Sandy Albrecht and Fred Jenkins tore open the doors of their ambulance, yanked the gurney out and practically rammed it through the sliding doors into the ER of Saint James Hospital. As soon as they passed the vestibule Sandy was shouting for a doctor. "We’ve got a severely wounded black male, late twenties going cardiac on us!"
Jenkins, more sedate than his partner, had been a Paramedic for nearly twelve years, so he allowed Sandy to vent as he kept an eye on their patient. As they moved the gurney into a cubicle and lifted the man, moaning and bleeding from several wounds, to the bed, Jenkins looked at his partner and shook his head. The man’s lips were going pale, as were his extremities. He’d lost a lot of blood from the wounds, especially the one to the throat. While Sandy went for a Doctor, he unplugged the bag of blood expander and plugged in a new one. The wounded man, whose name they didn’t know – he had no I.D. on him – thrashed and moaned. Jenkins cursed out loud. They’d given him a shot of morphine, but it didn’t seem to be working. As he was getting ready to do CPR, he felt the man was going to code any second, Doctor Shiva arrived. A petite Indian woman, she’d saved more patients than he cared to think about. Sometimes Jenkins wondered if the attractive doctor lived in the ER.
"Crash cart,"
she called. On the bed, the man had stopped thrashing, the whites of his eyes
showing. Shiva quickly read the triage tag on his neck; then readied a shot of
adrenaline in case they needed it. An orderly rolled over the crash cart and
activated it. Shiva quickly cut the man’s clothes off and her eyes went wide.
"These bite marks, they are human!"
Sandy nodded, licking her lips.
"We got an anonymous call about a fight. When we got there this guy was lying
in the street, bleeding. No one saw anything."
The patient
interrupted them, his back arching as he drew in one great gasp of air and
collapsed. Shiva motioned for the paddles and rubbed some conductive gel on
the man’s chest. He wasn’t only bitten; he had furrows taken out of his skin.
The wounds looked like someone had raked their nails across his body.
"Clear!"
The body jumped
as the paddles were applied. Collapsing, Shiva rubbed the paddles together
again and applied them. A second jump and the body lay still. Grabbing her
stethoscope, Shiva applied it; then used the paddles again. With a shake of
her head, she put the paddles down and glanced at the clock.
"Time of death, 9:45 p.m."
She wasn’t aware
of it, but that time was the death knell of civilization.
With an angry
face, Sandy began pulling out the IV’s
while Fred attended to the paperwork.
She was so intent on this that she didn’t notice when the patient’s hands began
to twitch. She was reaching over the body when his hands closed on her head
and drew her face to his mouth. For a moment Sandy didn’t believe this was happening.
She simply froze allowing the dead man – for that’s what he was – to lift his
fetid mouth to her face…
Shiva was with
another patient when Sandy’s scream of pain and terror
echoed through the ER. The security guard, Jenkins and Shiva all came running and what
they saw blasted their minds. Sandy was in the grip of the clinically
dead man; face bleeding as he sucked out her eye, teeth biting into the area
around her socket. Blood was flowing freely as Sandy fought desperately. Shiva, Jenkins and the guard all froze as
the creature moved his mouth to her neck and bit deeply. A fountain of
arterial blood spurted all over the creatures face while Sandy kicked once and went still.
Its unblinking eyes covered in the young woman’s blood, the creature continued
tearing at the soft flesh of her neck, chewing and swallowing each morsel.
The guard and Jenkins finally moved. Jenkins hit the creature directly
in the face with a fist. The dead mans nose shattered, but no blood came.
Instead the creature dropped Sandy’s body to the floor and
jumped off the bed. As he did, the guard hit him across the shoulder with his
baton, knocking the creature forward. Faced with this new threat, the ghoul
jumped on the guard, grabbing him by the face and digging its thumbs into his
eyes. With a scream the man dropped the baton and went to the floor, the dead
man gnawing at his skull. The guard screamed in pain, trying to fight back,
but the pain from his destroyed eyes was too much and he fell limp.
The ER went into
panic mode. Orderlies and residents screamed in terror and fled in every
direction. Infirm patients who couldn’t move remained in their beds, faces
wide with horror.
Jenkins and Shiva again froze.
"What the hell?" The senior Paramedic mumbled. Shiva screamed and pointed. Sandy was struggling to her feet,
her good eye cloudy.
Jenkins did what any sane man did.
He turned and ran for his life from something that was beyond horror. Shiva
stood there a puddle of urine forming at the crotch of her sensible slacks. Sandy growled her lust for flesh
and leaped on the doctor, bearing her to the floor, pulling handfuls of her
beautiful dark hair out by the roots, bending her open mouth to the Doctors
face, chewing her features off. In an instant the other creature had joined
her. In the corner, the security guard, now dead, began to twitch. With a
growl he climbed to his feet.
Doctor Shiva died not believing what was happening.
Jenkins ran past another ambulance team bringing in another patient. One of them, Roger Peters tried to grab him. Fred knocked the man to the ground, jumped into his ambulance and sped off. Peters got to his feet and shrugged at his partner. "What the fuck was all that about?"
They entered the ER bringing in another recruit for the ranks of the undead.
Homepage of the Dead has the largest collection of living-dead related fiction on the internet. Each day a contribution is featured in the form of a 'little bite'. If you want to read more simply visit the 
RIP Paul Di’Anno