Bitten (18 page)

ST. MARTIN’S WAS NEWCASTLE CITY’S oldest
standing hospital. The building was made of brick architecture circa the mid-1800s. It was one of the first major hospitals in the U.S., alongside Bellevue in downtown Manhattan and the Bayley Seton on Staten Island. The Red Cross had owned it for more than six decades, but when the new city hospital was constructed closer to downtown, and with the Red Cross opening their own establishment on the other side of the city, St. Martin’s became an unfrequented establishment and quickly fell into ruin.

A
round that time, Dr. Jamal Treslan stepped up and donated two million dollars to pay for renovations and keep the hospital open. Of course, being the main financial donor meant he had a spot on the board, and his timing couldn’t have been better as the Chief of Medicine soon resigned after management changed. This gave Treslan the opportunity he was looking for and, without any hesitation, he quickly slid into the position of Dean of Medicine for St. Martin’s Hospital. The rest was history.

Treslan led the way as a small army of troopers marched behind him down the corridors of the hospital. Timid eyes peered out of rooms at Rachael Ramirez as she followed close behind
the doctor. He led her straight into an ER and marched up to a tightly shut vinyl curtain. He reached up and tugged the drapes back and the curtain rings rattled as they opened. Lying on a metal operating table was a little girl with pitch-black eyes. She snarled and growled at them.

Rachael looked at Treslan with a curious look.
“What’s this?”

“This is my daughter.” Walking up to a shelf with medical supplies, he opened a drawer and pulled out a couple of syringes and a blood drawing kit. As he prepared, he motioned toward a swivel stool next to the bed.
“Take a seat.”

“What are you planning to do?”

“Your blood has very unusual properties. I think if I give my daughter a blood transfusion using your blood, it may cure her.”

“It might kill her,” Rachael added with a concerned look.

“As you can see, she has been infected. She has no heartbeat, no pulse. For all intents and purposes, she is already dead. She cannot get any more dead than undead, but if I can cure her, if I can bring life back to her…” Treslan’s voice trailed off as he attempted to mask his emotional scars with the bandage of silence.

Rachael held out her arm.
“If you believe it’s the right thing, then I won’t stop you.”

Treslan stared at her for a moment and then a sad smile broke across his face.
“You have children, don’t you?”

“I have…” Rachael caught h
erself, “I had a son. But the infection took him.”

“I am sorry for your loss.”

“If this works,” Rachael said, “Will you help me find my son?”

“You have my word.”

An understanding between them, Treslan filled six bags of blood. Then he hooked his black-eyed daughter up to a plasmapheresis machine. Once he collected and filtered Dahlia’s infected blood, he mixed in a packet of Rachael’s virus resistant blood, and with tubes running to the little girl’s arms and legs, he ran it back through his daughter.

Violent spasms overtook her immediately. She moaned so loud that
it echoed through the hospital walls. Jerking back and forth the entire table shook as the restrains fought to hold the convulsing girl on the operating table. The leather straps rubbed raw against her skin so that Rachael thought the poor girl’s flesh would tear off from her bony little limbs.

Watching intently, Treslan and Rachael stood mouths open as the girl raised her head and looked at them with human eyes.
Looking at them, the child’s attention locked onto her father. “Daddy?”

Treslan’s eyes began to poor tears as he ran to embrace her.
“Dahlia!” he cried out. His large powerful hands worked furiously to undo the painful leather straps that bound her. “My Dahlia!”

Once Dahlia was free she put her arms around her dad’s neck and cried into his chest.
“Daddy! I was so scared.”

“Hush now,” Treslan said. “Everything is alright now. Daddy is here.”

Looking up at Rachael, Dahlia asked, “Daddy, who’s that lady?”

“She is the nice lady who made you all better,” he replied.

Treslan held his precious Dahlia in his arms and squeezed her with all the warmth he could muster.

“Where is mamma?” Dalia asked.

“You don’t remember?” Treslan asked in a worried voice. He didn’t want to reveal the fact that Dahlia was the way she was
because
her mom had gotten sick and … Treslan choked up just thinking about it.

He had come home as usual. Entered the house, set his briefcase down by the coat rack, threw his keys in the bowl
on the Ikea Besta shelf near the entrance, and hung his jacket up. As he turned the corner and entered the living room he saw his wife mauling their daughter. He recalled the panic that overcame him. Desperate to rescue his daughter from the clutches of what used to be his wife, Treslan picked up the glass vase by the entrance to the living room and smashed it against the back of his wife’s head. She fell to the ground, but immediately started pushing herself back up. Her scalp peeled back off her skull, somehow oblivious to the pain, she stood up and growled at Treslan like a wild animal. Then she lunged at him.

Treslan
dodged her attack and slammed her into the wall. She fell back and hit the floor again. Seeing the crying child, she started to crawl toward her, and that’s when Treslan smashed her over the head with the vase again, and again, and he kept on bashing her skull in until it was the consistency of strawberry jam.

Dahlia was screaming wildly, probably more from the pain than anything. Standing there half dazed and confused, his dead wife’s blood
spackled on his face and her lifeless corpse at his feet, Treslan didn’t know what to do. Then Dahlia let out a torrent of sobs and in an instant he rushed over to his daughter, picked her up in his arms, and carried her into the bathroom and bandaged her up. Treslan glanced at himself in the mirror and saw that he was crying. If Dahlia didn’t recollect that horrible day, it was probably for the best.

“Mamm
a is busy at work now,” he lied. But the lie was comforting. The truth would only devastate.

“Can I see mommy soon?”

“Yes, very soon. Don’t you worry about a thing, Dahlia. Daddy is here. I will take care of you.”

“Come,” one of the guards said in a quiet voice, reaching out his hand to
guide Rachael toward the exit. “Let the doctor have a moment with his daughter alone.”

“Of course,” Rachael
said.

Once they were out in
the hallway, the guard addressed her in his regular tone of voice. “We have a room prepared for you. But, as you can imagine, space is limited. I’m afraid you’ll have to share, if that’s not too much of a burden?”

“
No, not at all.”

“
Your roommate should be no problem, but if you should find her less than amiable, just let us know and we can try to fix you up with some new accommodations.”

“I
am fairly easy to get along with,” Rachael said with a smile. “At least I like to think so. Out of curiosity, who is my roommate?”

“A woman we picked up the day before yesterday.”

As they approached the end of the wing which had large day windows on the left which overlooked the grounds, they came to a door, second from the end. The fluorescent light at the end of the hall buzzed and flickered, fighting to stay alive. The large man opened it and pushed open the door. On the bed in the room sat a young woman writing in a purple diary.

Alyssa looked up
just in time to see Rachael standing in the doorway staring back at her with equal astonishment. “No way!”

The guard raised an eyebrow.
“You two know each other?”

“Yes,” Rachael informed.

Alyssa leapt up and practically pounced on Rachael. The two embraced each other in a long, warm hug. Tears of elation filled their eyes as they embrace one another and they couldn’t help but start laughing.

“Well,” said the guard, “
curfew is at nine. Be in your rooms by then.”

“Thanks,” Rachael replied without looking back. The guard nodded regally, then turned and
made his way back down the hall.

“I can’t believe it,” Alyssa said, stepping back to see how Rachael had faired. “
It’s really you! I never expected to see you again.”

“I know,” Rachael replied. “Tell me about it.”

Alyssa had on a gray short sleeve shirt and navy blue denim jeans. Staring at Rachael with a contemplative look, Alyssa licked her upper lip and squinted. Rachael’s outfit looked like a sultry prom dress gone feral. A transparent fabric barely masked the fifty-cent sized areolas of her pink nipples. Her bare midriff trailed down to a frilly tutu.

“And what in the world are you wearing?”

Rachael looked down at herself and laughed at the thought of wearing such a hideous outfit. “It’s a long story.”

“It looks like you were mauled by a crazed bear.”

“Actually, it was a bit worse than that.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Just then an electric clunk was heard, as if a breaker was suddenly switched off, and the lights went out in the hall. Shutting the door, Rachael turned back to face Alyssa. Her face had become like stone. “Not really.”

Sensing a hint of hesitation in her voic
e, Alyssa said, “I sense a
but
in there, somewhere.”

“But
,” Rachael added, “I think I have to, just to maintain an ounce of my sanity.”

Alyssa plopped down on the bed, smoothed the covers out with her hand and patted the space next to her.
Rachael cozied up next to Alyssa, and they leaned against the wall and kicked their legs over the edge of the bed. Rachael took a deep breath and began her tale of terror and suspense.

Stepping softly down the hall
, Jamal Treslan lovingly carried his sleeping daughter back to his room. As he took her past the other rooms, he could hear the sound of whispers murmuring about the miracle woman who had cured Treslan’s precious daughter. Reaching his room, lit by soft candlelight, he gently laid Dahlia onto his bed, pulled a flower embroidered blanket over her, and tucked her in.

Brushing her hair out of her face,
Treslan smiled, then got up and went over to his desk and flicked on a small kerosene desk lamp. The lamp illuminated the room with a doped glow that soothed. Taking out a notepad, Treslan began jotting down theories about Rachael Ramirez’s blood, her rare immunity to the virus, and several ideas on how to implement it in processing a cure. It was the first time since the outbreak that he felt like a real doctor again and not just a mad scientist—or a father barely hanging onto his sanity. As he wrote, his head bobbed with the weight of sleep and soon enough he gently nodded off.

The clock struck midnight and chimed.
Arousing from his slumber, Treslan lifted his head from his desk, which revealed a small puddle of saliva where the corner of his mouth had been, and sat up. Groggy, he wiped the sleep from his eyes and the drool from his mouth with the back of his sleeve. Treslan turned to look at his sleeping baby girl, but upon finding nothing but an empty bed, he jumped up in a dreadful panic. Dahlia, his precious Dahlia, was gone.

Noticing the door had been left open just a crack, he figured she must have wondered out to fetch a glass of water or find the bathroom. But why
hadn’t she woken him up? She always used to wake him up for that sort of thing. A deep seeded anxiety overcame him. Jumping up, he grabbed a flashlight and went out into the hall to search for his missing daughter.