucker. The dracula disappeared from sight and Randall returned his attention to Jenny. “It’s okay. He’s not coming after us.”

“No, I think he’s the one who started this.”

“What do you mean?”

“He was the first one to transform into one of those things.”

Randall frowned. “So you mean he’s…I dunno…the leader or something? Kill the queen and the rest die, like ants?” Randall hoped that didn’t sound stupid. He didn’t mean that he’d expect the rest of them to suddenly burst into dust if he killed the leader, but what if the leader was giving them signals? Was that dumb?

He stared into Jenny’s eyes. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I just…I don’t know.”

“I’ll be right back,” Randall said. “I’ll kill him. If it doesn’t do anything…well, he should be killed anyway, before he kills somebody else. Barricade yourself and the kids in here as well as you can. Here, I’ll trade you.” He handed her the bloody hatchet, took back his chainsaw, and turned to go.

“Randall!”

He stopped. He’d never heard Jenny so upset before. When he turned and looked at her, she seemed close to tears.

“I need you here. Please don’t leave me.”

She held out her hand to him. He took it, the warmth of her touch penetrating his rough, calloused hands and working its way through his whole body.

I need you here…

Did she have any idea what those words meant to him? He felt the start of tears. He blinked them back and managed to speak around the lump in his throat.

“Okay. I’ll stay.”

Clayton Theel

DAMN hospital.

Clayton Theel, Jr. tossed his cell phone on the passenger seat as he pulled out of the Gulf station. He’d been filling up his Suburban—a feat that required a small business loan at current prices—and had missed Shanna’s call. His return call had hit instant voicemail. She had her phone off.

Sure, he’d pick her up at the hospital. Jenny too. Not a problem. But her voice had sounded a little funny. Prolly just a woman thing. Never knew how they’d react to something.

He dug the little cube box out of his pocket. He flipped up the top and checked out the diamond sparkle. He did know how she’d react when he handed her this and asked her to marry him.

Then again, maybe he didn’t know. Maybe she’d think it was too soon. They’d known each other only six weeks, true, but he had no doubt in his mind that she was the one. And he knew he was right for her. In all the schools she’d gone to, she’d probably never met a man like him. Just wimpy brainiacs and stuffy professors. She dug him almost as much as he dug her. Almost, because no one could be as crazy for anyone as he was for her.

She might say it was too soon, that he was rushing things, and maybe he was, but he wanted her to know that this wasn’t any fly-by-night relationship for him, wanted her to know he was committed. He’d wait. It was only a matter of time.

All that sparkle had cost him a bundle, but nothing was too good for—

His phone rang. He snatched it up and said, “Hello, darlin’.”

“Why, Clay! I didn’t know you cared!”

He winced as he recognized the male voice.

“Sorry, sheriff. Thought it was—”

“Someone else?” the sheriff said, laughing. “After I gave myself to you?”

Clay laughed too, despite his discomfort. Sheriff Seward was a good guy, but this stuff wasn’t all that funny.

“What’s up, boss?”

“Got a situation.”

Crap. He wasn’t going to call him in, was he? Clay had been planning this weekend, at least the gun-show part of it, for a loooong time. And looking forward to it even more with Shanna coming along. He needed this weekend.

“What’s up?”

“Got a train off the track and on its side, flat across the highway, but we’re handling that.”

Good, good. So far, so good.

“But I got a funny call from the hospital.”

Clay’s neck muscles bunched. Shanna was at the hospital.

“Funny how?”

“You know that tight-ass, his-shit-don’t-stink ER doc—?”

“Lanz?”

“Yeah, him. Well, he calls with some story about being terrorized by a monster running loose in the hospital. We’re all tied up here, so I was wondering—I mean, I know it’s your weekend off, but—”

“I’ll go take a look right now.”

A pause on the other end, surprise most likely. “You will?”

“Not a problem. Can’t have monsters running around Blessed Crucifixion, can we? I’ll check it out and call you back.”

No need to tell the sheriff he was headed there anyway.

“That’s damn white of you, Clay. I won’t forget this.”

Clay forced a casual laugh. “Damn right, you won’t. I won’t let you.”

The sheriff hung up laughing. Clay hit END and frowned. A monster at the hospital? What kind of crap was that? Was Lanz on drugs? Well, drugs or for-real monster, didn’t matter. Shanna could be in danger.

He stomped the gas.

An ambulance sat outside the ER entrance, lights flashing, rear doors open. Clay pulled his Suburban in beside it, popped the glove compartment, and removed his Glock 23. As he stepped out, he stuck it in the waistband of his jeans at the small of his back. He was out of uniform and didn’t want to freak anyone by going in hot.

He didn’t have to rack the slide because he always kept a round chambered. An empty chamber was worse than useless, it was just plain stupid. He’d filled its extended mag to the brim with .40 caliber, 180-grain Hydra-Shok hollow points.

Enough to stop any “monster.”

As he stepped toward the two-stage entrance, he saw someone in a hospital security uniform standing with his back to the inner doors. The outer motion detector caught his approach and opened one of the doors. The guard turned and Clay froze.

His face. He was wearing some sort of Halloween mask, except Halloween was a long way off. The blood and most of the mask looked pretty damn realistic, but the teeth didn’t work—too big, too many of them. Just plain unreal.

Then it opened its impossible jaws and wiggled its tongue as it hissed at him.

That was no mask.

…some story about being terrorized by a monster running loose in the hospital…

This was the monster.

It charged him, talons extended.

Clay backpedaled and pulled the Glock.

“Stop! Stop right there!”

If the thing heard him, it gave no sign. In fact it seemed to increase its speed.

Clay raised the Glock in the official two-handed grip as it burst from the entrance.

“Last warning or—!”

Those claws…too close. Clay squeezed the trigger three times and put three .40-caliber Hydra-Shoks into its center of mass. The impacts spun it 180 to the left, but it stayed up—staggering, but still on its feet despite the three gaping exit wounds in its back.

How was it standing? Those Hydra-Shoks with the little center post in the hollow expanded like mad. Its lungs and maybe its heart had to be confetti.

It staggered in a circle, completing another 180, then started for Clay again.

What the hell?

Clay went for the head this time. Three more straight into the face. He saw blood and brains form a crimson halo behind it as the head snapped back. It went down like a felled tree, arms spread like branches, to land flat on its back.

Clay watched it for a few seconds. When it didn’t move, he stepped up for a closer look.

“Jesus.”

One round had entered through its fangs, snapping off half a dozen of them. One through the nose, and the third through the left eye. He’d never seen anything like this thing. One ugly mother.

With the toe of his boot he flipped it over. The back of its skull was gone, the brain pan pretty much empty.

Well, Lanz hadn’t been exaggerating about a monster terrorizing the hospital, but now it was a dead monster. He hoped to hell Shanna was all right.

Clay was just about to turn away when he thought he spotted movement. He turned back and saw the creature slipping an arm under itself, trying to rise.

“You gotta be shittin’ me!”

He pumped two more rounds into the back of its neck, all but severing the head from its body.

It slumped and lay still. Clay watched a full half minute to make sure it stayed down and still. It did, so he turned and hurried toward the entrance.

He didn’t know what he’d just killed, didn’t much care. Worry about that later. His only thought right now was Shanna…if that thing had hurt Shanna he’d—

What? Nothing much left to do to it except dowse it with gas and set it on fire.

He increased his pace to a fast trot. The doors slid open…

And he entered hell.

Blood everywhere—everywhere. An EMT on the floor with his throat ripped out, a patient on the stretcher, likewise, and another EMT with her face ripped off and her throat torn open.

Had that monster done all this?

Jesus, where was Shanna?

And then movement to his right as a bloodsoaked nurse charged him from a side room, and she had the same goddamn teeth as the EMT outside, the same claws, and the same maniacal look in her black eyes.

No warning this time. He put three slugs into her face, knocking her back, brains and blood and skull and scalp splattering the wall behind her. For insurance, he put two more through her already ruined throat into her spine.

He did a quick 360 with his Glock extended. More bodies—a couple in softball uniforms on a floor awash with blood. But all quiet.

What the fuck?

Back to the nurse. Her bloody name tag read Rodriguez. Her throat had already been torn open when he first saw her. She should have been dead—as dead as she was now—but she’d been on her feet, charging.

What was going on here?

A noise. A hiss. He wheeled.

A guy in a Blessed Crucifixion security uniform was getting off the floor. Clay knew most of the guards but no way he could identify him: he had those same fangs, those same eyes, those same talons.

Clay emptied the Glock into his face, putting him down.

Out of ammo. Not good. He had a feeling there were more of these things. As if to confirm his worst fear, a second security guard started hissing and twitching on the floor as giant fangs began to shred his face.

Shit.

He was going to need a bigger gun.

Not a problem.

Stacie Murray

LABOR.

Hour eight.

Still three centimeters.

Was this baby ever going to come?

And where was Adam? He’d gone to find a nurse five minutes ago when no one had responded to the NURSE CALL button. This hospital wasn’t that—

A series of distant explosions broke the silence of the maternity wing—balloons popping several floors below. Probably some clown or candy striper entertaining the sick kids in Pediatrics. She started to pray for the umpteenth time that their child would be healthy, but the pain stopped her.

Stacie turned over onto her side and groaned.

Here it came, that vise in her belly, and she was really having to breathe through this one—more intense than the last, and it had come faster, too, by almost a minute. Maybe she was finally progressing. Her obstetrician, Doctor Galbraith, had already warned her that if she wasn’t at least eight centimeters dilated by midnight he’d have to perform a cesarean section. It got her emotional just thinking about it. She wanted a vaginal birth, not some doctor sawing her stomach open so he could rush home.

Her uterus relaxed. According to Nurse Herrick, these were still mild contractions, and honestly, that scared Stacie more than anything. Her birth-plan hadn’t included having an epidural. She didn’t want to be drugged for this experience, wanted her mind and body present for every moment, wanted to feel her first child coming out of her, hear those first cries with a lucid mind. But she didn’t know if she could take much more pain than this.

She heard footsteps approaching.

Adam appeared in the doorway, still wearing his black dress shirt and clerical collar. It didn’t exactly match his blue jeans and black Justin boots, but then again, Durango was hardly the epicenter of fashion, especially for a young Lutheran minister. They’d rushed straight to the hospital from the Sunday morning service when her water had broken during communion.

“You all right, honey?” he asked.

She nodded. “I just had another contraction.”

“Stronger?”

“Little bit.”

He came around and sat down beside her on the bed.

“Rub my back?” she said.

“Of course.”

His fingers went to work on her lower back, her muscles tighter than steel suspension cables.

“You find the nurse?” Stacie asked.

“Yeah, but just as she was stepping onto the elevator.”

Stacie stared into her husband’s face—smooth-shaven, still carrying a little baby fat that made him look younger than his thirty-two years. Kind, deep eyes that made him seem wiser. Listening eyes, she called them, and in this moment, she had the feeling they were holding something back from her.

“What aren’t you telling me?” Stacie asked.

“Nothing. Everything’s fine, Stace. You just focus on—”

“Adam…what’s wrong?”

“Nothing for you to worry about. I guess there was some disturbance down in the emergency room, and Nurse Herrick was called down to—”

“What kind of disturbance?”

“I don’t know. She said she’d be right back.”

Stacie thought about the balloons she’d heard popping several minutes ago.

What if…?

No. Adam was right. She had one thing and one thing only to focus on—getting this baby out.

“Tell me what you need, darling,” Adam said, touching the back of his hand to her forehead, which had broken out in tiny beads of sweat.

Stacie smiled. “I’m really thirsty.”

“But you can’t have water. In case you have to go into surgery.”

“Yeah, but a bucket of ice chips would really hit the spot.”

Adam Murray

SO he hadn’t exactly told Stacie the truth. Not all of it at least. Nurse Herrick had actually been a little more specific—one of the patients in the ER had apparently injured some people and hospital security was involved. She’d also told Adam to stay in the room and keep the door locked, and as soon as he got back with the ice chips, he planned to do just that.

But Stacie didn’t need to know the details. She had plenty on her mind.

He was so proud of her for wanting a natural childbirth. Not that it mattered to him one way or the other, but he thought it showed real bravery on Stacie’s part.

He’d been teary all day thinking about holding his son (or daughter—they’d chosen not to know the sex beforehand) for the first time.

After blowing Stacie a kiss, he closed the door to their room and started down the corridor.

Quiet up here on the third floor in this nine-bed maternity ward, and aside from the door to their room, only one other was closed.

He passed the first, heard a woman moaning inside.

The nurses’ station stood vacant.

Adam took a wrong turn down a short hallway that dead-ended at the OR. The doors were closed, windows dark.

The hall on the other side of the nurses’ station led to a nursery, and across from it, a waiting room and a kitchen.

Both empty.

Adam walked into the kitchen, searched the cabinets until he came to a stack of plastic buckets.

The ice machine hummed in the corner.

As he filled the bucket, he thought he heard those distant pops again over the racket of the falling ice, several floors below.

Back out in the hall, Adam stopped at the big window and peered into the nursery.

Low lit.

None of the glass isolettes was occupied.

His son or daughter would be in there soon.

The doors to the maternity wing swung open and footsteps padded quickly down the hall.

Nurse Herrick emerged around the corner. She was a cute, petite, thirty-something blonde, bit of a cowgirl twang in her voice. He thought he’d seen her at his church before with a seven or eight-year-old boy, but he couldn’t be sure.

Adam called out to her.

She stopped and looked at him.

Something was wrong, very wrong—he could see it in her sheet-white face long before he was close enough to notice the speckles of blood that dotted her pink scrubs.

When he reached her, he put a hand on her shoulder—couldn’t help himself, comforting was engrained into his nature.

“Carla, what’s wrong?”

She shook her head, tears welling.

The ice cracked and settled in his bucket.

“There’s been…some kind of outbreak,” she said softly, almost too evenly. “It started in the ER, and it’s spreading. Fast.”

“What do you mean, ‘outbreak?’“

She finally met his eyes, and in them, he glimpsed real fear. “People are changing. They’re killing each other.”

“Where’s hospital security?”

“Dead.”

Adam quickly turned around. “I have to get Stacie out of here.”

He started down the corridor, but Herrick grabbed his arm and pointed back toward the thick, automatic doors she’d just come though, thirty feet beyond the nurses’ station.

“That’s the only way out, Pastor. You need to understand—the other nurses tried to leave.” Her bottom lip quivered. “They didn’t make it. I didn’t come back up here to help you and Stacie escape. I came back to lock you in, because that’s the only chance we have.”

Oasis

AS the elevator climbed slowly toward the third floor, Oasis felt like her stomach was turning itself inside out.

She bent over, vomiting up a pile of black bile laced with birthday cake into the corner of the elevator car.

She cried out, mewling like a kitten.

The bell dinged as The car lifted past the second level.

She stared at her arm, and an idea occurred to her—both comforting and horrifying.

She was filled with red candy.

Oasis turned her talons over, stared down at the periwinkle veins running like a highway system under the skin of her forearm.

Her teeth would pass so easily through her skin, it probably wouldn’t even hurt. Just a little taste was all she needed. She swore she could smell the blood through her flesh. But what if she loved it too much? What if she didn’t want to stop and kept sucking and sucking and—

The bell dinged.

The elevator doors parted.

Oasis crossed the threshold and stepped onto the third floor.

Two bounding strides brought her around the corner into a long corridor of rooms.

A fat, old nurse in purple scrubs had been torn apart twenty feet ahead. Oasis sprinted toward her and buried her face in the open chest cavity like a dog into a bowl of Alpo, but nothing was left. The body held only the faintest scent of red candy.

Oasis stood, big tears trailing down what was left of her face.

She sulked down the corridor, and had just started to think about eating her own arm again when she saw a sliver of light escaping from a room up ahead.

Even as she approached, she could smell it, and when she pushed the door open with one of her black, scythe-like talons, she let out a sharp, involuntary cry of joy.

Jenny

THERE were seven children and three adults in what was called the playroom—an area with several activity tables, a toy chest, and various dry erase boards and easels for watercolors and crayon masterpieces. Running along the far wall was a room-length window, decorated brightly with finger paint. A crudely-drawn bird caught Jenny’s eye, its oversized head reminding her of one of the creatures.

When she first became a nurse, pediatrics was her favorite ward. Children, even sick children, had a wonderful innocence about them. They were optimists, even when they were scared and facing death sentences. Though she and Randall had tried, Jenny hadn’t become pregnant. If she had, divorcing him would have been so much harder.

She cast a glance at her ex, and saw he was barricading the door they’d entered through, piling chairs and tables against it. Randall…he really seemed to be back to the old Randall. It was almost too much to hope for.

His leg was still bleeding, and Jenny knew she’d have to re-stitch his wound. But first things first. When doing triage, it was important to assess who needed immediate care. She turned her attention back to the sobbing families.

Three of the kids—two boys and a little girl—were sitting with their backs to the window, holding hands. No blood on them, though the boy on the right was bald from chemo. One pre-teen was with an older woman—probably Grandma. They clutched each other tightly, and Jenny wasn’t sure who was consoling whom. Another little boy clung to his mom, whose slack, pale expression was an obvious indicator of shock. The last boy, the eldest of them, knelt next to a man, prostrate on the floor, who was bleeding from a neck injury.

Jenny set the bloody hatchet on a table next to some coloring books and hurried to them. The blood pooling around the man was significant. The boy—no more than fifteen—was holding a towel to the man’s neck. Before looking at the injury, Jenny checked his radial pulse. The man’s skin was cool, sweaty. His face lacked color. Tachycardia—his heart was beating wildly—accompanied by rapid breathing.

Hypovolemia. Stage three or four.

This man was bleeding to death.

“Help my Dad. Please help him.”

“Can you hear me, sir?”

Glassy eyes. No response.

The man needed a transfusion, but the hospital’s blood bank was in the basement, and even if she made a run for it, and survived the dracula gauntlet, there was no guarantee the man would still be alive by the time she got back.

Jenny hurried to a closet in the corner of the room, the door decorated with crayon pictures. Inside were supplies. No blood, but a saline IV that would help restore some blood volume, oxygen, noradrenaline…

Her finger attacked the keypad over the lock, punching in the four digit code by memory.

A red light came on, and an unpleasant raspberry buzz indicating she’d gotten it wrong.

She tried it again, slower this time.

Another raspberry. They had changed the code. Son of a—

“Lady, can you help me find my mommy?”

Jenny stared down at the little girl tugging on her uniform. Then she cast a frantic glance around for Randall, who was barricading the second entrance.

“Randall! I need to get this door open!”

His head cocked up at the sound of her voice, and after tossing another chair onto the pile he limped over, pulling a screwdriver off of his tool belt.

“Dad! DAD!”

Jenny stared back at the bleeding man, but even at that distance she could see his chest was no longer moving.

“Got it!” Randall had jammed his screwdriver into the door jamb and popped the lock.

But it was too late. Even if Jenny tried CPR, the man had lost too much blood, and his wound was still open.

She walked to the teen, put a hand on his shoulder, and then he hugged her legs, squeezing them hard as he cried.

“Ah, shit,” Randall said, noticing the dead man.

Jenny tousled the boy’s hair, then motioned for her husband to come over.

“You need to clear a path to one of the doors, so we can drag this man out of here, before he turns into…”

Her voice trailed off, but Randall got the point, limping back to the barricade he’d made. Jenny helped the boy to his feet.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Peter. Peter Bernacky.”

“Peter, my name is Jenny. I’m very sorry about your dad. We’re going to put him in another part of the hospital.”

“He’s…dead…”

“I know he’s dead. But I need you to be strong for me. See those little kids sitting by the window? They’re really scared right now. Can you help me try to calm them down?”

Peter nodded, and Jenny took his hand and led him to the two boys huddling together, crying hysterically. Peter knelt next to them, his face a mask of tears, and dragged over a toy fire truck. Jenny watched as he tried to engage the younger children, and had to turn away because she felt her own tears coming.

“Please help me find my mommy. One of the monsters took her away.” The little girl was tugging on her uniform.

“I’ll help in a second, sweetie. But first I need to help Randall. I’ll just be a second.”

Her husband had pushed aside the pile of chairs, returning access to the door. Checking to make sure Peter wasn’t watching, she wrapped her hands around his father’s collar and began to drag him toward the exit. He was a man of average size, but the blood loss not only made him lighter, but functioned as a lubricant. She managed to get him three quarters of the way there by herself, and then Randall joined her.

They tugged the dead man into the hall, outside the picture window.

“We can’t leave him here,” Jenny said. “Peter can still see him.”

“We’ll take him around the corner. He won’t be able to—”

“Mommy!”

The little girl sprinted past, beelining down the hall.

Jenny automatically sprang up to run after her, but her husband’s strong arm wrapped around her waist, holding her back.

“I’ve got to get her, Randall.”

“I’ll get her. You’re staying here.”

“Randall…”

Randall shoved her back into the room, then limped off after the child.

Damn him. He probably won’t even be able to catch her with that bad leg.

What a stupid, stubborn, selfless fool.

“Randall!” she called out after he rounded the corner. “Be careful! I…”

She almost said I love you, but stopped herself. Old habits die hard. Though, if she were forced to tell the truth in a court of law, Jenny still did love the hopeless dope.

Staring down the hallway, she wondered if she should have just said it.

Wondered if she’d ever get another chance.

Squeak…

Squeak…

Squeak…

It was such a familiar sound. Jenny could swear she’d heard it before. Just a little while ago.

What could it be?

Then Jenny remembered.

Benny the Clown’s shoes.

She took a fearful look behind her and saw him standing at the other end of the hallway. Just standing there, watching her, his clown outfit drenched in gore. The dracula teeth had broken through his lips and cheeks. But, incredibly, he still wore the red clown nose and the fright wig.

Squeaksqueaksqueaksqueaksqueak!

The clown sprinted at her, its hands outstretched, talons wiggling. Jenny barely had time to scoot back when it pounced—

—on Peter’s dead father. Benny the Clown’s fangs tore into the corpse’s throat, and it shook its head like a dog and pulled away, stretching out the carotid artery as if it were a long string of spaghetti. Jenny managed to get to her feet. Then she danced around Benny the Clown and sprinted toward the playroom. Slamming the door after her, she got behind the nearest table and braced it up against the entrance.

“Help me! Everyone, help!”

Peter and one of the boys began to stack chairs against the door. The others watched through the picture window as Benny the Clown feasted. The woman—the one Jenny guessed was in shock—had locked her eyes on the spectacle. They widened abruptly, and the woman began to scream.

When the door was as secure as Randall had had it, Jenny told Peter and the one boy to sit on the other side of the room and look away. Then she rushed to the screaming woman.

“Miss, you need to be quiet. You’re upsetting the—”

“What is that terrible clown doing?” the Grandmother cried.

Jenny forced herself to look. Benny the Clown had torn open the man’s abdominal cavity, his claws cradling several loops of glistening intestines. But rather than gorging on them, the clown was stretching and pulling the bloody loops, twisting the organ into knots.

Familiar knots.

“Is that…a flamingo?” asked the old woman.

Jenny couldn’t answer. She stared, slack-jawed, as Benny the Clown continued to make balloon animals out of that poor man’s innards.

One of the boys passed out.

The screaming woman passed out.

The old woman threw up, her dentures plopping into the puddle of puke.

Besides the flamingo, Benny the Clown also created a wiener dog, a giraffe, and what could have been either a lion or a poodle—some animal with a poofy mane. Jenny summoned up her last bit of courage and rushed the window, banging her palm on the glass.

“Get away from here! Get away from us, you fucking evil clown!”

Benny stared at Jenny. Stared without moving. Without making a sound. Jenny saw cunning, there. Cunning, and the same kind of cold, watchful malevolence that alligators had.

Then Benny the Clown reached up and squeezed his red nose, the fake flower on his chest squirting blood on the window, blurring Jenny’s view.

A moment later, the clown was gone, his oversized shoes squeak-squeaking down the hallway…

In the same direction Randall went.

Lanz

HE couldn’t get enough of the blood.

It had the same punch as coke. The same rush as an orgasm. The same high as morphine. The same satisfaction as a huge meal when starving. All wrapped up in one overwhelming sensation that made Lanz’s eyes roll up and his body quiver in absolute fucking ecstasy.

But the feeling didn’t last. The moment the blood ran out, so did the jolt. And in its place was a longing, an ache. That ache became painful after just a few minutes, and the pain turned into crippling, mind-searing agony, getting worse and worse until more blood was consumed.

The part of Lanz’s brain that still had some higher functioning recognized the symptoms of addiction, but also knew this was something more. He’d become a higher life form. Sharper vision and hearing, a sense of smell so powerful he could detect a drop of blood from a hundred meters away, faster reflexes, accelerated healing power, abnormal strength.

But unlike the other infected, who seemed to be operating at a reduced mental capacity, Lanz still had some reasoning powers, and some memory of his previous life. He realized this could have been due to the locus of the disease. The others were all infected intravenously, the agent making direct contact with their bloodstream. Lanz had ingested contaminated blood. This could have resulted in a different variation of the infection. Different transmission meant different symptoms.

Medicine certainly had precedents for this. Yersina pestis—known as the black plague—was a bacteria that could infect a host in three entirely different ways, and cause different symptoms as a result. Perhaps this dracula bug was similar.

Or perhaps Lanz’s strong will and extraordinary intelligence were too much for the bug to cope with.

Either way, Lanz felt like the proverbial one-eyed man in the land of the blind. While other creatures ran around, blithely attacking anything that moved—people, each other, and even themselves if the blood urge became strong enough—Lanz could still use his cognitive faculties.

As the disease spread, turning more humans into creatures, Lanz decided competition for blood was getting too fierce. But he knew of a good source. A source that would be like picking low-hanging fruit from a tree.

Pediatrics.

Children would be easy to catch, and not put up much of a fight. Plus, there was an added bonus.

That bitch nurse, Jenny, had said she was headed to the pediatric ward.

Lanz would enjoy tearing her sanctimonious throat out.

He’d enjoy it quite a bit.

Grammy Ann

SHE’D fought a long and valiant battle against the diabetes, but it had finally claimed her right foot, the infection spreading into her blood, sepsis hours from killing her before the amputation.

Now she rested peacefully in a morphine slumber.

Fresh, clean blood flowing into her body and dreaming of a picnic she’d had just last summer up at Vallecito Lake, her two sons with her, and their children, the apples of her eye—six-year-old Benjamin, and eight-year-old Vicki playing by the shore. Grandchildren. Was there anything better? They were like your kids, but without the hassles. A perfect relationship, a dynamic where everybody won.

A crack ran through her dream like a fracture through glass, and she could feel herself tumbling out of it, the phantom pain in her right foot spoiling the memory.

She opened her eyes, but she must have still been sleeping because what she saw made about as much sense as a nightmare.

A little girl who looked to be the same age as her precious Vicki was standing at her bedside with her back turned, sucking down the chilled contents of the blood bag through the needle that had been attached to her left forearm.

It was an image that simply didn’t compute, and because of this, she was certain she was dreaming, but God, it felt so real, especially the pain in her right foot, or rather, where her right foot had been. Maybe if she tried to speak, to engage the little girl, it would shatter the illusion of the dream and she would wake.

“Excuse me. Little girl?”

The little girl didn’t answer or even move. Grammy Ann eyed the blood bag, watching the level of the dark liquid quickly lowering.

“Little girl?”

Then there was only a sucking noise, like slurping down the dregs of a cup of soda.

“Little girl?”

The girl let go of the clear, plastic tube and turned around.

Grammy Ann recoiled, the beeping of the heart monitor accelerating.

Oh God, that face!

This was a nightmare. It had to be. Those black eyes, the shredded cheeks, the long, terrible teeth, shellacked with blood.

She reached for the NURSE CALL, her thumb punching the button over and over.

It happened so fast, the movement was catlike—the little girl leapt off the floor and came down on Grammy Ann’s chest, blood running down her chin.

Her head tilted, and her lips moved, an awful noise coming out of them that sounded like a question in some demonic language.

Grammy Ann screamed, “Nurse!”

Oasis

“CAN I have your red candy?” Oasis asked, and she asked nicely, like the nicest she’d ever asked for anything, but the old woman only screamed.

She would have been gentle, or tried at least, but the screaming hurt her ears, and so she lunged into the woman’s neck, and the screaming got louder, the woman pulling her hair now, and she was strong.

It wasn’t fair!

The old woman jerked Oasis’s head back before she could dig in, and hit her in the cheek.

Oasis roared and swiped one of her talons at the woman’s face, but it missed and sliced across her neck instead, and suddenly—

Red candy everywhere!

—and the old woman still flailing and thrashing but the smell and taste of the red candy drew Oasis in and she was at the woman’s neck again, biting, tearing, sucking, the blows still coming, but slower and softer, and the screams dissipating, and then the old woman lay still, and Oasis didn’t have to struggle anymore.

Instead, she just curled up beside the old woman, whose arm was around Oasis, and, come to think of it, it reminded her of her Grandma Betsy, and it was just like those times when she stayed at Grandma’s house and Grandma would read a book to her before bedtime, except instead of cozying up with a book, it was cozying up with that delicious red candy running out of Grandma’s neck, right down into Oasis’s throat in a steady stream, and she lay with the old woman in her bed for five minutes, until the last of her candy was gone.

Stacie

ADAM walked into the room and locked the door after him.

He sat down on the bed, offered her a shard of ice.

“How you feeling?” he asked.

“Gigantic,” she said.

“Stop it, you’ve never been more beautiful.”

The water felt so good sliding down her throat, despite the micron-size portion.

“You just locked the door,” she said. “What’s that about?”

“Just hospital procedure when there’s a disturbance. Nurse Herrick came back. Do you need anything else?”

“I’m all right for now.”

Stacie thought he seemed distracted, and she was about to ask him what was wrong, but he was already up again, heading toward the door.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m thirsty now.” He smiled, but there was anxiety in his eyes. She’d seen this before—his strong face. Hiding pain with a smile. God forbid anyone ever think a minister could have a hard day, a sleepless night.

“They had some apple juice in the Fridge,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

Adam

ADAM came up behind Nurse Herrick at the entrance to the maternity ward. The double doors were closed, and she was kneeling, fighting to slide a lock into the floor.

He stepped up to one of the small, square windows at eye level and stared down the corridor on the other side of the door.

Empty.

Nothing moving.

Linoleum floor shining dully under the ceiling panels of fluorescent light.

“Please don’t mention this to my wife.”

“You haven’t told her anything?”

“Just that there was a disturbance and we’re on a mandatory lockdown. Have you informed the other patients on the wing?”

“Yes. Well, sort of. I told them there was an outbreak in the ER, and we all have to stay put until help arrives.”

“How many in this wing at the moment?”

“I have a single mother who’s alone in her room.”

“So it’s only the four of us?”

“Yes.”

Adam pushed the deadbolts up into the ceiling and glanced once more out the window before turning to Nurse Herrick.

“Can you deliver our baby?” he asked. “If the time comes and there’s no doctor?”

“Yes.” She wiped her eyes, crying again. “I’m sorry.” Her hands had begun to shake.

“What exactly did you see down there, Carla?”

“I can’t…”

“Do you want me to pray with you?”

She nodded, and Adam took her hands in his, had just opened his mouth when a scream came rushing up the corridor beyond the doors.

It didn’t sound human.

Felt like someone had run a cold finger down Adam’s spine and he took an involuntary step back.

“What’s out there, Carla?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can these doors stop it?”

“I don’t know.”

A thunderous succession of gunshots splintered the silence several floors below.

Adam stepped toward the window in the door.

The view through the single square foot of glass was of a long corridor that extended for a hundred and fifty feet to a sitting area.

One of the fluorescent lights halfway down had begun to flicker.

A figure appeared at the far end, turned the corner, and sprinted up the corridor toward the double doors—a woman in black scrubs and white tennis shoes, her curly brown hair pulled back in a scrunchie.

Adam could hear her crying and gasping, and she’d covered twenty strides when three others ripped around the corner in pursuit, chasing her, fast and low to the ground like pit bulls.

Carla whispered, “Oh God, that’s Pam from Radiology.”

Three seconds, and they were upon her, bringing her down in a violent tackle under that flickering light, the woman screaming, pleading for them to stop.

“We have to help her,” Adam said, reaching up to retract the top lock.

The nurse grabbed his arm.

“There’s nothing we can do.”

And they stood watching through the windows as two of the creatures held Pam from radiology down while a third swiped a bone-white talon through her jugular.

A stream of dark blood rushed out across the floor and they screeched and descended upon it, lapping it up off the linoleum with a ravenous intensity as their prey’s twitches became more sluggish.

“Dear God in heaven,” Adam said.

The creatures fastidiously sucked up every drop of blood, their long, black tongues digging into the crevices between linoleum tiles.

They had human hair and human clothes, but there the similarity ended, their faces literally exploding with prehistorically savage teeth and their hands deformed into talon-like claws.

The blood was gone, like someone had spit-shined the linoleum to a high-gloss sheen, and then one of the creatures looked up, down the length of the corridor toward the maternity wing.

Adam grabbed Carla’s arm, pulled her down.

Too late—footsteps already on the way, claws clicking across the floor.

Adam and Carla plastered themselves against the door as something bumped against the other side.

Adam craned his neck and looked up, saw a nightmare face peering through the window.

He whispered under his breath, The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not—

Something crashed into the door, set the bolts rattling in their housings.

Five seconds elapsed.

Adam’s heart slamming in his chest.

It came again—twice as hard, enough force to jar them both onto the floor.

Adam reached into his shirt, came suddenly to his feet, knees like jelly, but he spun around, despite the fear, and held up a small gold cross his father had given him on the day he’d graduated from seminary.

The monster running toward the door pulled up short two inches from the glass.

Its head tilted to the side—a fleeting moment of curiosity as its breath fogged the bloodied window.

Adam pressed the cross against the glass and spoke with as much authority as he could muster, “By the power of Jesus Christ—”

The talon that punched through came within a half-second of driving into Adam’s eye socket, but he parried out of the way, the thing screaming now, trying to climb through the square foot opening, jagged glass slicing into its head, but the moment the blood began to flow, the creature was sucked back out of the window.

The two others ripped it apart amid a chorus of screams, took less than a minute for them to fully exsanguinate the creature.

When they’d finished, they crouched motionless for a moment, as if briefly at peace with the glut of blood filling their stomachs.

One of them turned and looked at Adam and Carla. It stood, then ambled over, stopping ten feet away. It wore a knee-length, floral-print dress, its blond hair still pinned up with silver barrettes.

Adam realized its black eyes weren’t looking at them. They were studying the doors, the locking mechanisms.

At length, it turned away from them, cried out to its companion, and the two monsters loped back down the corridor.

Adam looked over at Carla when they had disappeared around the corner at the far end.

“We have to barricade this door.”

He turned to head back toward the nurses’ station, but stopped in his tracks.

Stacie stood twenty feet away in her hospital gown, hands cupped around her enormous belly, a look of pure horror on her face.

Clay

“SHERIFF, Lanz wasn’t kidding. There’s a bunch of monsters in the hospital.”

He stood by the open rear of his Suburban with his cell pressed against his ear. He’d thought a few moments before making the call. Decided not to say that formerly normal people were turning into those monsters. First he had to get the sheriff on board with the simple existence of the monsters.

“Okay, Clay,” the sheriff said. “I know it’s your weekend off, so it’s okay if you started drinking early, but—”

“Sheriff, I just blew three heads off. And they were not—I repeat, not human heads. The ER looks like a slaughterhouse and Lanz is nowhere in sight.”

“Not even a nurse around?”

“Not a live one.”

“Where’s hospital security?”

“Dead.”

He decided not to mention that he was the cause of their passing.

A long silence on the other end, then, “You’re not shittin’ me? You better not be shittin’ me, Clay.”

“I’m telling you I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. I think you need the National Guard, or staties at the very least.”

“No staties.”

Clay clenched his teeth. This was no time to get territorial. Something was going on. He was sure that nurse hadn’t shown up for work looking like that. He’d seen enough vampire and zombie movies to know that if you get bit you turn into one. That seemed to be what was happening here. And that meant more monsters were running loose inside—with Shanna.

Shit, what if she got herself bit?

“Sheriff, just send help, okay?”

“I’ll free up somebody—”

“Somebody?” he shouted. “We don’t need somebody, we need a fucking platoon—a full company. The people in that hospital are in deep shit, sheriff. You send in the troops. You send in the fucking cavalry!”

“Okay, okay. I’ll call in the staties. But this better be worth it. I’m trusting you, Clay. Meanwhile, you’ll stay?”

“Not a problem.”

“I love when you say that. Just hang around outside until—”

“That will be a problem, sir.”

“What do you mean?”

“Shanna’s inside.”

“Oh, shit. Just wait where you are and—”

“I’m going back in.”

“Wait—”

“Bye, sir.”

He ended the call and slipped the duffel bag’s strap onto his shoulder.

The bag weighed a freaking ton. Clay could feel his collarbone bending under its weight as he walked toward the ER. Well, why not? It held just about everything he’d been working on since last year’s show—all his new pieces and the ones he’d been modifying. They’d been on their way to the Denver convention where he’d planned to show them off and demo a few. Now it looked like he was going to have to put some of them to use.

He had to admit he was excited about this. No, scratch that—he was ecstatic. He had murderous, blood-thirsty monsters to fight. He could throw anything he wanted at them and it was all good. If only Shanna were back home and out of harm’s way, this would be perfect. This had a gun show beat to shit.

He had an old friend and a new piece out and ready. His lovely lady, Alice, the nickel-plated Taurus Raging Bull .454 Casull revolver he’d owned for years, was loaded with Cor-Bon 300-grain JSP flat heads. The .454 Casull could take down a cape buffalo. These babies had a muzzle speed of 1800 feet per second and kicked like the devil himself. He stashed Alice in his belt.

In hand was the newbie, an AA-12 automatic shotgun. Its drum was loaded with thirty-two three-and-a-half inch twelve-gauge shells loaded with #2 titanium alloy shot. He could shoot one round at a time or hold down the trigger and fire at a rate of 300 per minute. A true street sweeper.

It might have to become an ER sweeper.

He stopped inside the doors and looked around. Everything seemed quiet and still—no, wait…

The patient on the stretcher, an elderly, gray-haired woman, was writhing under the safety straps, hissing and spitting teeth. Shit, where were the two EMTs who’d been dead on the floor a few minutes ago?

Suddenly the patient sat up, ripping through the straps. Clay watched, fascinated, as those unreal teeth shredded her wrinkled lips. He hesitated. A little old lady…someone’s granma. But as the teeth sprouted further and talons popped out of her fingertips, he realized this lady would eat her grandchildren without a second thought.

Holding the AA-12 chest high with the stock clamped under his arm, he let fly a round. The number-two shot took off most of her face and slammed her back on the stretcher.

“That’s what I’m talkin’ about!”

But then she began to rise again.

“Crap!”

His second shot knocked her flat again and left only her lower jaw hanging, swinging from one hinge. This time she was down to stay.

“Sorry, granma”—and he truly was—”but you weren’t granma anymore.”

His ears were ringing from the loud reports. He always wore ear protectors on the range and had a set in the duffel, but didn’t dare wear them now. He needed to hear these things coming. The racket must have attracted attention. A bloody blond guy in a softball uniform was stumbling toward him with only half the usual complement of talons because he had only half a left arm.

Took two head shots to stop him.

And then a second softball player—bearded with a black eye—lurched around the corner and charged him. He took three rounds.

Toughest damn sonsabitches to kill. He had only 25 shells left in the AA-12’s drum and it was taking two or three shots each to put these monsters down. He hoped there weren’t too many more. He’d brought a shitload of ammo, but not an endless supply.

But what a weapon. He was firing major shot with barely any recoil.

He scoured the ER—all the treatment areas and the wide-open supply room. All clear. He could move on. But how was he going to locate Shanna? He checked his cell and got no service. The in-house lines were useless if he didn’t know what extension she was near.

He moved toward the doors to the hospital proper but stopped just before he pushed through. Anything could be waiting on the other side—a whole army of monsters.

He placed his duffel on the nurse’s station counter, then stepped back toward the entrance where he grabbed granma’s stretcher. He got behind it and started pushing it toward the door. Hard to get traction in the congealing blood all over the floor but he wheeled through it and had built up decent speed when he rammed it through the double doors.

All hell broke loose.

Half a dozen monsters leaped onto the stretcher, tearing at its occupant in a wild, hissing frenzy that lasted all of maybe twenty seconds. They soon realized she was dead and looked around for a new victim.

Clay was already backpedaling when they spotted him. They charged and bunched up at the doorway on either side of the stretcher, elbowing and clawing at each other to be first through. This slowed them—not much, but enough to let Clay put some distance between him and them. He set his feet and raised the AA-12 to his shoulder. He sighted down the barrel, pulled the trigger, and kept it pulled.

The AA-12 went to full auto then, firing five rounds a second. He sprayed back and forth, two quick passes, left and right at first, and then more deliberate, aiming for the heads, watching them explode. The drum emptied quickly, but during those five seconds he shredded those monsters, all six of them. They went down and stayed down, leaving the doors, the walls, the ceiling, the stretcher dripping blood and brains.

He’d done it. Wiped them out. All of them.

Well, all except one. A guy in a torn-up bloody suit with the back of his head gone was trying to crawl toward him.

Clay watched him and couldn’t resist: “I know what you’re thinking. ‘Did he fire thirty-two shots or only thirty-one?’ Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself.’ “

He was reaching for the Taurus when two more of the damn things appeared in the doorway and charged him.

“Shit!”

Not trusting a hurried shot with the kind of kick a Casull delivered, Clay turned and ran for the supply room. Slipped and almost went down as he tried to grab his duffel from the counter. Missed the handle but kept on going. They were right on his tail. He could hear their hissing, could almost feel their talons slashing the air at the nape of his neck.

How many of these things were there? Had the whole hospital turned? Weren’t there any humans left?

What about Shanna?

He ducked into the supply room and whipped the door closed behind him. Almost closed. One of the things managed to shove its hand through. The door caught its wrist. Clay heard bones crunch as he threw his weight against the door. More weight hit from the other side, pushing it open a few more inches.

Needed a wedge, or something to block it. A metal shelf behind him. He grabbed it and pulled it toward him. He ducked aside as it crashed against the door, sending bandages and bottles of disinfectant smashing to the floor—but not before the thing shoved its arm and shoulder through.

Clay stayed out of reach of the slashing talons as the thing gnashed its awful teeth and hissed. It wore a jacket with the emblem of the ambulance outside. One of the formerly dead EMTs. He saw a second one right behind it, trying to push its pal through the opening. That gave him in idea.

He pulled out Alice. Only half a dozen rounds in the Raging Bull, but they were .454 Casulls. He aimed between the eyes of the lead monster and squeezed off a round. The report was like a punch in this small room, and the kick damn near sprained his wrist, but when he looked, the doorway was empty. Cautiously, he peeked through and saw both monsters on the ground, both with holes through their foreheads and enormous exit wounds.

“A two-fer! Awriiight, Alice!”

He wished someone was around for a high five, or at least a knuckle bump. So he settled for kissing Alice.

“There’s my good girl. You’re the best.”

Then he noticed the first one twitching.

Aw, not again. He wasn’t going to get up, was he?

No. The twitching stopped and it lay still.

He spotted the phone at the nursing station and had an idea. But first…

He grabbed his duffel from the counter, locked himself in the supply room, and began to reload the AA-12’s drum.

Jenny

“EVERYONE!” Jenny said. “I need everyone’s attention! I want all of us to move away from the window, to the other side of the playroom. Now.”

The hallway—just beyond the room-length finger-painted window—was filled with draculas.

Freakin’ filled.

They’d run up en masse after sounds of firecrackers came from the lower floors. Jenny guessed it hadn’t been fireworks, but rather gunshots. These monsters seemed to have been retreating, but stopped when they’d caught sight of the children through the window.

At least eight of them. Maybe ten. Clawing at the glass, pressing against it, knocking on it. Some smeared blood and bits of gore across the surface, while others fell into line to lick the blood up with spongy, misshapen tongues and thick, ropey strands of saliva. Saliva right out of that movie Randall loved to watch over and over again. Aliens, with Sigourney Weaver.

“You kinda look like Sigourney Weaver,” he’d told her, every time he played that VHS tape. “Cept you got better boobs.”

As the children gathered around her, Jenny wondered where Randall was. She hoped he was okay. She also hoped that once he found the little girl, he wouldn’t try to bring her back here. Too many of those things out there. Even her husband, whom Jenny thought was damn near indestructible, wouldn’t stand a chance.

“Will they break the glass?” Peter asked.

“No,” Jenny answered firmly.

But that’s what she feared, and why she ordered everyone away. The glass was thick—a necessity in the children’s ward—and would be tough to crack bare-handed. These creatures were strong, but so far the glass had resisted their pushing and pounding.

If they did get in, Jenny needed a weapon. Preferably one like Sigourney had in that film. Keeping her eyes on the window, she walked over to the old woman, the one who’d thrown up. The stains on her dentures and fingers were telltale signs of a smoker.

“I need your lighter,” Jenny told her.

The woman didn’t answer. She just stared, wide-eyed, at the window. The draculas continued to knock and pound at the glass. Some bit at it, their teeth leaving scratches with the sound of nails across a chalkboard.

The boy holding the old woman’s hand nudged her. “Grandma, the nurse lady needs your lighter.”

The old woman stared at the child like she had just now realized he was there. Then, without a word, she handed her purse to Jenny. Jenny dug around until she found it; a cheap, plastic disposable brand. She flicked it once, and the flame came on big and bright.

She heard a CRUNCH, followed by squeals of fright from the children. Jenny stared at the window and saw that one of the monsters had picked up an office chair and was bashing it against the glass. Jenny didn’t even need to read the dracula’s nametag on its lab coat to know who it was. She recognized the hair.

Dr. Lanz.

After the second hit, the window spiderwebbed, but stayed intact. It had a plastic safety coating, similar to the one used on car windshields, so children throwing toys wouldn’t get showered with shards.

Lanz tried twice more, but the glass held. His eyes met Jenny’s, and his toothy mouth yawed open, a hiss escaping the crosshatched fangs. He tossed the chair aside and scurried off, probably to look for something bigger to throw at the window.

Moving quickly, Jenny went into the supply closet Randall had gotten open. She immediately zeroed in on a portable oxygen tank. It was the large MM size, brushed aluminum with a painted green top, almost the size of a scuba tank. A good start, but she needed more. Contrary to popular belief, pure oxygen wasn’t flammable.

Luckily, the hospital had something that was very flammable. And it was stored in the same closet as the oxygen.

Jenny walked past the medical supplies to the extra stock for the coffee machine at the nurse’s station. She bypassed the packages of regular and decaf, the filters, and the sugar, and took down a full box of non-dairy creamer. Twelve bottles, 15 oz. of powder per bottle. Enough to set a whole building on fire.

Finally, she found some rubber tubing, a large cannula, and a bottle of rubber cement.

Working quickly, Jenny removed the caps from all twelve creamer bottles. A plastic seal covered the opening, keeping the product fresh. She applied a big dollop of rubber cement to the top of each, and set the box next to the doorway.

Next, she hooked the cannula—a large, metal tube with a pointed tip—up to one end of the hose. After pulling over the oxygen tank on a hand truck, she attached the other end of the hose to the nozzle, and pulled the toggle lever to give it a try. O2 hissed out of the cannula, strong enough to blow her hair back.

“Miss! I need your help,” Jenny said.

But the old woman, like the other adult in the room, appeared to be catatonic.

CRACK!

Dr. Lanz had returned, resuming his assault on the window. But rather than attack it with a chair, he was now wielding a fire extinguisher. It was heavy, compact, and would easily break through the glass in another swing or two.

Jenny patted her pockets, frantic, afraid she’d misplaced the lighter. She found it in her hip pocket.

CRACK!

Jenny studied the lighter, and frowned when she saw it had one of those child-proof locks on it.

CRACK! Some glass tinkled onto the tile floor, a medium-size hole appearing in the window.

“Quickly! Can any of you children operate a child-proof lighter?”

Every child raised their hand.

“Peter!” she said, calling the oldest of them. “Come here!”

CRACK!

The hole was now big enough to crawl through, and one of the draculas got ahead of Lanz and forced itself through the opening, sliding on its belly into the playroom.

“Light the tops like this!” Jenny ordered, bending down and touching the flame to the rubber cement on the first bottle of creamer. It glowed blue, and Jenny picked up the bottle, jabbed the cannula through the plastic bottom, and then pointed it at the creature scrambling on all fours toward her.

“Everyone get back!”

She cranked the nozzle, the compressed air blowing the front off the bottle, showering the dracula with white powder.

A moment later, the powder ignited in a tremendous fireball, the powerful WHUMP! hitting Jenny with a blast of heated air that burned off all the fine little hairs on her arms.

The dracula fared much worse. Every square inch of it was throwing off flames. It twisted around on the floor, slapping at the inferno it had become, oily black smoke swirling up into the air and smelling a lot like bacon cooking.

Bacon, with a hint of artificial vanilla.

Thank you, Mythbusters.

Jenny turned off the oxygen. While non dairy creamer had nothing in it that made it flammable, it was a fine powder, and many powders were ignitable simply because they had such a huge surface area. Flour, sawdust, dust in grain silos—they’d caused countless fires and explosions throughout history. The oxygen worked as an accelerant, and also dispersed the powder so it spread evenly through the air.

“Light the next one, Peter!”

Jenny knocked off the smoking, melted plastic container from the end of the cannula, and jammed on a burning one just as Dr. Lanz flopped into the playroom.

“Now you’re fired, Lanz!” Jenny yelled. Then she hit him with her makeshift flamethrower, dusting the doctor in a cloud of powder.

But at the same time, Lanz had emptied his extinguisher, putting out the flame before it had a chance to ignite the cloud of creamer enveloping him.

Son of a—

Snarling, Dr. Lanz rushed at Jenny, far too quick for her to prep another creamer bottle, his hideous mouth unhinging at the jaw and a look of smug satisfaction in his predatory eyes.

Jenny threw herself backward, Lanz’s claw swiping the air a few inches in front of her face. A cloud of sweet-smelling vanilla non-dairy creamer floated above his head and shoulders, and a ropey line of drool escaped his cage of teeth, dripping down his neck.

“Die, you monster! Die!”

Peter Bernacky, his teenage face defiant, stuck his arm into the dust plume, his hand on the lighter.

“Peter! Don’t—”

The flash blinded Jenny, a wave of superheated air sunburning her face and bare arms, singeing her eyebrows, instantly drying out her mouth.

Both Lanz and Peter instantly burst into flames. Lanz scurried away, still holding the extinguisher, turning it on himself and dousing the fire as he fled back through the hole he’d made in the window.

Peter screamed, but the sound was instantly muffled by the flame entering his lungs. He staggered away from Jenny, arms pin-wheeling, heading straight for the grandmother with the dentures.

She tried to push him back, but Peter wrapped his arms around her, setting her clothes ablaze. They did a burning dance for several steps, then fell over in a tangle of screams and flailing limbs and burning flesh.

The sprinkler finally came on, dousing the pair, and Jenny turned her attention toward the broken window as another dracula climbed through. She charged it with the cannula, pulling it free from the oxygen tank, and spearing the creature through its left eye. The monster hissed, blood and bits of brain matter spraying out of the hollow end, arcing across the playroom, and landing directly in the mouth of the catatonic woman who’d been watching the entire scene unfold with her jaw hanging open.

Children screamed. Flesh sizzled and popped. Jenny cast a frantic look around, seeking a weapon as the dracula flopped through the window, crashing at her feet where he squirmed and undulated like a landed swordfish. Jenny looked up as another dracula snaked into the opening. But rather than attack her, it pounced on the other creature, positioning its mouth over the fountain of blood and tissue pumping through the cannula, and locking its lips around it like a drinking straw.

Jenny spotted the oxygen tank through the steam and hefted it, adrenalin giving her the strength to lift the eighty-plus pounds. She slammed it onto the new intruder’s skull, driving it to the floor, squashing it like a stomped pumpkin. Then she hoisted the tank again and pancaked the monster with the cannula eyestalk.

Another dracula slid in through the window. Then another. They descended upon their fallen comrades, chewing and tearing and lapping up the gore.

We need to get the hell out of here. Now.

“Everyone! Come on!”

There weren’t many left to follow her order. The grandmother was down on the floor, convulsing. The mother was keeled over, throwing up. Most of Peter’s hair had burned off, his eyelids and nose were scorched away, and he was blessedly still. That left five children. Three listened, running to Jenny’s side. The son of the vomiting mother stood there, eyes wide, immobile. The grandson had curled up fetal, hugging his knees into his chest.

“Into the storage closet!” Jenny yelled.

Then she grabbed the shirt collar of the boy on the floor and tugged him away from his grandmother, dragging him to the closet. She turned to go back for the other boy, but more draculas had infiltrated the playroom, and they were tearing through the rest of them like a piranha tornado. Forcing herself to back away from the slaughter, cursing herself for not being able to do more, Jenny grabbed the storage room door and slammed it closed, hoping that whatever Randall had done to open it hadn’t damaged the lock.

She gave it a cautious push, saw that it held, then watched through the small, square window as the creatures turned the playroom into a blood buffet. Horrified, yet fascinated, she couldn’t help but wonder how they could drink so much. She squinted at one of them, gorging until its belly distended to practically bursting, like a pregnancy that had lasted twenty months.

But only seconds after it stopped feeding, its belly began to shrink.

Once again she thought of Randall and his old horror movies. One of his favorites was actually relevant to their current situation. The Killer Shrews, a black and white cheapie infamous for dressing up dogs as the titular rodent monsters. The film’s heroes were trapped in a house, the bloodthirsty shrews everywhere, clawing to get inside and devour them. Like their diminutive counterparts, the shrews had to eat ninety percent of their body weight every day, or else they’d starve—a byproduct of their hyper-metabolism.

Apparently, the draculas also functioned at a highly increased metabolic rate, which explained why Jenny and the others had been able to get to the closet without being slaughtered. These creatures had to eat constantly, and they took the path of least resistance to do so. So they’d leapt upon the dead and dying, the small and weak, even if the injured were other draculas.

Jenny tore herself away from the spectacle and tried to focus on what needed to be done. First, barricade the door. Next, look for weapons. Then attend to the wounded.

But even though she was trained for emergencies, Jenny found herself paralyzed by worry.

Strangely, it wasn’t fear for herself, or the people she was with.

It was for her husband.

Please, please, please, God, let him be okay.

Lanz

DR. Lanz tore at his face, the burned flesh coming off in strips. The pain was unbearable, but not as overwhelming as the heavenly odor of his fried skin. Hunger pangs doubled him over, the agony even worse than the fire damage, and Lanz momentarily lost his self-control and began shoving his own toasted flesh into his mouth, including a walnut-size chunk that was quite possibly his nose.

Jenny.

That bitch nurse Jenny had done this to him. Jumbled as his thoughts were becoming, Lanz could still recall firing her ass. She’d had the audacity to question one of his treatments—right in front of the patient and the other nurses. Granted, he’d been a little coked up at the time and had inadvertently prescribed penicillin to someone who had an allergy, but he couldn’t allow that kind of blatant insubordination. Not in his ER.

The bloody nurses’ union tried to fight him on it, but Lanz had ultimately prevailed by threatening to walk. A bluff, but he knew the hospital needed him more than it needed some know-it-all nurse.

But she’d gotten back at Lanz. She’d burned him good.

No matter. Even as he peeled off his face and neck and shoved them into his toothy maw, he could feel the skin regenerating, regrowing.

I’m invincible. You think you can stop me, Nurse Bolton? I know how to deal with your insubordinate ass.

Gliding down the stairs, Lanz reached the basement. He’d brought Winslow down here a few times, let her blow him near the furnace. Even with the lights off, Lanz’s vision was perfect. Yet another enhancement, courtesy of the virus. He hurried past the boilers, chewing on the charred flesh of his right hand, until he found what he sought.

The circuit breaker.

I can see in the dark, Nurse Bolton. Can you?

Randall

“HEY, kid!” Randall shouted. “Little girl!”

Crap! He limped down the hallway after her, cursing silently with each step. He couldn’t blame a five-year-old kid for freaking out, and yet…okay, maybe he could. She was going to get both of them killed. If his leg wasn’t so messed up he could’ve scooped her up in about three seconds, but she was already halfway down the hall, sobbing and screaming as she ran.

“Little girl!” he repeated, trying to use his friendliest tone of voice. “It’s going to be okay! I can keep you safe!” Also, little girl, there’s a Santa Claus and an Easter Bunny and a Tooth Fairy.

He wasn’t going to let her get eaten. No way in hell. He was going to return to Jenny with a safe little girl on his shoulders, no matter how many draculas he had to splatter to do it.

Though she was a fast little fucker, his legs were a lot longer, and he’d almost caught up to her by the time she rounded the corner. She darted into an open doorway, then screamed. Randall limped in after her.

He was in an office. A pretty nice one. Clearly the guy who used it worked with numbers instead of patients. Randall thought that might be him behind the desk, a bald middle-aged man with a dracula chewing on his neck.

The dracula’s face was buried in its meal, and it didn’t see them. Randall grabbed the little girl’s hand and tugged her back out into the hallway…

…where six or seven creatures emerged around the far corner. Randall yanked the little girl back into the office and slammed the door shut.

Shit! Shit! Shit!

The dracula twisted its head and looked over at him, its mouth so laden with gore that Randall could barely see its fangs. It regarded him for a moment, then slammed its mouth back onto the number-cruncher’s wound.

So they weren’t homicidal. Just…hungry.

The door had a push-button lock on it. Randall quickly locked it but didn’t feel all that much safer. He had no idea if those things in the hallway would come after him or not.

“It’s okay,” he told the little girl. “They can’t break down a door.”

He was saying that based on absolutely no proof. For all he knew, they were wandering around the hospital kicking down doors left and right. The little girl seemed to have gone from pure panic to frozen terror, which made things a little easier for him. He hoped her mind wasn’t permanently damaged.

Randall still didn’t know much about how these things behaved, but he figured this one was unlikely to finish guzzling the blood and then settle down for a long nap. He had to take the offensive instead of waiting for it to come after them.

Damn, he wished he still had his hatchet. Though the chainsaw had worked nicely before, it really wasn’t intended to be used as a club, and he didn’t want to ruin it before he had the opportunity to find some gas. He’d have to think smaller.

Screwdriver through the back of the head? That should do it.

He set the chainsaw on the floor and pulled the screwdriver out of his belt.

What if the change was only temporary? Randall hadn’t felt any guilt about slaughtering the other monsters, but what if they could be saved? What if the dracula that was slurping blood right in front of him was a nice guy, with a wife and two kids at home, and this change—this horrific creature he had become—was reversible? Didn’t that make Randall a murderer?

A fountain of crimson jettisoned from the office man’s neck as the dracula opened a new vein. The dracula lapped at it greedily, letting it spray all over its face. Randall decided that he’d rather have a bothered conscience than his own body parts strewn across the hospital.

“Close your eyes,” Randall told the little girl.

She squeezed them shut immediately. Good. She was still hearing him, at least.

Randall slowly walked over to the desk, clutching the screwdriver in his fist, looking for the best place to jam it. Probably the forehead. The dracula seemed aware of his approach, but was apparently not concerned enough about the threat to risk losing some of that scrumptious blood. What was the appeal?

The dracula made a soft, almost inaudible sound, like a lion protecting its kill. It thinks I’m gonna steal its dinner.

It was time to move fast. Randall stepped forward…and his leg, which he’d abused so relentlessly this evening, finally couldn’t take it anymore. It twisted, popping some more stitches, and Randall hit the floor, several trickles of blood streaming from his calf. He gritted his teeth and winced but didn’t scream.

The dracula pounced.

Randall swung the screwdriver at it, bashing it in the fangs. Unfortunately, none of them broke off. The screwdriver popped out of his hand and fell to the floor.

The dracula, jaws open wide, jerked its head toward him. Randall punched it between the eyes, knocking a spray of blood out of the side of its mouth—the number cruncher’s blood that it hadn’t swallowed yet.

He slammed his hand against the creature’s neck and held it tight, trying to keep its jaws away from his flesh. Some droplets of blood fell from its fangs and pattered onto his cheek. Shit! What if it was infectious? He pressed his lips together as tightly as he could and prayed that none of it would drip into his eyes.

He squeezed its neck with one hand while feeling around for the screwdriver with the other. He’d seen this trick work remarkably well in a zombie movie, although in that case the guy had actually been able to find the goddamn screwdriver! Where had the stupid thing gone? It’s not like it was round and would’ve rolled away!

A large drop of blood hit his lips.

Forget the screwdriver. He reached for his belt and grabbed the first thing he touched: a pair of pliers. He opened the pincers, pounded them against the creature’s throat, and squeezed them shut. Then he yanked, tearing off a chunk of the dracula’s neck. A shower of blood poured down upon him.

He did it again, getting one half of the pliers into the hole he’d just created, and tearing off an even larger strip.

The dracula flailed and spasmed and helplessly clawed at its throat but remained very much alive.

Randall ripped out two more pieces of its neck. Then he bashed it in the nose.

It struggled quite a bit less now.

After the next chunk, the dracula gave up the fight. Its lifeless body collapsed on Randall. He rolled it off him and pushed himself up to a seated position.

He had blood all over his face, but none seemed to have gotten into any orifices as far as he could tell. He at least wasn’t snorting blood. He lifted his gown and used it to mop off his face, although it was difficult to find a part of the gown that wasn’t already wet.

He couldn’t feel too bad for the creature. Even if it could revert to human, its face would be all mutilated from where the teeth broke through. Nobody would want to live like that.

The little girl stared at him, unmoving.

The man at the desk moaned.

No fucking way…

Randall grabbed the top of the desk and used it as leverage to push himself up. His injured leg really didn’t like that. He shoved the pain out of his mind.

“Help me…” said the man. How was he still alive? Randall was probably the least qualified person in the entire building to make such a diagnosis, but he figured the man had a minute left to live, tops. “Get me to…” The man paused to cough up some blood.

“I don’t think I can help you,” Randall said, feeling absolutely sick to his stomach.

“Get me to surgery,” the man whispered. “I can do it. I just need you to take me there.”

Even regular surgery wasn’t going to help him, much less self-performed surgery. “I can’t,” said Randall. “My leg is ruined. I can’t carry you.”

“Please…”

“I can’t. I would if I could, I swear, but there’s nothing I can do for you.” Randall knew he should lie to him—the man was a goner anyway—but he just couldn’t bring himself to do that.

The man stared at him with dying eyes. “You’re going…to burn in hell.”

Randall watched helplessly as his eyes went blank.

What kind of asshole would do that to somebody? Randall had no time for guilt; he had to focus on the person he could actually save.

He looked over at the little girl. She recoiled.

Why was she scared of him?

Oh, yeah. He was a giant-sized blood-soaked man in a hospital gown who’d ripped the neck out of a monster with a pair of pliers. Her fear was justified.

“What’s your name?” he asked, again trying to use his kid-friendly voice.

She didn’t answer.

“I’m Randall.” He set the bloody pliers down on the desk, hoping that might help. Even though it hurt, he got down on one knee, bringing himself closer to her level. “I’m a lumberjack. Do you know what that is?”

She just stared at him.

“Do you know Paul Bunyan?”

She nodded. Randall smiled.

“I’m not Paul Bunyan, but I’m one of his friends. He’s a good guy. Have you heard of Babe?”

“His blue ox?”

“Yeah. I get to ride him sometimes. Now, Paul gets really mad if his fellow lumberjacks let little girls get hurt on their watch, so I promise you that if you listen to me and do what I say, I’m going to protect you from the monsters, okay?”

“Okay.”

“What’s your name?”

“Tina.”

Tina. That’s what Randall had wanted to name his daughter, if he and Jenny ever had one.