One of the cops inspected it, and then said, “Okay, doc,” and stood back to let him pass. “Honest to God, thoughâI don't know what the hell you think you can do.”
Frank crossed the sidewalk and pushed open the blood-smeared plastic doors. To reach the emergency room, he had to negotiate his way through a shoal of abandoned gurneys, most of them covered in blood and bloody blankets. Inside, the whole world had turned red. Patients were lying six deep in the corridors, noisily bringing up blood. The whole emergency room was plastered in scarletâthe floors, the walls, and even the ceilings. There were red
handprints everywhere. Everybody's clothes were soaked in blood, and many of the patients looked as if they were wearing bright red gloves and bright red masks, like revelers at some grisly pagan carnival.
Frank pulled back curtain after curtain, until he found Dean Garrett in a cubicle at the far end of the ER. Dean was bending over a young Puerto Rican woman who was blowing bubbles of blood with every breath. Dean's clothes were soaked in blood, too, and he looked beaten.
“Doctor, I will not die?” the young woman was asking him. “I am so afraid . . . I cannot bear to think that I will never see the sun again.”
Dean laid his hand on her forehead, and tried to smile. “You'll see the sun, don't you worry. This time next month, you'll be sitting on your rooftop in your bikini, and I'll come around to make sure.”
Frank said, “Hi, Dean.”
Dean turned around and blinked at him. “Ohâhi, Frank. Glad you could make it. Mind you, I think we need more priests than doctors.” He took Frank's arm and steered him away from the young woman's bed. “They're
dying
, Frank. All of them. They haven't announced it on the TV yet, but this disease is one hundred percent fatal, whatever it is, and there's nothing we can do to stop it.”
“Nothing from the labs yet?”
“So far, they're totally baffled. Every victim's blood shows signs of this metallo-enzyme, but they're beginning to think it's a symptom, rather than a cause.”
“Where's George?”
“Up on Eleventh, helping with autopsies.”
“How many negative outcomes so far?”
“Up until 11:45 we'd admitted seven hundred seventeen patients, which is over ten times our capacity. At a rough guess, I'd say that we've already lost more than half. They seem to succumb much more rapidly, too. It's like a forest
fire. Likeâthe more people that catch it, the faster they die. Round about now, I'd say that most patients are dead within four to five hours of admission.”
Frank looked around. He didn't know what to say. Some people were still retching and sicking up blood, but most of them were lying pale-faced and shivering, as if they knew what was going to happen to them, but were too weak even to cry.
“You're bleeding,” said Dean.
Frank peered at his elbow. “Nothing serious. Some girl attacked me with a piece of glass. It's like hell out there, believe me. They must be fifty deep, trying to force their way in here.”
Dean led the way through to his office. One woman was sitting against the wall and three women were lying on the floor, all of them trembling and muttering. Dean's desk was strewn with blood-stained, crumpled papers. “There's no point in us taking any more in,” he said, dragging out his chair and sitting down. “We can't do anything for them, except hold their hands while they die.”
“Maybe it'll burn itself out like the Spanish influenza did in 1918.”
“The Spanish influenza died out because there was nobody left alive to catch it. I don't know. I don't have any idea what this is, Frank. I can't understand how it spreads and I can't work out why it makes people want to drink human blood.”
“Maybe the TV people aren't so far wrong. Maybe it
is
vampires.”
“Oh, sure. Nosferatu's Syndrome. Lookâyou'd better let me put a dressing on that cut.”
Frank took off his coat and rolled up his blood-soaked shirt-sleeve. Dean swabbed the cut with alcohol and examined it closely. “You were lucky. A quarter-inch to the left and she would have opened up your radial artery.” He applied
a nonadhesive dressing and bound it with tape. One of the women on the floor coughed and said, “
Tatal nostru
. . .”
“Has anybody found out what that means?” asked Frank.
Dean shook his head. “We've been overwhelmed, Frank. We're still overwhelmed.”
“But they're
all
saying it. Everybody who catches this disease. I mean, don't you think that needs looking into?”
“You're absolutely right, it does. But not by me, and not tonight.”
Frank left Dean in his office and took a tour around the ER and all the surrounding wards. In the new-admissions bay, patients were retching and crying out in despair, or furiously babbling to themselves, while exhausted nurses went from one bed to another, trying to keep them as quiet and as comfortable as they could. Until they knew what was causing this epidemic, there was nothing else they could do. Frank stepped carefully over blood-drenched bodies that were packed together in the corridors. Some of them were moaning or praying but most of them were very close to death and were silently staring at the ceiling. Emergency technicians patrolled the corridors, checking the patients who were lying on the floor, shaking them if necessary to see if they were still breathing. Every now and then, one of the technicians would stand up and beckon for the porters, and yet another body would be lifted up and wheeled away to the morgue, draped like a store-window dummy in a bloodstained sheet.
The stench was so strong that Frank had to press his hand over his face. Even though he had been practicing gastric medicine for eleven years, he had never become inured to the smell of decomposing fleshâunlike George, who could happily cut open a slippery gray-green corpse without even wearing a face mask, and whistle
Annie Laurie
while he did it. Frank was always convinced that the smell of death lingered on his hands and in his hair, even
after three or even four successive showers. The women in his life had often caught him sniffing his fingers, but he had never told them why he did it. He hadn't wanted them to think that when he made love to them, his hands might still smell like dead men and women.
He gagged, but his stomach was empty, and so he didn't bring up anything but acid-tasting bile. The back of his throat felt as if somebody had forced a carpenter's rasp down it, and his skin prickled. He was so shivery that he began to wonder if he had a temperature. He could feel sweat sliding down his back and into his waistband.
A man on the floor painfully lifted up his head and stared at him. The man had a beard of dried blood and his eyes were unfocused. “
De strigoica, de strigoi
,” he said, hoarsely. “
Si de case cu moroi
.”
“What?” said Frank, hunkering down beside him. “What are you trying to say?”
“
De deochetori . . . si de deochetoare
. . .” the man wheezed, but then his head fell back and he lay staring at the dying woman next to him, and gasping for breath.
Frank stood up. He still couldn't work out what language these people were speaking, but he was convinced that it had to be a critical clue. What condition causes people to speak in tongues that nobody has taught them, and nobody understands? Only demonic possession, as far as he knew, and he certainly didn't believe in
that
.
God, he was thirsty. He pushed aside a gaggle of abandoned wheelchairs until he reached the Coke machine. He took out three quarters, but before he inserted the first one into the slot he thought:
I don't want a Coke
. The very thought of swallowing Coke made him feel hotter, and his skin more irritable.
I need something else. Something that will really refresh me.
A porter went past, pushing the body of a young blonde woman on a gurney. He was short and podgy, with dark circles under his eyes, and his face was waxy with tiredness.
His overall was spattered in so much blood that he looked like a butcher.
“How's it going?” Frank asked him.
The porter stopped, and wiped his nose with his blood-streaked forearm. “We can't help them, can we? All we can do is watch them kick the bucket and then wheel them off to the morgue.”
“Here,” said Frank. He took hold of the front of the gurney, and helped the porter to steer it along the corridor. If he couldn't do anything to help the dead, he might as lend a hand to the living.
He pushed open the heavy swing doors of the morgue. It was chilly and gloomy inside, and one of the fluorescent lights was blinking on and off. All of the chiller compartments must have been filled by now, because bodies were being wrapped up in sheets with only their faces showing, and then laid out in lines on the floor, as tidily as possible. There was only one morgue attendant on dutyâa tall brunette woman with small oval glasses and a Roman nose. She looked as exhausted as the porter, and she had a large red cold-sore on her upper lip.
“Brought you another one,” said Frank. “Where do you want her?”
“Any place here is fine,” said the morgue attendant, pointing to a row of women's bodies on the right-hand side of the room. “I'm trying to keep the men and the women separate.”
“In case of what?” asked the porter. “Post-extinction hanky-panky?”
“Out of respect,” said the morgue attendant. “Or maybe that's something they don't teach you in porter school.”
The porter left, banging the gurney loudly against the swing doors. The morgue attendant bent over the woman that he and Frank had just brought in, and checked the label attached to her big toe. “Jane Kryzmanski, 1143 West Thirty-eighth Street. Aged twenty-four. God, what a waste.”
Frank looked around at the blood-stained bodies. “I don't think I ever felt so helpless in my life.”
“You're a doctor?”
Frank nodded. “Frank Winter, gastroenterology.”
“Good to know you, doctor. Helen Bryers. We don't have any idea what's causing this yet, do we?”
“No. Whatever it is, it seems to be very difficult to isolate.”
“It's a bad dream,” said Helen Bryers. “I keep thinking I'm going to wake up, and none of this will have happened.”
You and me both
, thought Frank. But then maybe he was dreaming her, and she didn't even exist. “How many cadavers do we have here now?” he asked her.
“Three hundred sixty-nine, including this young lady. There's over a hundred out back, in the storeroom. We're going to have to ship them out soon, before they become a major health hazard. I'm waiting to hear about refrigerated trucks.”
Frank walked between the bodies. Each of them was a personal tragedy, but right now they were nothing but numbers, and the numbers kept on piling up.
Helen Bryers said, “Could you do something for me, doctor? I hate to ask you, but I haven't had time to go to the bathroom in over four hours.”
“You want me to babysit?”
“Both of my colleagues went off-duty and they still haven't come back and I'm not supposed to leave the morgue unattended.”
“Just in case one of your charges tries to make a run for it, right?”
She took off her glasses and tried to smile. “It's the rule, ever since that unpleasantness last year.”
“I'm sorry?”
“We had some very distressing incidents . . . casual cleaning staff taking advantage of deceased patients.
Intimate
advantage.”
Frank suddenly became aware that he was staring at Helen Byers' neck, and at the pale blue line of her carotid artery. He could imagine the warm blood pulsing through her system, pumped by her heart, and the thought was strangely soothing.
Drinking blood . . . it must be like lowering your body into a warm, deep bath.
He blinked. “Ohâyou mean
that
unpleasantness?” he said, abruptly realizing what she was talking about. “Yes, I heard about it. I guess some guys are so lacking in charisma, the only women who are going to fall for them are dead.”
“Then it's all right if Iâ?”
“Sure, go ahead. Take your time. You look like you could use a break.”
Helen Byers took her purse and left Frank alone in the morgue. He supposed that he should have refused her request, and returned to the ER to help Dean, or gone upstairs to assist George. But somehow it all seemed so hopeless. No matter what they did, they didn't know how to stop all these people from dying, and maybe they were better off dead. Most people were.
He caught sight of himself in a glass-fronted cabinet, and stared at his reflection as if he didn't recognize himself.
Most people were better off dead?
Why on earth had he thought that? He was supposed to be a doctor. He was supposed to do everything in his power to keep people alive. He rubbed his arm. His skin felt uncomfortably hot, as if he were suffering from sunburn, and his thirst was so fierce that he found it difficult to swallow.
He looked down at the body of a middle-aged woman in a gray-and-white summer dress, stained brown with blood. She was quite handsome, with a well-cut bob, and she had obviously had some cosmetic surgery done around her eyes. Not much use where she was going, thought Frank . . . she should have saved her money. Her eyes were wide
open, but all the color seemed to have drained out of them. Whatever she was staring at, it wasn't in this world.
As he turned away from her, he heard a noise in the storage room at the back of the morgue. A clatter, and then a sharp bang, like a stool falling over.
“Anybody there?” he called out. He didn't think it was likely. Helen Byers had told him that she was on her own, and the ER technicians knew what they were doing: They wouldn't have sent anybody to the morgue if they weren't one hundred percent sure that life was extinct.
But then he heard another sound, like a window-bar rattling; and he was sure that he could feel a sudden draft of warm air. The sirens sounded louder, too.