Dead Air (Book One of The Dead Series) (2 page)

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Jodi looked around wildly for help, only to see the last person in the world he wanted nearby at that moment. It was the same bitchy nurse with no sense of humor who had written him up for doing his mad doctor imitation. And she was watching him.

The nurse glanced at the writhing body and a scowl darkened her features before she pinned Jodi with a sharp look. She was about to open her mouth and tell him to quit fooling around or she would have him fired, when she noticed the shocked expression on his face.

Just then, the body jerked again, and this time a hand came out from under the sheet to grope around on its chest to try and find what was restraining it.

"He's-he's-he's-alive," Jodi stammered out.

The nurse flew into action. Calling on reinforcements, she ran around the desk and elbowed Jodi out of the way as she grabbed the front of the wheeled bed and started pushing the body back into the room it had come out of. When she had it inside, she pulled the sheet off the dead man. Seeing he was gnashing his teeth and whipping his head back and forth, she grabbed one of his flailing arms so she could try and get a pulse.

"Call the doctors back," she yelled to no one in particular as she finally managed to get a finger on where the
patient’s radial pulse should be. Feeling nothing and assuming it must be too weak to detect, she grabbed the blood pressure cuff and wrapped it around the late Darryl Turp's arm as another nurse tried to place a respirator over his face. Darryl’s whole body had turned grayish-blue, showing signs of what she thought was cyanosis, but what was really just the color of the dead.

Jodi was standing nearby, watching all this with amazement, when the head nurse turned to him and yelled harshly, "I told you to get those doctors back in here. Now move."

"I don’t know where they went," Jodi replied helplessly.

A page came over the public address system, calling for Doctors Rahjib and Wendover to come to the ICU on the double. Another voice called out from down the hall that the crash cart
was on the way. Jodi pointed up at the ceiling from where the announcement had come over the speaker mounted there as if in answer to the nurse’s order, and stood his ground. He didn't want to miss any of this.

She shook her head and replied, "You have to go down to the
doctor’s lounge on three and check. The speaker in there is busted so they won't hear the summons."

Reluctantly, Jodi trudged down the hall and went through the door that led to the stairs. He was disappointed that he would miss all the action and paused for a moment, saying, "Shit," before continuing on. He knew that any time a page went out for one of the doctors that the nurses on three sent a candy striper to the lounge with the broken P.A. system to check if the doc being paged was there. As he made his way down the stairs to the third floor, he cursed the head nurse who had sent him on this
fool’s errand, not knowing that she had just saved his life.

Even as Jodi was halfway down the first flight of stairs, Doctor Wendover and Doctor Rahjib raced down the hall toward
Darryl’s room from the other direction. As they entered the room, they took in the situation at a glance and moved forward to look at the now struggling patient whom they had pronounced dead only minutes before.

"Vitals," Doctor Rahjib called out.

The nurse looked down and said, "Blood pressure's-," then stopped with a confused look on her face.

"Yes, yes, the blood pressure it is?" Rahjib demanded.

"Zero over zero." She replied.

All eyes broke away from their various tasks to stare at the moving body on the bed.
Doctor Wendover broke their trance by gently easing the nurse out of the way and inflating the blood pressure cuff himself.

Looking at the reading he said, "It must be broke. Someone go get another machine from the
room next door."

A nurse hurriedly left as Rahjib asked Wendover, "What is it reading?"

"Zero over zero," he answered, "it's got to be broke." Turning toward the door, he yelled after the vanished nurse, "We need that machine now, on the double. Chop, chop."

The room now held six medical staff and the patient
, but it wasn't crowded. The rooms in the ICU had been designed with twice the space of those in the rest of the hospital to accommodate situations where the patient needed multiple hands on them to keep them alive. The nurse came back in with a blood pressure monitor and strapped the cuff around Darryl's arm. The machine whirred as the cuff inflated and deflated. Looking at the readout she said dumbfounded, "Zero over zero."

Frustrated that nothing seemed to be working right, and worried at his liability in this situation, Doctor Rahjib let loose his anger on the nurse.

"Why isn't that heart monitor hooked up?" He demanded, as he pointed to the wire leads hanging loose over the side of the bed. "Do it now," He barked.

The nurse hurried to reconnect them to the monitor
. When she was done, she jumped back quickly from the slowly writhing, teeth gnashing body on the bed. She had only worked in the medical field for two years, and didn’t have as much experience as some of the others in the room, but she had a strong feeling that something was wrong here. The grotesque head injury could explain the way the patient kept biting down as if trying to chew but she had been in the room when the man had died and she knew he was dead. She had been amazed, upon first seeing him as he was wheeled onto the floor, that he had even lived through his initial accident and had prayed that he went peacefully instead of suffering.

The heart monitor came to life
, showing a flat-line and the digital readout showed a steady pulse of zero, but the gauge monitoring the patient’s body temperature did give a reading of 94 degrees.

"You incompetent," Rahjib burst out. "You need to make sure that the leads are connected correctly to the patient."

Pointing at where two of the round discs had been removed so that the attendant could get the chest strap around the body, he said angrily, "Reconnect them now, you idiot."

The young nurse, tired of the arrogant way Doctor Rahjib ordered the staff around and
generally freaked out and scared by the present circumstances, snapped back, "Do it yourself you Pakistani goat fucker," and stormed from the room, grateful to be gone even if the outburst had cost her job.

Rahjib considered going after the insolent nurse and firing her on the spot
but decided to deal with it later. Right now he had to clean up, and cover up, the mess he had made when he pronounced an obviously living patient as dead.

After removing the cervical collar and failing to find a pulse at his
patient’s throat, Rahjib leaned over to loosen the chest strap so he could reconnect the leads for the heart monitor. This was when he noticed the patient’s eyelids fluttering. The man had been keeping them tightly clenched up until now and the doctor took this new development to be a good sign.

As Rahjib loosened the clasp, letting the restraining belt fall to either side, the thing that had been Darryl Turp rolled its eyelids wide and let out a whine. Slowly
, it opened its mouth in what Rahjib took to be a smile so the doctor leaned over and smiled back saying, "You're going to be all right now, sir. You have the best medical staff in the world working on you. Just relax."

***

It opened its eyes to a red blur that slowly began to clear. It had no conscious thought of who or what it was, or who or what it had been, as it had no memory to call upon. To It, Darryl Turp did not now or ever exist. The red tint remained as its vision cleared and it struggled to focus on the object in front of it. Moving felt awkward and sluggish, and if it had a memory, it would equate the sluggish motor responses to the time Darryl Turp had drank a bottle of tequila and then ate the worm. Although its reactions were slow, its senses were tuned to a fine edge. It realized quickly by the rich, salty smell that in front of it was its one purpose for being, the one thing it craved above all else.

Food.

It reached up with a tentative hand and suddenly knew that if it didn't move faster its prey was going to back away and escape, leaving it hungry. With a sudden lunge, it grabbed the food in front of it and dragged it down to its mouth.

Doctor Wendover let out a scream like a little girl watching her pet dog getting run over in the street when he saw the patient grab Rahjib by the hair at the back of his head
. His eyes bulged as it pulled the doctor's face down to his mouth and tore a chunk out his lower left cheek with its teeth. Blood gushed, but even through the torrent of red Wendover could see Rahjib's jawbone glaring white through the gaping wound as a huge flap of skin and meat were ripped away.

The room broke into pandemonium
, with cries of revulsion and calls to restrain the patient coming from all sides. Two nurses struggled to pull Doctor Rahjib from the grip of his attacker but only succeeded in being bitten themselves, one on the arm and the other on the little finger. Both nurses fled the room trailing blood. Rahjib straightened up as he tried to back away, dragging his assailant into a sitting position as he beat helplessly against its back.

Still holding onto Rahjib, it chewed quickly and swallowed the small chunk of flesh it had bitten off the nurse
’s arm before plunging its teeth into the soft neck of its original food source, this time severing Rahjib’s carotid artery and sending a fountain of blood into the air.

Chewing vigorously on a wad of neck muscle before swallowing it and then tearing loose another, it seemed unaware of the people running around the room screaming until it realized
that the food in its grip was dead. Although it would eat dead meat when none other was available, it preferred fresh. It dropped the body of Rahjib onto the floor and then looked around the room until its eyes locked on Doctor Wendover, who stood frozen in shock a few feet away. A surge of saliva rushed out of its mouth, mingling with the blood on its face and tingeing it pink as it dropped its feet to the floor and advanced on the Doctor in three quick steps.

***

When the two security guards arrived on the floor, they were greeted by confused shouts and orders coming at them from all directions. They finally made out enough of the story that the frightened nurses and interns babbled at them to figure out that a patient had gone berserk and was attacking the hospital staff.

Although
the two men carried tasers, they were hesitant to draw them from their holsters. They knew that even tasing a crazy person who was attacking someone, could leave them liable to a lawsuit. After a quick conference, they decided to check out the situation and then move in and overpower the patient from different directions. Both men were over six foot tall and weighed over two hundred pounds, so they were confident that they could subdue even the most violent of suspects.

Cautiously
, they approached the room where they had been told the attacker was hiding. They reached the door and the first guard peeked around the corner but then quickly withdrew. Turning, he raced past his partner and began vomiting onto the floor. The sight he had just witnessed would be burned into his brain for the rest of his short life.

Seeing this reaction from his partner, the second security guard moved forward and hesitantly looked into the room, fearful of what he might see. The thing that caught his eye was the blood. At first glance it appeared as if someone had filled a super soaker squirt gun with the stuff, pumped it up to full pressure, and then let loose on the walls, floor and even the ceiling. The guard then noticed a body lying crumpled next to the bed and a nude figure bent over
another body in a red lab coat stretched out on the floor near the back of the room. It appeared that the naked man was giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to the supine man but the guard dismissed this as he focused on the body in the lab coat. Something was wrong with this picture. The guard's shocked mind tried to register why the man lying on the floor was wearing a red lab coat instead of a white one but came up blank. Then in a flash, he realized that the coat, like most other surfaces in the room, was soaked in blood.

S
ince he saw no one else in the room waiting to attack, the guard thought he should move forward and assist the man trying to revive the doctor on the floor. As he opened his mouth to say something reassuring, the nude man looked up at him and whined.

The second guard now realized why his partner had lost it and started vomiting. He wasn't sure what exactly his associate had seen, but if it were anything like what he was watching, it would be a wonder if either one of them kept their sanity.

Hanging from the mouth of the nude man were the freshly bitten off lips of Doctor Wendover. Looking closer at the body on the floor, the security man could see that half of the doctor's face had been chewed away. He switched his attention back to the nude man and watched as the blood covered thing that had once been Darryl Turp reached up and pushed the dangling lips into its mouth before chewing and swallowing.

The other guard returned from emptying his stomach contents onto the hallway tiles and joined his co-worker. The two exchanged a look of resolution as they moved into place in the wide doorway leading into the slaughterhouse
. They entered in one quick motion while talking soothingly to the man, who had gone back to cannibalizing Doctor Wendover's face. They split up in order to circle in from different directions, using hand signals to alert each other as to their future moves as they quickly wove their way around the medical equipment now littering the floor.