Draculas

"Je

"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.

Je

"Mortimer, can you hear me? It's Je

"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.

Je

That can't be Mortimer's hand.

It was more like a claw. A bloody, ragged claw. Je

The old man hissed again, a high-pitched keen, and when he turned his head to look at Je

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 Je

For the first time in her life, Je

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 Je

Mortimer rolled on top of her, like a lover, blood and saliva dripping onto Je

This is it, Je

"Get the fuck away from my wife!"

Je

He raised something large and red over his head.

"Smile, motherfucker!"

Mortimer's misshapen head jerked up as Randall swung the fire extinguisher, co

Je

"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 Be

Mortimer crouched, then leapt after them, soaring three meters into the breezeway.

As the doors slid closed, Je

His shoes were frantically squeaking and blood sprayed the automatic glass doors, which opened and closed over and over.

As Mortimer feasted on Be

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 Be

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 Je

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.

Je

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?" Je

"I'm go

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 ski