DRACULAS (A Novel of Terror)

by J. A. Konrath

  “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.