Konrath, J.A. - DRACULAS (A Novel of Terror)

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.