Dead on Arrival (2 page)

Plenty of people wore T-shirts and slippers in the hospital’s Food Court, so Alistair didn’t stand out.

There were people with bandages that covered injuries or operation scars. No visible blood anywhere, but he was aware of the smell. It was a metallic thrill in his nose and at the back of his throat – just the first stirrings of that hunger. It pulled his nerves taut, like guitar strings, and already he wanted more of the feeling.

He hadn’t had ProVamp since the day before. He needed to go back and look for his clothes, then take his ProVamp. And he wanted his phone. He had to phone Ruby. She would help him – she always did.

He went back towards the morgue, but stopped when he saw a group of people standing by the door leading into the morgue. A security guard spoke into a walkie-talkie, and a woman in a lab coat pointed at the door. Alistair slipped into a side corridor. There was a door open to his right and he went through it into a dark room.

He was in some kind of storeroom, with racks and racks of scrubs – the green outfits surgeons wore. He pulled some down and changed into them quickly, stuffing the jumper behind a stack of boxes. He pulled a green cap over his hair and
surgical boots onto his bare feet. Then he slipped out into the corridor and walked as confidently as he could away from the morgue. A nurse held a door open for him; it said ‘Staff only’. An ID badge swung against her chest. He didn’t have one.

The niggling desire for blood was growing into a real hunger. It was getting hard to think of anything else. He was in a hospital. It was full of people, and some of them must be bleeding. He could taste it in the air. He didn’t want to want it, but he did, and the strength of his wanting was growing stronger by the minute.

His feet drew him after the scent of blood, a scent so faint no ordinary person would have been able to tell it was there. But now his keen vampire senses made his awareness of blood as sharp as a shark’s, and the scent pulled him through corridors
towards A&E. He barely needed to glance around the waiting room to find someone bleeding. But the hunger was not yet so strong that it overpowered him. He knew he couldn’t do it here.

Two police officers talked urgently with a nurse sitting at a desk. Alistair backed against the wall, then edged out of the room unseen. Were they looking for him? He was supposed to be dead. Dead people don’t walk away. What do they do to dead people who aren’t dead? Would they have to kill him? He had no idea.

The terror of what they might do to him was greater than the desire for blood. He hurried away again, back into the maze of corridors. But how long would it be before his hunger for blood grew too strong to ignore?

It was not long. The scent of blood dragged Alistair into a ward, between curtains to a bed.

The woman in it was unconscious, or dead. He didn’t know which – he didn’t even care which. He wrenched a tube from her wrist and pulled her hand to his mouth.

His lips closed around the tiny needle hole on the inside of her wrist. He played his tongue over
the skin. It was salty, warm, with the iron tang of blood. He sucked hard, imagining the drops of red on his tongue, and his mouth filled with saliva. But so little came from her, such a tiny hole. It just made his hunger all the worse.

He knew he had to bite her. Though his mind said he shouldn’t, every fibre of his body screamed with the need to sink his teeth into her flesh and feel the blood flood into his mouth.

The woman hadn’t stirred. He bit into her arm. Her skin, papery and dry, at first dented under the pressure. Then he felt the click as his teeth punctured the skin and sank into flesh. The salty, metal taste swelled in his mouth, and made a noise like the sea in his head.

He sucked with such force that he felt he must
surely drain her.

Heady with the taste of it, he lifted his face. A large greyish-white circle had appeared around an ugly bite mark. It was not what he had expected. He’d seen so many vampire movies. Where were the neat puncture wounds, the two spots of blood? The edges of this wound were ragged, and the line of his tooth marks was uneven. His dentist was right – he needed braces.

But no more blood would come from the woman. He rubbed her arm. Nothing. It didn’t glow pink again, as a living arm would. The blood vessels had collapsed under the pressure of his sucking. What would happen now? He still needed more, but it wouldn’t come.

He put a hand on the woman’s bony chest. It
didn’t rise and fall. He felt her neck, longing to feel the promising pulse of blood moving beneath the skin. Nothing. The woman was dead. Had he killed her? Or had she been dead already? Alistair knew he should care, but he didn’t. He just wanted more. Why couldn’t he suck her dry? He struggled to marshall his thoughts, to work out what to do, but his mind returned only to the flood of red that he needed more than anything in the world.

Think, Alistair. What do you know? How can you
work this out
? he coaxed himself silently.
CSI. Think back to those CSI episodes. The bodies on the slab are pale, they are grey. Where does the blood go? Down! It goes down! Of course.
But the woman was lying flat, so the blood would be pooling at her back. That wasn’t easy to get.

He glanced around. It was hard to see just by the
glow of screens, but it was a hospital, there must be something sharp lying around that he could use.

He couldn’t find anything. His head was still swirling with the need for blood. He pulled aside the woman’s hospital gown, wrenching the loose back flap from beneath her and exposing flesh that was deep purply-red, plump with the promise of blood.

It was difficult to get his mouth into the right position to bite her, but with his cheek crushed against the trolley he could just manage it. This wasn’t like it was in the movies, either. Dracula never had his face mashed against a hospital trolley and his mouth gaping around the buttocks of a smelly old woman. It was disappointing. He’d thought it was going to be cool to be a vampire. This was more like being a junkie.

But he forgot all that in an instant. The woman’s skin was thin and burst easily under his teeth this time, like a ripe raspberry. Blood poured into his mouth, flowing around his teeth and over his tongue. He pressed, sucked, drew in so much it made his head light.

It took longer this time to suck out all he could. He wanted to move along her body, bite again, but there was a noise somewhere outside. He raised his head, tilting it to listen, like a wild animal disturbed. Footsteps. He pulled his mouth away quickly.

Somewhere a light turned on. A ghostly glow filled the cubicle and he saw there was not a trace of blood visible on the body. He slipped out. Curtains around another bed shifted as someone behind them moved around. No one saw him leave the ward.

Alistair felt a warm glow from the blood. It was as though every part of his body had been bathed in hot, holiday sun. But he still wanted more. That made it difficult to think.

For nearly an hour he walked the corridors, learning the layout of the hospital. He must not attract attention. He must look as if he knew where he was going, though he didn’t.

He followed two nurses to the staff canteen. Most people were talking in groups, but one or two sat alone reading the paper or poking at their phones.

He took a cup of water and sat at a table. No one looked at him. After a while, a young man about his age left his security pass and newspaper on a table and joined a queue. Alistair stood up, brushed past the table so that both things fell to the floor, then picked them up. He returned the paper to the table, but hid the pass in his hand. Outside, he looped the lanyard over his head, turning the photo towards his chest, and strode quickly down the corridor.

He drifted back towards the morgue, but the area was still crowded. There was even a policeman. He walked past quickly, head down, and turned a
corner. What were the police doing there? Was it because he had stolen a jumper? He wanted to return it and make them go away.

Suddenly he wanted to see Ruby. She would know what to do. He had no idea how to get home, but he knew it had to be a long way. He had no money for a bus.

Panic twisted Alistair’s stomach and he felt suddenly sick and cold. He didn’t want this to be happening any more. It wasn’t an adventure, it was scary and strange.

All he was allowed to do was be dead, and he couldn’t even get that right: he had got himself un-dead and started walking about.

He liked to know what was happening and what would happen next. But now he was stuck
walking around a hospital. Eight hundred years, Ignace told him he would live. Eight hundred years walking around a hospital was going to get boring. It was boring already.

The nurse ushered Ruby into another room. It didn’t look like a normal hospital room. It had wallpaper and a bowl of flowers, and comfy chairs.

‘Where’s this?’ Ruby asked.

‘It’s called the mortuary viewing room,’ the nurse said. ‘It’s where we bring the deceased person to be identified or viewed by relatives.’

They waited five minutes, then ten, and still the doctor didn’t come back.

‘What’s happening?’ Ruby asked the nurse. ‘When can I see my brother?’

The nurse fetched the doctor. His professional calm was gone. He looked worried and flustered as he ran a hand over his balding head.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what’s happened – I can’t explain it. The body isn’t where it should be.’

‘Perhaps he’s not dead!’ Ruby said. ‘Perhaps he got better and –’

‘No. He was certainly dead. We don’t make mistakes like that in a hospital.’

‘Well, you obviously make
some
kind of mistakes, if a dead person can go missing,’ Ruby snapped.

The doctor spread his fingers.

‘I’ll see what I can discover.’

Ruby didn’t want to wait any longer, but what else could she do? Two policemen arrived, but they walked straight past her into the room she now realised was the morgue. As the door opened, a blast of cold air hit her.

At last, the doctor, the nurse and a policeman led Ruby into another room. Alistair’s clothes lay on a table. Blood smeared the shoulder of his grey sweatshirt, and his trainers were wet with mud.

‘Are these your brother’s clothes?’ the doctor asked. Ruby nodded. Tears pricked her eyes. She didn’t trust herself to speak.

‘And these?’ Alistair’s things lay in a small plastic
tray. It was impossible that they could look so impersonal, so ordinary. So like – well, just things. His phone was crushed. He wouldn’t be happy about that, Ruby thought. And then the tears fell. She so hoped he was alive to be unhappy about it.

‘I’m sorry,’ the doctor said. ‘I have to ask you – can you tell me what these are?’

He pointed to two ProVamp capsules in the tray.

Oh no,
thought Ruby
. Wherever he is, he doesn’t have ProVamp. How long will he last?

‘Are they a prescribed medication? Can you tell us what they’re for?’ the doctor asked.

Should she tell them? She looked at the doctor’s face, trying to work out what to do.

‘Do you know?’ he persisted. ‘Was he a drug abuser?’

Ruby shook her head.

‘OK. Never mind. We’ll send them to the lab.’

‘He’ll need them if he comes back,’ she said at last.

‘He isn’t going to come back,’ the nurse said, laying a hand on Ruby’s arm. Ruby shook it off.

‘He’s not dead!’ she shouted. ‘You’ve not got his body, have you? Dead people don’t just walk off. He’s obviously not dead, and you need to find him because he’s hurt and he’ll need his medicine.’

‘What’s the medicine for?’ the doctor persisted.

‘It’s for blood,’ Ruby said. It was sort of true.

‘He had a blood disorder? What did he have?’

Ruby shrugged, pretending not to know. They all looked at the tray of Alistair’s belongings.

‘Can we take some details from you, please?’ the policeman said at last. But then the door opened and another doctor came in.

‘There’s been an incident on one of the wards. Please come.’

Ruby was left alone with the nurse again.

Alistair noticed something different about the hospital. The medical people in the corridors were tense and looked around anxiously.

He went to the staff canteen again and stood looking at a noticeboard, listening to the chatter as he drank a cup of water. The police were looking for someone, he heard – someone who did things to dead bodies. Someone who had stolen one corpse and mutilated another. Security would be
tightened.

Alistair drained his plastic cup and left without looking at anyone.

He saw a policeman and hurried away, up some stairs, along a corridor, turned left, turned right – going anywhere. He touched his stolen ID to a card reader and swung open a door into a darkened ward. Each little side room held a single patient. A nurse on the central desk stared at her computer screen and didn’t look up.

Alistair ducked into one of the rooms.

The table was covered with cards and a helium balloon drooped on a ribbon. A handmade card said in childish lettering, ‘
Please get well Helena xxxx
’.

Helena was beautiful. Her long, dark hair lay plaited at the side of her head. She looked more than asleep. Tubes went into her nose and mouth, and a cobweb of wires joined her to monitors.

Excitement stirred in Alistair. Her hand was warm. He lifted it, touched the skin with his tongue and felt that electric thrill again. He remembered Ruby having a large red mark on her neck, long before they had become vampires.

‘You can suck so hard you break blood vessels under the skin,’ she’d said. ‘Watch.’ And she’d shown him how to do it on his own arm. He wanted to do it now to Helena.

He sucked harder and harder. He had the taste but not the blood.

Ignace had told them that vampires used to file
their teeth to points because biting through skin isn’t easy. He’d already discovered that. Perhaps he would have to start filing his teeth.
You never see vampires doing that in movies
, he thought,
just like you never see people go to the loo, but they must do it
. ‘All you need,’ Ignace had said to them, ‘is a puncture wound. A tiny hole – something you can suck from.’

That was what Alistair needed now.

He grabbed surgical scissors from a tray. His hand shook so much as he jabbed the pointed blade into the girl’s arm that he sliced his own finger too. His blood leaked slowly, one or two drops mixing with hers. He lowered his mouth to the cut and sucked.

A noise startled him, but he couldn’t stop, not
now. Someone was walking outside the door. He sucked harder, desperate to get all he could before it was too late.

At the click of the door handle he jerked his head away, and crouched beside the bed. A nurse walked in and looked at the monitors. Then her mouth opened in an ‘O’ shape as she saw Alistair.

She reached towards the alarm button by the bed, but he caught her ankle and dragged her to the ground. The nurse screamed once, and Alistair slapped his hand over her mouth and held it there.

‘Shhhh.’

The woman kicked out, and tore open the back of his hand with her fingernails. She tried to scream, tried to bite him, but Alistair just pressed
harder on her face.

He didn’t dare let her go – she would scream. What if someone had heard her and was coming already?

The woman went limp. He pulled his hand away in horror.
Is she dead? She can’t be dead!

He scrabbled to his feet and ran out of the door. At the far end of the ward, two male nurses talked together. They looked up, and it took all the power Alistair could gather to walk slowly from the ward.

The men were already walking towards Helena’s bed as the door to the ward closed behind him.