Draculas (13 page)

Next, she hooked the cannula--a large, metal tube with a pointed tip--up to one end of the hose. After pulling over the oxygen tank on a hand truck, she attached the other end of the hose to the nozzle, and pulled the toggle lever to give it a try. O2 hissed out of the cannula, strong enough to blow her hair back.

"Miss! I need your help," Jenny said.

But the old woman, like the other adult in the room, appeared to be catatonic.

CRACK!

Dr. Lanz had returned, resuming his assault on the window. But rather than attack it with a chair, he was now wielding a fire extinguisher. It was heavy, compact, and would easily break through the glass in another swing or two.

Jenny patted her pockets, frantic, afraid she'd misplaced the lighter. She found it in her hip pocket.

CRACK!

Jenny studied the lighter, and frowned when she saw it had one of those child-proof locks on it.

CRACK!
Some glass tinkled onto the tile floor, a medium-size hole appearing in the window.

"Quickly! Can any of you children operate a child-proof lighter?"

Every child raised their hand.

"Peter!" she said, calling the oldest of them. "Come here!"

CRACK!

The hole was now big enough to crawl through, and one of the draculas got ahead of Lanz and forced itself through the opening, sliding on its belly into the playroom.

"Light the tops like this!" Jenny ordered, bending down and touching the flame to the rubber cement on the first bottle of creamer. It glowed blue, and Jenny picked up the bottle, jabbed the cannula through the plastic bottom, and then pointed it at the creature scrambling on all fours toward her.

"Everyone get back!"

She cranked the nozzle, the compressed air blowing the front off the bottle, showering the dracula with white powder.

A moment later, the powder ignited in a tremendous fireball, the powerful WHUMP! hitting Jenny with a blast of heated air that burned off all the fine little hairs on her arms.

The dracula fared much worse. Every square inch of it was throwing off flames. It twisted around on the floor, slapping at the inferno it had become, oily black smoke swirling up into the air and smelling a lot like bacon cooking.

Bacon, with a hint of artificial vanilla.

Thank you, Mythbusters.

Jenny turned off the oxygen. While non dairy creamer had nothing in it that made it flammable, it was a fine powder, and many powders were ignitable simply because they had such a huge surface area. Flour, sawdust, dust in grain silos--they'd caused countless fires and explosions throughout history. The oxygen worked as an accelerant, and also dispersed the powder so it spread evenly through the air.

"Light the next one, Peter!"

Jenny knocked off the smoking, melted plastic container from the end of the cannula, and jammed on a burning one just as Dr. Lanz flopped into the playroom.

"Now
you're
fired, Lanz!" Jenny yelled. Then she hit him with her makeshift flamethrower, dusting the doctor in a cloud of powder.

But at the same time, Lanz had emptied his extinguisher, putting out the flame before it had a chance to ignite the cloud of creamer enveloping him.

Son of a--

Snarling, Dr. Lanz rushed at Jenny, far too quick for her to prep another creamer bottle, his hideous mouth unhinging at the jaw and a look of smug satisfaction in his predatory eyes.

Jenny threw herself backward, Lanz's claw swiping the air a few inches in front of her face. A cloud of sweet-smelling vanilla non-dairy creamer floated above his head and shoulders, and a ropey line of drool escaped his cage of teeth, dripping down his neck.

"Die, you monster! Die!"

Peter Bernacky, his teenage face defiant, stuck his arm into the dust plume, his hand on the lighter.

"Peter! Don't--"

The flash blinded Jenny, a wave of superheated air sunburning her face and bare arms, singeing her eyebrows, instantly drying out her mouth.

Both Lanz and Peter instantly burst into flames. Lanz scurried away, still holding the extinguisher, turning it on himself and dousing the fire as he fled back through the hole he'd made in the window.

Peter screamed, but the sound was instantly muffled by the flame entering his lungs. He staggered away from Jenny, arms pin-wheeling, heading straight for the grandmother with the dentures.

She tried to push him back, but Peter wrapped his arms around her, setting her clothes ablaze. They did a burning dance for several steps, then fell over in a tangle of screams and flailing limbs and burning flesh.

The sprinkler finally came on, dousing the pair, and Jenny turned her attention toward the broken window as another dracula climbed through. She charged it with the cannula, pulling it free from the oxygen tank, and spearing the creature through its left eye. The monster hissed, blood and bits of brain matter spraying out of the hollow end, arcing across the playroom, and landing directly in the mouth of the catatonic woman who'd been watching the entire scene unfold with her jaw hanging open.

Children screamed. Flesh sizzled and popped. Jenny cast a frantic look around, seeking a weapon as the dracula flopped through the window, crashing at her feet where he squirmed and undulated like a landed swordfish. Jenny looked up as another dracula snaked into the opening. But rather than attack her, it pounced on the other creature, positioning its mouth over the fountain of blood and tissue pumping through the cannula, and locking its lips around it like a drinking straw.

Jenny spotted the oxygen tank through the steam and hefted it, adrenalin giving her the strength to lift the eighty-plus pounds. She slammed it onto the new intruder's skull, driving it to the floor, squashing it like a stomped pumpkin. Then she hoisted the tank again and pancaked the monster with the cannula eyestalk.

Another dracula slid in through the window. Then another. They descended upon their fallen comrades, chewing and tearing and lapping up the gore.

We need to get the hell out of here. Now.

"Everyone! Come on!"

There weren't many left to follow her order. The grandmother was down on the floor, convulsing. The mother was keeled over, throwing up. Most of Peter's hair had burned off, his eyelids and nose were scorched away, and he was blessedly still. That left five children. Three listened, running to Jenny's side. The son of the vomiting mother stood there, eyes wide, immobile. The grandson had curled up fetal, hugging his knees into his chest.

"Into the storage closet!" Jenny yelled.

Then she grabbed the shirt collar of the boy on the floor and tugged him away from his grandmother, dragging him to the closet. She turned to go back for the other boy, but more draculas had infiltrated the playroom, and they were tearing through the rest of them like a piranha tornado. Forcing herself to back away from the slaughter, cursing herself for not being able to do more, Jenny grabbed the storage room door and slammed it closed, hoping that whatever Randall had done to open it hadn't damaged the lock.

She gave it a cautious push, saw that it held, then watched through the small, square window as the creatures turned the playroom into a blood buffet. Horrified, yet fascinated, she couldn't help but wonder how they could drink so much. She squinted at one of them, gorging until its belly distended to practically bursting, like a pregnancy that had lasted twenty months.

But only seconds after it stopped feeding, its belly began to shrink.

Once again she thought of Randall and his old horror movies. One of his favorites was actually relevant to their current situation.
The Killer Shrews
, a black and white cheapie infamous for dressing up dogs as the titular rodent monsters. The film's heroes were trapped in a house, the bloodthirsty shrews everywhere, clawing to get inside and devour them. Like their diminutive counterparts, the shrews had to eat ninety percent of their body weight every day, or else they'd starve--a byproduct of their hyper-metabolism.

Apparently, the draculas also functioned at a highly increased metabolic rate, which explained why Jenny and the others had been able to get to the closet without being slaughtered. These creatures had to eat constantly, and they took the path of least resistance to do so. So they'd leapt upon the dead and dying, the small and weak, even if the injured were other draculas.

Jenny tore herself away from the spectacle and tried to focus on what needed to be done. First, barricade the door. Next, look for weapons. Then attend to the wounded.

But even though she was trained for emergencies, Jenny found herself paralyzed by worry.

Strangely, it wasn't fear for herself, or the people she was with.

It was for her husband.

Please, please, please, God, let him be okay.

DR. Lanz tore at his face, the burned flesh coming off in strips. The pain was unbearable, but not as overwhelming as the heavenly odor of his fried skin. Hunger pangs doubled him over, the agony even worse than the fire damage, and Lanz momentarily lost his self-control and began shoving his own toasted flesh into his mouth, including a walnut-size chunk that was quite possibly his nose.

Jenny.

That bitch nurse Jenny had done this to him. Jumbled as his thoughts were becoming, Lanz could still recall firing her ass. She'd had the audacity to question one of his treatments--right in front of the patient and the other nurses. Granted, he'd been a little coked up at the time and had inadvertently prescribed penicillin to someone who had an allergy, but he couldn't allow that kind of blatant insubordination. Not in his ER.

The bloody nurses' union tried to fight him on it, but Lanz had ultimately prevailed by threatening to walk. A bluff, but he knew the hospital needed him more than it needed some know-it-all nurse.

But she'd gotten back at Lanz. She'd burned him good.

No matter. Even as he peeled off his face and neck and shoved them into his toothy maw, he could feel the skin regenerating, regrowing.

I'm invincible. You think you can stop me, Nurse Bolton? I know how to deal with your insubordinate ass.

Gliding down the stairs, Lanz reached the basement. He'd brought Winslow down here a few times, let her blow him near the furnace. Even with the lights off, Lanz's vision was perfect. Yet another enhancement, courtesy of the virus. He hurried past the boilers, chewing on the charred flesh of his right hand, until he found what he sought.

The circuit breaker.

I can see in the dark, Nurse Bolton. Can you?

"HEY, kid!" Randall shouted. "Little girl!"

Crap! He limped down the hallway after her, cursing silently with each step. He couldn't blame a five-year-old kid for freaking out, and yet...okay, maybe he could. She was going to get both of them killed. If his leg wasn't so messed up he could've scooped her up in about three seconds, but she was already halfway down the hall, sobbing and screaming as she ran.

"Little girl!" he repeated, trying to use his friendliest tone of voice. "It's going to be okay! I can keep you safe!"
Also, little girl, there's a Santa Claus and an Easter Bunny and a Tooth Fairy.

He wasn't going to let her get eaten. No way in hell. He was going to return to Jenny with a safe little girl on his shoulders, no matter how many draculas he had to splatter to do it.

Though she was a fast little fucker, his legs were a lot longer, and he'd almost caught up to her by the time she rounded the corner. She darted into an open doorway, then screamed. Randall limped in after her.

He was in an office. A pretty nice one. Clearly the guy who used it worked with numbers instead of patients. Randall thought that might be him behind the desk, a bald middle-aged man with a dracula chewing on his neck.

The dracula's face was buried in its meal, and it didn't see them. Randall grabbed the little girl's hand and tugged her back out into the hallway...

...where six or seven creatures emerged around the far corner. Randall yanked the little girl back into the office and slammed the door shut.

Shit! Shit! Shit!

The dracula twisted its head and looked over at him, its mouth so laden with gore that Randall could barely see its fangs. It regarded him for a moment, then slammed its mouth back onto the number-cruncher's wound.

So they weren't homicidal. Just...hungry.

The door had a push-button lock on it. Randall quickly locked it but didn't feel all that much safer. He had no idea if those things in the hallway would come after him or not.

"It's okay," he told the little girl. "They can't break down a door."

He was saying that based on absolutely no proof. For all he knew, they were wandering around the hospital kicking down doors left and right. The little girl seemed to have gone from pure panic to frozen terror, which made things a little easier for him. He hoped her mind wasn't permanently damaged.

Randall still didn't know much about how these things behaved, but he figured this one was unlikely to finish guzzling the blood and then settle down for a long nap. He had to take the offensive instead of waiting for it to come after them.

Damn, he wished he still had his hatchet. Though the chainsaw had worked nicely before, it really wasn't intended to be used as a club, and he didn't want to ruin it before he had the opportunity to find some gas. He'd have to think smaller.

Screwdriver through the back of the head? That should do it.

He set the chainsaw on the floor and pulled the screwdriver out of his belt.

What if the change was only temporary? Randall hadn't felt any guilt about slaughtering the other monsters, but what if they could be saved? What if the dracula that was slurping blood right in front of him was a nice guy, with a wife and two kids at home, and this change--this horrific creature he had become--was reversible? Didn't that make Randall a murderer?

A fountain of crimson jettisoned from the office man's neck as the dracula opened a new vein. The dracula lapped at it greedily, letting it spray all over its face. Randall decided that he'd rather have a bothered conscience than his own body parts strewn across the hospital.