Bitten (2 page)

Hector sat on the padded bench in the nurse’s office. It smelled like a clinic. As if everything, from the floors to the walls, had been sterilized but the stench of sickness still lingered in the air. It even had a white vinyl curtain that divided two small cots.

Mrs. Jensen was standing nearby talking to the school nurse, Ms. Carlyle. Ms. Carlyle was a short, stout, and sturdily built woman with black curly hair that always seemed to look wet. Her dark eyebrows gave her a stern look, as if she was perpetually angry about something, but Hector knew that she was secretly funny. She could make all the kids laugh, no matter what.

“So what bit you?” Ms. Carlyle asked. Before he could speak, she added, “I bet a little monkey bit you.”

“No, Mike Laurie did,” Hector answered.

Ms. Carlyle raised an eyebrow and shot Hector a slightly devious look.

“As I suspected,” she said in a firm tone of voice, “a monkey
did
bite you.”

Hector smiled. Mrs. Jensen just rolled her eyes and tried
desperately not to grin. Teachers weren’t supposed to have favorites, but secretly they did.

Ms. Carlyle placed the thermometer under Hector’s arm. It felt cold in his armpit.

“Don’t worry,” Ms. Carlyle said. “Your mom will be here soon to pick you up.”

Mrs. Jensen smiled warmly and winked at Hector.

Rachael Ramirez pulled up to her son’s school in her glistening silver Audi Q7. She had always told herself she wouldn’t be one of those lawyers who went out and bought a gas guzzling SUV, but after just one test drive she fell in love. It had leather heated seats. Most of all, its sturdy frame and size made her feel safe. That was the real reason she bought a big ole SUV. It wasn’t to look prestigious. It was because she was desperately terrified of being on the losing end of another car wreck.

Rachael brushed
her silky-smooth black hair out of her face and put the car in park. Looking out her window she saw Hector waiting for her on the steps of the school with Mrs. Jensen. Rachael waved, and then leaned over and opened the passenger door for Hector to climb in.

Mrs. Jensen brought Hector over and held the door as he climbed in
.

“Thank you for taking care of him,” Rachael said as she rubbed Hector’s head messing up his hair. Without saying anything Hector instantly started fixing it.

“It was my pleasure,” replied Mrs. Jensen, smiling warmly. “It seems he’s come down with a slight fever, but Ms. Carlyle said a bowl of chicken soup would clear it right up.”

“Oh, baby,” Rachael said looking down at Hector. “Do you feel sick?”

“I’m alright,” Hector answered.

“Be good to your mom now, you hear?”

“Yes, Mrs. Jensen,” Hector said blushing a little.

“Promise?”

“Promise,” Hector answered.

“Good,” Mrs. Jensen said. With that, she shut the door, waved goodbye to them both, and then went back inside the school.

“Buckle up,” Rachael told Hector, but like any over protective mother, she found herself leaning over the seat and reaching for Hector’s seat belt for him.

“
Ahhh, mom!
” Hector protested. “I can do it myself.”

Hector grabbed the seatbelt and defiantly
fastened himself in. His mother just looked at him with a big grin which only showed a small fraction of how proud she was. Not only to be his mother, but to be lucky enough to have him in her life.

“Sure you can,” Rachael said with a warm laugh.

“I’m not a little kid anymore, Mom.”

“But you’ll always be my baby,” Rachael retorted.

She started up the V8 engine and the car roared to life. Hector finished fastening his seatbelt and stared out the window at an empty school lot.

“Sorry I was so late
. Things ran long with a client,” Rachael said as they drove off.

“Don’t worry, mom,” Hector said, trying to scratch under the cuff of his bandage. “I wasn’t worried.”

Arriving safely at Hillside Parks Condominium, Rachael carried her sleeping boy, curled up in her arms, into the lobby of their building and waited for the elevator. The poor kid, she thought, was coming down with something. His complexion looked much paler than usual.

Entering
the elevator Rachael leaned against the guard railing and reached down with one arm, smashed the button with her elbow, then balancing Hector on her shoulder, she slipped off her high heels. Pinching them between her thumb and finger, she waited for the doors to close and take them to the sixteenth floor.

Rachael shifted Hector to her other shoulder and
then the elevator jerked to a halt. Walking into the hall Rachael took a right and walked down the hallway to the suite doors at the end. She pressed her thumb down on the biometrics scanner next to the door, barely holding onto her heels as she fumbled to keep everything balanced. It lit up with a green laser, scanned her thumb like a barcode, and the deadbolt automatically unhinged. Once inside, Rachael kicked the door shut with the heel of her foot. Taking Hector to his room she gently laid him onto his bed, took his shoes off, then pulled the comforter over him and tucked him in.

Admiring Hector’s boyish face she brushed his dark hair out of his eyes so she could take a mental picture of her beautiful baby boy. He was growing up so fast. As her hand brushed his
forehead she noticed that he was burning up with a horrendous fever.

Rachael fetched
a cool wet washcloth and gently laid it across her son’s forehead to help bring down his fever. Next she poured out a glass of water and set it on the nightstand by his bed, just in case he needed it later.

“Meow!” a small voice called out. Their cat Trixie, a
silky gray Russian Blue, leapt onto the end of the bed and circled a few times before curling up next to Hector’s feet. Rachael scratched behind Trixie’s ear and affectionately rubbed her hand down the cat’s soft back. Trixie immediately began purring softly as she licked her paws and bathed. After a few minutes of self grooming she closed her eyes and dozed off.

“You two sleep tight,” Rachael said, in an almost whisper. She stood up and admired the warm scene of her son and cat curled up on the same bed together.
Rachael smiled and turned off the bedroom lights. Closing the door to Hector’s room behind her, she left it open just a crack in case her sleeping boy called out for her in the middle of the night.

Rachael
went into the kitchen and poured herself a large glass of wine and checked her messages on the answering machine that sat on the counter. Nothing of interest, except for a strange message from Jennifer Hurley who urgently requested, demanded rather, they bump up their next meeting to nine am tomorrow morning. This woman was insatiable. The stressful phone message prompted Rachael to pour herself a second glass of wine. The wine helped, but she was still wound up. Her neck was tight. Her shoulders stiff. What she wouldn’t give to have a neck massage right about now. Her husband always used to give the greatest neck massages.

Feeling warm and tingly, Rachael pulled up her skirt and reached down between her legs. She poured herself a third glass with one hand as she attended to herself with the other. Finishing her fourth glass of wine,
and feeling quite good, Rachael went to pour herself another glass but the bottle had run dry.

With a disappointed sig
h she stood up, thinking she ought to at least take a shower before bed, and stumbled forward. Her legs wobbled, partly from being too tipsy but also partly from miniature orgasm she had set off. Brushing her skirt down, she made her way to the bathroom. With a carefree attitude she pulled off her clothes and let them fall where they may, leaving small piles on the floor as she went.

By the time Rachael entered the bathroom
the only thing she had on was her black lace lingerie she had bought at Victoria’s Secret. It made her feel both professional and sexy all at the same time. Unhooking her bra she let the straps slide off her shoulders and let the bra slip off and fall to the floor. Using her curled up toes she picked it up and flicked it away with her foot. Sliding her panties down, a wet patch glistening where her moisture had soaked through, she stepped out of them and into the shower.

It all
BEGAN sometime
yesterday afternoon, Alyssa recalled. Without warning, the animal clinic’s phones were ringing off the hooks with reports of dog bites from all over the city. Soon enough reports of other animal bites were coming in as well. Strange ones like bats and cats too. It seemed everyone and their dog was getting bit—literally.

Her boss, Dr. Beckford, had b
een bitten by an extremely wild-eyed Japanese Ainu dog sometime early yesterday afternoon. Dr. Beckford diagnosed the dog as positive for rabies and, to err on the side of caution, immediately began himself on a post-exposure prophylaxis treatment. But due to the sudden rush of bite cases flooding in, he didn’t want to risk a city-wide epidemic and decided to work late, burn the candle from both ends, as he liked to say. Sending Alyssa home early to get some rest so she would be ready to handle the pile up the next morning, Beckford opted to stay late and personally oversee the animals.

Alyssa
arrived at work at five a.m. the next morning and, as per usual, put on a fresh pot of coffee. She spent the next few minutes writing down the events of the past day in her diary, a small purple leather-bound book with flowery stenciling on the cover. She kept it under the front desk where she could jot down thoughts and reflections or just interesting events.

After pouring herself a cup of
Joe, she tucked the diary into her back pocket, threw on her white lab coat, and went to the kennels to check on the animals. All the animals seemed to be more than a little restless. Worried as to what this might mean she went to fetch Doctor Beckford. Luckily he was in his office. When she stumbled upon him she found him hunched over his desk. She couldn’t quite make out what he was doing. At first Alyssa had thought Blackford was bent over doing some paperwork on his clipboard instead of the desk top. An old habit from working in the field so much that she teased him about. But it wasn’t that.

Approaching the desk she realized he was attending to one of the smaller animals. Being the loving doctor he was, h
e would often let his favorite pick of the day out of its kennel to get some fresh air and exercise.

The doctor bent over and Alyssa watched as he put his mouth to it.
Oh, no, Alyssa thought. One of the newborn pups must have stopped breathing in the night and he was trying to use resuscitate it using CPR. That’s when she heard the hideous sound of bones crunching.

The pit of Alyssa’s
stomach bottomed out. Calling the Dr. Beckford’s name, she took a step closer, trying to get a clearer view of what he was doing. He didn’t reply.

“Dr. Beckford!” she called out, louder than before. But
he remained unresponsive. Walking up to him from behind, she placed her hand on his shoulder and leaned over to see what he was doing.

Alyssa let out a shriek and reeled back as she
reflexively gagged, covering her mouth as not to let herself vomit. Her horror-filled shriek aroused the doctor’s attention, and looking up with blood stained chops, he stared at her with a morbid gaze from behind awful whitish eyes. Even his pupils had fogged over with the eerie milky white.

The bowels of the puppy he was gnawing on were torn to
ribbons and dangled between the doctor’s blood-stained fingers. The doctor growled at her and stood up. Scared for her life, Alyssa reached for the closest object she could find. It was a stapler. She clutched it tight as the doctor moaned and proceeded to limp toward her. Alyssa stepped back to keep a safe distance between them.

“Look, I don’t know what’s going on here, Mr.
Beckford, but if this is some kind of a joke … it’s not very funny.”

It was no joke.
The doctor growled and bared his blood soaked teeth, as if to prove it to her. In the animal kingdom showing one’s teeth was a sign of aggression. Alyssa stepped back again but the doctor suddenly lurched toward her. Panicking, Alyssa chucked the stapler at him and it pelted him in the head.

“Graaahr!” growled the doctor, stretching out his arms and fingers to grab her.
Moaning and snarling he took rigid steps toward her, closing the distance between them.

Scurrying back s
he frantically looked around for something else which she might use to defend herself. Picking up the doctor’s umbrella she quickly held it out and used it as a makeshift shield to deflect the growling maniac’s clawing arms and fingers.

“Why? Why are you doing this?” Alyssa asked, tears bleeding from the corners of her eyes.
She had never seen a case of rabies act this quickly before—especially not after a dose of treatment. Whatever this contagion was, it was new, and deadly.

Backing up cautiously, Alyssa neglected to see the
Internet chord running to the computer behind her and tripped over it. She fell backward and crashed into the glass medicine cabinet which ran along the side of Dr. Beckford’s office wall. The sheer weight of her body fell into the cabinet with a violent force. Her right elbow smashed through the glass of the cabinets and caused the whole thing to wobble uncontrollably. Teetering, the cabinet violently pitched forward and toppled onto her.

Lucky for her, she was spared the crushing weight of the cabinet when it suddenly caught on the doctor’s desk. Stilted upon the desk the cabinet, s
pecimen jars of animal skeletons, sheep eyes, a pickled pig’s head, and a preserved fetus of a calf all came sliding off the shelves and shattered all around her. Pinned underneath the heavy medicine cabinet, in her anxiety ridden state, she looked around at the organic horrors littering the floor about her and gasped. It all looked like the trophy case of a mad witch-doctor.

In the tumult, a long jagged piece of glass
had broken off from one of the window panes and pierced Alyssa’s right thigh. Before she could even react to the searing pain of serrated glass tearing into the meat of her leg, a snarling Dr. Beckford’s hand clutched her ankle.

Alyssa screamed as she looked down to see
Beckford’s blood soaked teeth clacking at the open air as he tried to pull her into them. His jaws snapped at her relentlessly, like a crazed shark driven mad by the scent of fresh blood. Tearing at her clothes, the mad doctor managed to get a hold of her white lab coat, and drug her back.

Thinking fast,
Alyssa tore the shard of glass out of her leg with a yelp and, using it like the blade of a knife, slammed it down onto the doctor’s hand. It went straight through his flesh and pinned his hand to the floor. Alyssa looked at him in horror as he continued to try and grab at her with his free hand. What was wrong with him? Even pain didn’t seem to register. He just kept tearing at her jacket trying to sink his meat hooks into her.

Kicking her feet, Alyssa managed to wriggle her way out of the white lab coat and backpedalled her way out from under
neath the cabinet. Crawling on her hands and knees, Alyssa scrambled toward the door. Looking back to see whether or not the doctor was pursuing her, she barely noticed her purple diary lying under the cabinet.

“Shit,” Alyssa grumbled.

Stumbling to her feet, glass popping under her heavy footsteps, Alyssa hobbled back toward the cabinet. Reaching underneath, she snatched up the diary. Beckford tore his hand from the glass spike without so much as a whimper and began thrashing and clawing at her. Squeezing himself under the cabinet, he tried to follow her, but got himself wedged in. Growling in anger, he snarled at her.

Alyssa
held her purple diary to her chest and watched the crazed Dr. Beckford flounder to get himself unlogged from the small trap he’d mindlessly gotten himself in. Not knowing how long it would take him to get free, Alyssa spun around and, feet crunching on broken glass, she fled from the room. She didn’t dare look back.

Limping
down the hallway, Alyssa stopped to tear out some remaining slivers of pesky glass. Groaning as she tore each agonizing piece out, she dropped the shards of glass onto the checkered linoleum floor and watched as blood seeped out from her leg wound.

Alyssa
pressed down on the gash with her palm, hard, to try and stop the bleeding. But she knew she would need stitches. That’s when the doctor stumbled out of his office like a drunkard and snarled at her.

Alyssa
screamed so loud that it frightened the rest of the animals. Suddenly the whole clinic was in an uproar. She quickly limped away as fast as she could with a crazed Dr.  Beckford hot on her heals. Sensing he was gaining on her, her fright and flight instinct kicked in and she ducked into the nearest room she could find—the dog kennels.

Sweat glistened on Alyssa’s sternum as she tugged on her tank top to let cool air lap at her skin.
Even though her shock was finally beginning to wear off now, her thoughts were struggling to grapple with how strange the events of the past forty-eight hours had been.

Alyssa couldn’t believe she had survived the
terrible string of unfortunate events the day had brought. Everything from the doctor’s going insane, then being attacked, getting injured in the assault, fearing for her life, finding a first-aid kit in the dark amid snapping jowls, stitching herself up, and the worst part of it all, being the only one to escape the kennels with her life intact. At least her morning couldn’t get any worse, she told herself.

Lo
oking back over her shoulder she watched as the animal clinic went up in flames. The poor animal she’d used the flare gun on burned along with all the rest. Ominous black smoke streamed out of every orifice of the clinic and rose into the sky like the sundry heads of a wraithlike hydra.

The thought of those poor animals burning alive weighed heavily on her. It seemed so cruel and inhumane
to just let them die like that. If she could have put the animals to sleep somehow, save them from the misery the flames caused, that would have at least made her feel better.

She was still having difficulty figuring out
just exactly what was going on. What was with the sudden bite cases? Rabies can be spread through a bite, sure. But like most contagious disease it had a gestation period. She had never heard of a strain that acted so quickly. It seemed the moment someone was bit they almost instantaneously began feeling the effects of the virus. She had never seen anything like it.

And what the hell happened to Dr. Beckford? None of it made any sense.
Even having been bitten, there was still no way the virus could have taken him so quickly. It just wasn’t possible. But he had gone completely cannibal-crazed eat-your-face mad in less than twenty-four hours. It all seemed like a bad dream.

Standing in the parking lot Alyssa
looked around at the pines which lined either side of the road. It was all so quiet. In fact, apart from the light wisp of the breeze and the crackle of flames, there were no sounds at all. Certainly someone would have called the fire department by now, she thought. But nothing. No wail of sirens or blare of horns. Not even a curious spectator loitering on the side of the road to watch the small clinic on the outskirts of town burn up. Instead, only a deep lingering silence filled the air like the calm before a storm, which, in Alyssa’s opinion, was always a bad omen.