Bad Hair Day (14 page)

Dr. Burr jerked to attention, looking at my face. “You’ve just thought of something.”

“Maybe.”

I moved forward, hesitantly putting my fingers to Holly’s neck, her arms, her hips. The skin was cold but pliant. I didn’t feel anything moving around inside her, but maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. If she had whatever Bryan had, the ants had already done their job. They’d fixed everything.

“Well?” Dr. Burr prompted.

“Let me try one more thing.” I pulled off my gloves and dumped them into the infectious waste bin. “Do you have a magnet handy?”

Now he was really looking curious, but he went into the storage room and pulled a magnet off the fridge. It said,
Pathologists
—WE SEE DEAD PEOPLE.

I snorted. “Funny. Now let’s see if this works or not.”

When I set the magnet down on the specimen tray next to the vials of blood we’d taken from Holly, nothing happened. This had to work; I moved the magnet a little closer. And then the vial of blood rolled across the tray and stuck to the magnet with a clack.

“Magnetic blood?” asked Dr. Burr, his voice hushed with awe.

“Exactly.”

The door buzzer picked that moment to go off, and we stared at it with identical expressions of exasperation. Dr. Burr got up to answer it, mumbling words under his breath that I was sure my delicate underage ears didn’t need to hear.

“I hope this is good,” he said into the intercom.

“Dr. Burr?” came the crackle-voiced reply. “This is Detective Lynn Despain. I was hoping to talk to you.”

It felt like the universe was telling me to spill everything. So after she came in, I did.

Well, not everything
everything
. I skipped the relationship bits and the neurotic bits and the part where I got thrown out of the hospital, but I told them everything else about the magnetic blood and the mutant hair and the accelerated healing. All of it.

“And, you know,” I said, “I’m pretty logical, and I don’t believe in ghosts and stuff. But this really does sound like the werewolf legends, doesn’t it? You’ve got the hair and the super strength and the super speed and the healing. The only thing that doesn’t fit is the blood.”

Dr. Burr patted my hand. “I’m sure we can come up with another explanation, Kate. I’ll send the blood to toxicology. Perhaps this is a very extreme case of lead poisoning.”

But Despain didn’t seem so sure. “I wouldn’t write her off just yet, Doc,” she said. “I’m sure there’s a logical cause underlying it, just as there was with the zombie phenomenon, but that doesn’t mean she’s wrong.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I said.

“I’m going to tell our lab techs about this and see what they can come up with,” she said. “We’ll look into this, Kate. In the meantime, let me get you back to school.”

I should have been relieved, right? School was where I belonged, especially if I intended to set some priorities. I needed
to see Aaron and Rocky and Kiki and to be a normal teenager for a while.

But I wasn’t relieved at all.

When Despain dropped me off in her squad car, I made my way toward the front doors of the school. But as soon as she was out of sight, I veered off into the parking lot. Luckily, it was the middle of fifth period, and too cold for anyone to eat out in the quad. Otherwise, there would have been no way for me to sneak off unseen.

Jonah had given me a copy of his keys after I’d left my backpack in his car over the weekend one time and woke him up before noon. He was going to regret that when he found out that I took his car. But desperate times require desperate measures. Like driving without a license and semi-stealing your brother’s car.

I still couldn’t believe his luck. I had a cruddy old car, not like I was complaining as long as it got me from point A to B without breaking down. But he’d lucked into a cute, if aged, two-door convertible. And it was all because I’d cured the son of the guy who ran the local used-car dealership during the zombie apocalypse. Sure, Jonah drove me around since I was still license-impaired, but that didn’t change the fact that the car should have been mine.

So I drove off, über-tempted to put the hood down. But it was starting to snow—little flakes that couldn’t decide if they wanted to fall down or fly sideways. I decided against it.

At the intersection of Wills and State, I hesitated. Left toward my house or right toward the hospital? I flicked on the left-hand blinker. Maybe Bryan was conscious. Maybe he’d seen his attacker.

Maybe he could identify them, werewolf or no.

S
kipping school was a little nerve-wracking, but I’d done it during the zombie outbreak, and it seemed to me that the key was to act like you were exactly where you were supposed to be. So I walked into the hospital without looking back. As I emerged from the elevator onto Bryan’s floor, I heard a loud buzzing from the nurses’ station. “Looks like that darned sensor on bed twelve slipped off again,” someone was saying. “Do we have another one somewhere?”

I walked up to the desk just in time to see two nurses disappear into the back. Perfect. I went to Bryan’s room. The light above the door beeped and flashed incessantly. Because I was a genius, I concluded that he must be in bed twelve with the malfunctioning sensor. Of course, the number twelve on the door didn’t hurt.

I silently thanked the gods that my epilepsy was under control; otherwise, those flashy lights would have probably sent me into total neurological meltdown. And then the nurses would have sent me down to Emergency, where some sleep-deprived intern would tell me what I already knew, which was that I had just had a seizure. Then I would make some smart-ass comment about how I already knew that because I had more than five brain cells, and then he’d burst into tears and leave the room. I knew these things. I had experience.

So it was a really good thing I hadn’t had a seizure in months.

I reached the door, turned the handle, and pushed it open, since that’s pretty much standard operating procedure as far as doors are concerned. A monstrosity leapt out at me. It looked like Bryan, if you added about seventeen pounds of dark brown hair and a Klingon forehead. His face was all bulgy and distorted. I couldn’t decide if his teeth were elongated or if they just looked that way because he was baring them at me.

He was a werewolf. Jonah was never going to let me hear the end of this, assuming that I lived. And if I died, he’d probably taunt me via Ouija board.

Before I realized what was happening, Bryan barreled into me, forcing all the air from my chest in a high-pitched squeak. My very brief martial arts training flashed through my mind; I knew I ought to roll, or strike, or grapple, or something other than be thrown around like a rag doll. I settled for stumbling backward, trying to suck air into my lungs.

He grabbed me by the arms and slammed me against the
wall. My vision swam, and when it cleared, his face was inches from mine. His nostrils flared as he took in my scent, but his eyes showed no sign of recognition or even coherent thought. His brow was drawn down into a simian squint, giving him an almost Cro-Magnon look underneath the fur.

“Bryan,” I said softly. “It’s me. Kate. I’m your friend. I’m here to help you.”

He growled, deep and low in his throat. I heard footsteps coming down the hall, shouts of alarm that sounded like they were coming from miles away. He threw me toward the nurses’ station, and I sailed through the air in what felt like slow motion. I had way too much time to contemplate how badly it was going to hurt when I landed. And then the world exploded with pain.

I came to with my cheek pillowed on cold tile. You’d think that would have been uncomfortable, but my head wouldn’t stop throbbing, so the chill felt pretty good. There was something in my eye; I wiped it off with a shaky hand. It tinted my fingers blue. And my arm was all blue too. Peachy.

“Oh my god!” someone exclaimed, and I heard rapid footsteps coming in my direction. I wanted to warn whoever it is that there was a werewolf on the loose, but I couldn’t make my mouth work yet.

A blob came into my field of vision, but without my glasses, I had no idea who it was. I was pretty sure it wasn’t Bryan—unless he was trying to fake me out by putting on a pair of hot pink
scrubs. I tried to focus, but I’d whacked my head pretty hard during the struggle. And when I say “struggle,” I mean “part where I got my butt kicked.”

It was the same nurse who had thrown me out before. She checked my pulse with a gentle hand. I did nothing. Frankly, I was content to lie there on the floor for the next eternity, or at least until my head stopped hurting.

“Can you hear me?” she asked. I nodded and immediately regretted it.

Another nurse came running down the hall, and there was a rapid exchange of details between them before she went off to call for a gurney to take me down to the ER. A third nurse ran into Bryan’s room and then down the hallway. She was probably calling security to notify them of a missing patient. I didn’t think they’d catch him, but it was a nice thought.

Then we went through the drill where my nurse asked me for the name of the president, and how many fingers she was holding up, all the usual questions to see if I was oriented to person, place, and time. I was tempted to screw with her, but then I’d probably end up strapped to an MRI machine or something. That would have interfered with my plans to determine how Bryan had contracted a case of raging werewolfism. So I concentrated on answering with as little sarcasm as possible. It was a lot tougher than I expected.

“So what was that thing?” she finally asked.

I’d been expecting the question but couldn’t think of an
answer that didn’t sound like complete lunacy. I couldn’t explain my werewolf theory yet except to say I thought he was one and was sure there was a scientifically feasible explanation for it. That wasn’t the most satisfactory answer in the world, though. Probably the basic facts were least likely to get me into trouble.

“I don’t really know,” I mumbled. “I opened the door, and someone jumped out. It all happened so fast that I didn’t even get a good look at him … her … it.”

“Well, they threw you all the way down the hallway.” She ran gentle fingers down the side of my skull. It hurt, but not enough to make me scream. Close.

“I landed pretty hard, huh?”

She snorted. “You put a huge hole in the wall, so I’d say that’s an understatement.”

I twisted my head, ignoring the combined protests of my cranium and the nurse, and barely made out what looked like a hole in the drywall. At least I no longer needed to worry that I was turning into an X-Man. I hadn’t inexplicably turned blue; I was just covered in powdered wall.

She put her hands on either side of my head and frowned. “Stop moving. You could have a neck injury.”

“I don’t have a neck injury.”

“Humor me.”

We sat there for another minute or two, and soon I heard a repetitive squeaking that could only herald the approach of a gurney. I looked up at her. “Thank you.” Because sure, she’d thrown
me out of the hospital yesterday, but she was like a totally different person today. Maybe this was the good twin and yesterday I’d met the bad one. Or maybe she just didn’t recognize me under all the blue.

“You’re welcome,” she said. “I figure I owed you, anyway.”

I guess I was more memorable than I thought.

They took me straight into a bay in the emergency department. Getting thrown into a wall gave me a certain amount of notoriety; a lot of people stopped by to look me over, but when I tried to talk to them, the only thing they’d say was that the doctor would see me soon. It didn’t take long for me to get impatient, because my head wouldn’t stop throbbing. The least they could do was give me a little pain medicine—not a lot, because I needed to be able to think straight if I was going to capture the werewolf.

I had nothing better to do, and I needed to distract myself from the pain radiating from the back of my skull, so I started thinking through the facts. Something had infected Bryan, and I definitely didn’t buy into the whole bitten-by-a-wolf theory. No, whatever this was had also made his blood magnetic. That meant it wasn’t a virus; it had to be something metal, and something small.…

Then it clicked. Sebastian was an intern at Nanotech Industries. Nanomedicine was making leaps and bounds all the time; it was the only reasonable explanation I could come up with.

The whole theory of nanomedicine is that you can use microscopic machines to stimulate the body to be more efficient. You
can’t make someone fly, because the body can’t do that already. But you might make them heal stronger, run faster, hit harder, and so on.

Bryan clearly was infected with nanobots, and I’d found all that blood all over him. If the infection spread via bodily fluids, that would explain how he’d contracted it. Same thing with Holly and her brother. That would explain how they’d healed after the fact—it took a while for the bots to start working. And apparently, they also provided a highly effective cure for baldness.

The theory made me feel tons better. No, I still didn’t know who the murderer was, but I had a lead. I could get to the bottom of this. Maybe the whole situation was some strange industrial accident. It was just a case of accidental nanobotting.