Draculas

BENNY the Clown was sad again.

He hurt.

His teeth were gone.

Half of his tongue was also gone, and it made new blood while he licked up what was on his clown suit. His whole mouth was leaking faster than he could lap up the new blood. The taste had made him happy before, and he still wanted MORE MORE MORE but now he hurt too much to be anything more than sad.

He realized that one of his siblings was gnawing on his leg. This made Be

It was an old woman. Very old. He could kill her.

Be

He drank her blood.

He was happier now.

But it didn't last. He hurt again.

He hurt so bad that he wanted to rip his face off.

He tried, just a little, but it didn't make him feel better.

Not at all.

Be

Nothing made him happy.

Except...

He looked at the thing on the floor. He seemed to remember something like it. One of his friends used to juggle them. Or was it his mentor? If he remembered correctly, somebody got badly hurt juggling them, and the other clowns had been sad, even though it was kind of fu

He picked up the chainsaw and began to lick the blood off the blade.

Nurse Herrick

CARLA relocked the double doors and pushed the dressers back into place.

What a night.

The outbreak.

The doctors gone.

A woman dying on her watch.

Another young woman, by herself, that patient already at seven centimeters.

Could things get any worse?

There was a part of her, growing stronger by the minute, that just wanted to hole up in a supply closet and wait for help to come.

But she couldn't do that. She had patients depending on her.

A sudden scream erupted from one of the private rooms.

She ran down the hall, the noise getting louder.

Room 12.

Brittany.

Maybe she was finally fully effaced and ready to push?

Carla opened the door. "How we doing, Brit--"

What the hell?

Brittany was pi

"Hey!" Carla shouted.

The little girl turned and looked at her and...hissed through a mouthful of hideous canines, her face a bloody wreck.

Carla backpedaled involuntarily out of the room as the little monster hopped off of Brittany and crawled in her direction on all fours, coming faster and faster, talons clicking on the linoleum.

"Lock yourself in, Brittany!" Carla screamed as the girl rose up on two feet and sprinted toward her.

The door to Room 12 slammed shut and Carla heard the deadbolt turn as the little monster leapt at her, talons pointing toward her like a full set of knives.

Hiss-screaming.

Carla lunged out of the way as the girl crashed into the nurses' station.

The Murray's baby daughter was screaming at the far end of the corridor, and Carla scrambled back onto her feet and hauled ass toward Stacie's room as the girl-monster climbed out of the nurses' station and came after her.

There was a delivery cart against the wall, and she opened the top drawer and grabbed the first thing she touched, a pair of episiotomy scissors--"bajango scissors" she called them on better days. She closed the scissors, took them by the end, turned, and threw them toward the little girl, knowing, even as the blades left her hand spi

The little girl suddenly stopped ten feet away and went quiet.

She looked down at her chest where the scissors were embedded, and then up at Carla, and she made a sound like a mewling cat or a depressed banshee.

There was an extension cord in the bottom drawer of the delivery cart, and Carla pulled it out, her hands shaking as they unwound the twist tie.

The little monster-girl sat in the middle of the floor. At first, she'd been trying to pull the blades out of her chest, but her own blood seemed to be distracting her now.

Carla approached slowly.

"I'm Carla," she said. "What's your name?"

The monster screeched something unintelligible.

"Well, I'm a nurse, and you look like maybe you're not feeling so well."

She was five feet away now, and getting her first look at this perversion of a child, wondering what kind of a virus could cause this. Something worse than Ebola.

Carla had grown up on a ranch ten miles from here, and by God she'd hogtied a calf or two in her day. No this wasn't anywhere near the same, but similar principles applied. Flip her on her stomach, hard and fast, knee digging into her spine, and get the cord around her wrists. Tie her ankles last.

Three feet away now. She squatted.

God, the closer she got, the more awful this thing looked. This wasn't a little girl. Not anymore.

Carla slowly uncoiled a four-foot length of cord, the monster eyeing her now with the distrust of a psycho cat, and licking the blood seeping out of her chest with a long, spongy-black tongue.

The Murray's baby wailed now, grinding down Carla's nerves.

She had to get back to Stacie.

Now or never.

She tightened her grip on the extension cord and lunged at the little monster, but it recoiled with terrible speed.

Carla felt something puncture the skin of her left arm, and by the time she looked up, the little girl had fled back down the corridor and disappeared around the corner that led to the operating room.

Carla stood up.

The bite to her left arm wasn't too bad.

Bleeding a little, sure, but considering those awful teeth, it could've been so much worse.

She walked a little ways up the corridor and opened the door to the supply closet, grabbed a dose of Pitocin out of the refrigerator, praying it would stop Stacie's bleeding. She should've already had the Pit ready for an IV-push just like she did for every single birth. What a fuck-up. If it didn't stop Stacie's bleeding, and without a doctor on hand to intervene surgically, the poor woman didn't stand a chance.

Lanz

DR. Lanz exited the playroom through the broken window, his head clear and his thoughts surprisingly rational. Perhaps that zap to the head had helped alleviate the urge to feed. Or perhaps he'd sucked enough of his own blood to gain a bit of perspective on things.

Because Lanz had a plan.

It had come to him, semi-formed, while he'd been chewing his fingers. Halfway into gnawing off his thumb, his fangs worrying the proximal phalanx, he'd noticed his breathing had become obstructed. Not because of the injury he was doing to himself, or because of the physical pain involved with chomping on his own flesh and bone.