Dark Moonlighting (4 page)

Since my office was in the bowels of the
hospital, I had assumed I could get two hours of undisturbed sleep
without anyone noticing. I was startled awake less than an hour
later by the hospital’s Chief of Medicine, Robert Little. Robert
had always despised me for my seemingly natural medical abilities.
He looked particularly angry after coming all the way down to the
basement to find me napping.

“This is what we’re paying you for? To sleep
at your desk?” Robert asked indignantly.

“I’m sorry, Bob,” I said as I feigned
embarrassment. I was delighted that my use of his first name
resulted in a noticeable facial twitch from the old man. “I was up
late last night… studying blood,” I finished weakly.

“Aw, is the twenty hours you put in every
week too strenuous?” Robert mocked. “Don’t give me that bullshit.
The albino thing I’ll buy since you look like death. Don’t think
for one second that I believe your chronic fatigue syndrome story
though. A lot of people in my generation were tired too. We sucked
it up and lived our lives without making up fake medical conditions
and asking everyone to feel sorry for us. If the board weren’t so
scared about the hospital getting sued, I’d bounce your ass out of
here so fast you’d… I’d bounce your ass out of here faster than…
You’d be gone!”

Albinism is typically a sufficient cover
story for the people I interact with at my other jobs. Medical
professionals are naturally more knowledgeable about the subject,
and so I had to add chronic fatigue syndrome for my life at the
hospital. Even my severe reaction to sunlight seemed too extreme
for the doctors who were familiar with albinism. I was able to
placate them by pointing to an obscure case in the
New England
Journal of Medicine
from 1967 that highlighted a patient with
my exact symptoms. The article had been submitted by a Dr. Julius
Kelso, which had been my alias at the time. Pretty clever, huh?
Talk about thinking long-term. For the record, chronic fatigue
syndrome is a real condition despite what my crotchety boss
thought. I did not suffer from the affliction, but it made a nice
excuse to reduce my time at the hospital. Even with my reduced need
for sleep, 120 hours a week is too much to work.

“I apologize. You’re right, there is no
excuse. I will endeavor to—”

“Oh, shut up. Make yourself useful and go
give the E.R. a hand. They’ve got 200 hypochondriacs up there who
are convinced they have the aardvark flu.”

Robert slammed the door to my office on his
way out, even though he had just ordered me to leave. I sat at my
desk and tried to rub the sleep out of my eyes for a moment. I had
seen a news report early that morning about an “outbreak” of
aardvark flu in Botswana. It had seemed the media was stretching
for a good health story as the epidemic was only affecting a single
isolated tribe of Bushmen. There had only been six reported cases
and no fatalities. The Centers for Disease Control announced that
it was nothing serious, and aardvark flu seemed to be milder than
normal influenza. Evidently that was not going to stop hundreds of
people from flooding the hospital, wasting time and tying up
precious resources. Never underestimate the stupidity and ignorance
of the average person when it comes to matters of their health.

My official position at the hospital was a
hematology fellowship. Ignoring the obvious irony of a vampire
studying blood, the fellowship proved to be quite practical. I was
supposed to be researching various forms of anemia, but was
secretly using the hospital’s resources for another project. Robert
Little had absolutely no interest in any of the fake or real
research I was conducting. Despite his frequent reassurances that I
was worthless, he had come to understand how much medical knowledge
I had. Facing an understaffed and cash-strapped hospital, Robert
often encouraged me to lend a hand in other departments.

The emergency room was one floor up from the
basement of death. The outdoor ambulance bay, where paramedics
delivered critical patients, led into a waiting area for walk-in
patients. The nurse’s station was immediately in front of the
waiting area. Behind that desk were several hospital beds that
could be enclosed with curtains for privacy. Two trauma rooms for
severely injured patients were positioned a short walk down the
hallway to the left of the nurse’s station. Beyond those were
larger rooms for patients and medical storage areas. Overall, it
looked pretty much exactly like the layout of that television show
ER
.

“Dr. Whittier,” one of the nurses at the
station greeted me as I arrived. “Please tell me you’re here to
help.”

“Of course. I heard we had a terrible plague
outbreak, and I thought it would be prudent to come down and lend a
hand,” I responded sarcastically.

“Oh, it’s days like these that I’m happy I
chose to get into medicine,” she said through clenched teeth as she
forced a smile. “Unfortunately this is going to be my last day
here. After my shift ends I plan on hunting down that asshole
reporter from Channel 6 and beating him to death with a tire
iron.”

“I remember a few years back a lot of doctors
were refusing to treat medical malpractice lawyers,” I quipped.
“Maybe it’s time we extended that concept to sensationalist
reporters. Anyway, where do you want me?”

The nurse snorted in agreement as she handed
me a chart. “Curtain two is open if you want to set up shop there.
Too bad you have to plow through these morons one at a time. It’d
be easier to see them in groups of fifty.”

“Damn Hippocratic Oath,” I agreed. “Thank
you, nurse.”

Like many classically trained physicians, I
had the bad habit of never learning the names of the nurses. Many
of them probably took it as a great insult. I scolded myself for
not making a greater effort as I walked to curtain two. There was
already a patient sitting on the bed when I arrived. He looked
nervous and smiled awkwardly at me.

“Mr.… Wilson?” I asked as I found the name on
the medical chart the nurse had given me. “It says here you believe
you might have aardvark flu. Is that correct?”

“Yes,” Mr. Wilson responded.

“Have you recently been exposed to an
aardvark at an illegal, exotic pet store?” I inquired.

“No.”

“Do you work as an aardvark handler at the
zoo?” I asked.

“No.”

“In the last two months have you traveled to
Sub-Saharan Africa and open mouth kissed an aardvark?” I
mocked.

“No,” Mr. Wilson answered seriously.

“Well, then you don’t have aardvark flu,” I
concluded, forcing myself not to sigh in exasperation.

“But I’ve had a sore throat for two days, and
my nose keeps running,” Mr. Wilson argued.

I nodded reassuringly as I put my hand on his
shoulder, nudged him gently off the bed and pushed him in the
direction of the exit. “Probably just a normal, run of the mill
cold that’s going around. Try to drink more fluids and take some
extra vitamin C. You’ll feel better in a week or so. Next!”

The last word I yelled was directed at the
nurse’s station. One nurse dutifully shuffled Mr. Wilson out the
door while another led the next hypochondriac back to me. The staff
was quite accustomed to media scares, and we had developed an
efficient assembly line method to deal with the people who wasted
our time. My interview with the second patient played out exactly
as it had with Mr. Wilson. In fact, there was very little
difference with any of the pathetic fools who I examined over the
course of two hours. The nurse at the station waved and gave me a
thumbs up after I had finished with the last hypochondriac. I
rolled my neck, which made a terrible cracking noise, as I returned
to the station at the heart of the emergency room.

“That was fun,” I joked. “Do you have any
real patients now that I’m done with the nut jobs?”

“You can take my kid who swallowed a foreign
object. She’s in exam room one. I’m too
abscessed
with this
patient to leave.”

I had not seen Dr. Condo before he spoke as
he was kneeling in front of a bed on the other side of the nurse’s
station. He was examining a dreadful looking wound on the leg of a
morbidly obese woman in her thirties. He looked up at the woman
with a smile but received only a blank stare in return.

“That was a pun,” Dr. Condo began to explain
to his patient. “I said
abscessed
instead of
obsessed
. See, it’s funny because all these pus filled
cavities on your legs are called abscesses.”

The patient continued to stare down at Dr.
Condo with a blank stare.

Dr. Condo let out a whistle. “Tough
crowd.”

I exchanged a concerned looked with the nurse
as she handed me the chart for Dr. Condo’s other patient.

“I can’t believe they made him an attending
physician,” the nurse whispered to me.

“I can’t believe they let him practice
medicine,” I countered.

I was happy to take a patient off of Dr.
Condo’s hands. I was tired of seeing hypochondriacs, and I knew the
patient would have a much higher probability of survival if someone
other than Dr. Condo was her doctor. I regretted the decision as
soon as I entered the examination room.

“Okay… Katie. I see you—”

The bloodcurdling scream my young patient let
out was so intense that it caused me to drop her chart. The
patient’s mother, after overcoming her own instinctive reaction,
threw her hand over Katie’s mouth and shushed the child. A security
guard, probably assuming someone was being murdered, popped his
head into the room to determine the cause of the terrifying shriek.
I waved him off and nodded reassuringly before I bent down to
retrieve the patient’s chart. Katie’s mother cautiously removed her
hand from the child’s mouth.

“What’s wrong with your face?” Katie asked
undiplomatically.

Anyone who watched the coverage of my murder
trial probably asked the same question. What
was
wrong with
my face was a series of unfortunate medical problems. My lack of
exposure to sunlight had left my skin quite pale, but that was
minor compared to the other ailments I had suffered through during
my life. These conditions all occurred before I was turned into a
vampire when I was twenty-six. In fact, I likely would have had a
very short life had I not been transformed. My face, and most of
the rest of my body, was covered in pox marks. These were of both
the chicken and small varieties. Back in the fourteenth century,
most people did not know there was a distinction between those two
conditions. The uneducated rabble, of which I was a member, was
less concerned with naming the diseases than surviving through
them. Back then, no one had microscopes or knew anything about
viruses or bacteria. However, the worst scars on my face came from
one disease that everyone knew formally.

The Black Death was the worst outbreak of
bubonic plague in human history. In 1350, when I was ten years old,
it ravaged England and the rest of Europe. It killed one third of
the continent’s population, but those of us whose immune systems
fought off the bacteria were forever scarred. The plague was named
for buboes, the swollen lymph nodes that were characteristic of
infection. Describing them as super boils would not be far off. I
survived the plague, but my skin could never recover from the
beating it took. Thanks to television and movies, people always
assume vampires should be dark, brooding hunks. This is simply not
the case for anyone born before the invention of medicine. I had
gotten used to my disfigurement, but it was always difficult for
others to accept in modern society. Not a day went by that I did
not pray to look like David Boreanaz or Robert Pattinson.

“Shush, don’t be rude,” Katie’s mother
scolded.

“It’s fine,” I lied as I examined the chart.
“I know what a… precocious age eight can be. To answer your
question, sweetheart, my mommy and daddy never gave me the shots
that prevent sickness. I bet you remember being mad at your mommy
when she took you in to see a doctor like me, and he stuck you with
a bunch of needles.”

“Actually,” Katie’s mother sheepishly
interrupted. “We never gave her any of the vaccines. We were
concerned about the link to autism.”

Katie’s eyes went wide as she put two and two
together. “Am I going to look like that?” she asked in terror while
pointing a finger at my face.

“No, honey. Mommy and Daddy were just worried
that—”

Katie was not to be placated. Her mother
lunged forward much more quickly than before as Katie let out her
terrible shriek. When she tired herself out, I witnessed something
I had never seen before. Given how many years I have been
practicing medicine, that is an impressive statement. I could not
help but show my amusement as the child begged me to give her
shots. After twenty minutes of trying to explain to the girl how
much medicine had advanced in the last fifty years, we reached an
uneasy stalemate.

“Okay, Katie. Given how well you scream, I
think it’s safe to say that the atomic deconstruction gun is not
lodged in your throat. I just need to take a quick look to make
sure everything is okay though. All I’m going to do is shine a
light down there, and I promise it won’t hurt at all. Is that
okay?”

Katie, likely still worrying about developing
horrible facial scars, nodded dispassionately.

“Yup,” I said to Katie’s mother after I had
finished the examination. “Nothing to worry about unless she starts
complaining of throat or stomach pain. The gun will pass through
her system naturally. Although I doubt your son’s Johnny Nuclear
action figure will want it back.”

Katie’s mother gave an obligatory smile at my
joke, thanked me and proceeded to shuffle her daughter towards the
examination room’s door. When she reached the hallway she hesitated
and turned back.