DRACULAS (A Novel of Terror) Read online

  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.”