“We do. Code Fur. Code Fang.” He patted through his pockets, maybe looking for his own set of gloves.
I hadn’t been in on any admissions since I’d been hired as a nurse at County a few months ago. But the vampires, weres, and other assorted casualties our floor catered to had to come in from somewhere. Not that the rest of the hospital knew that we kept vampire-exposed humans—daytimers—in our beloved County Hospital’s basement, but we must get advance notice somehow, even if it was just via a phone call.
I inhaled to ask another question, and then looked up at him. I could tell behind his scarf he was cracking a smile. “Awwww, you liar.”
“Nurse Edie is Code Gullible.”
“Whatever, old-timer.”
Charles laughed and held the building’s front door open. “After you.”
I braced myself and headed outside.
* * *
Winter weather was like a slap in the face—the portions of my face that it could still get to. We were two days before Christmas, and the skies were bleak. I was swaddled up in my warmest coat, my brown hair had had hat hair for what felt like weeks now, and between my own hips and the three layers of clothing I had on underneath my coat, I probably looked like a Jawa from the original
Star Wars
, only with blue eyes peering out.
Charles and I were going out for lunch, to the Rock Ronalds. It was in front of the hospital on the next cross street down, and it was where our recently released patients would take their legally prescribed methadone to trade for illegal heroin and crack. I wouldn’t go there alone at night, not even the drive-through, but during the day with a male co-worker I felt safe—plus I desperately needed caffeine if I was going to make it through the afternoon.
“So what really happened, anyhow?” Charles asked, as he double-tapped the signal change button on the light post.
“Um.” I rocked up and down on my toes, watching the orange stop hand across the six-lane street. I knew what he was asking, but I didn’t want to rehash the past, so I shrugged without meeting his gaze. “You know. I got stabbed by vampires. My zombie boyfriend ditched me on his way out of town. That sort of thing.”
“Too fresh?”
“Yeah.” I inhaled, and looked up. He was smiling again; it gave him crinkles around his eyes. Charles was a good nurse—and maybe even a better friend, if I’d let him be, in a wholesome father figure kind of way. He’d been working at Y4 for longer than I’d been alive. I couldn’t help but smile back. “We have Advanced Life Support recertification coming up together in four months. Hit me up then.”
“Gotcha.”
The light changed, and we both looked both ways twice before crossing across the street.
* * *
The bell over the door of the Ronalds rang as we walked in, and a color-coded height sticker measured us as we passed through the door, just in case.
Charles ordered fries with a side of fries at the counter, and I took off my gloves to hand him money for my Diet Coke. I realized this was the first time I’d ever hung out with a co-worker outside of work. It was on lunch break from work, but still, it counted for something. I grinned at him as I returned from the soda fountain.
“Code Fang,” he said, and laughed. “You totally bought it.”
“Yeah, yeah, make fun of the new kid.”
“We don’t get enough new people for me to tease.”
“Maybe if so many new hires didn’t die—which no one ever told me, by the way—you’d get more chances.” I followed him to the nearest table and sat across from him.
“Would you have believed us if we’d told you?”
I drank a deep gulp of my soda and considered this. “Probably not.”
“For the record, I told you not to go back into that guy’s room.” He glanced meaningfully toward my left hand. It had a semi-circular scar across the back of it, from where I’d been bitten by a vampire. It didn’t ache, except for when it was cold, which, since we were in the depths of winter, was all the damn time.
I rubbed at my scar. “If in the future you have a choice between blatantly warning me about possible death versus vaguely warning me in a smug fashion, please go with the former.”
He nodded. “Duly noted.”
At my last job my biggest fear was being coughed on by someone with active TB. But at County, and in particular floor Y4, where Charles and I both worked, the opportunities to screw things up and maybe also get killed were endless. Floor Y4 catered to the supernatural creatures that no one else knew about: werecreatures in their mortal phases, the daytime servants of the vampires, the sanctioned donors of the vampires, and shapeshifters that occasionally went insane. And sometimes zombies, that sometimes nurses dated, with poor outcomes. At the thought of my now twice-dead love life, my urge to make small talk chilled.
Across from me, Charles was starting in on his second cone of fries. Funny how knowing exactly what a ton of salt and fat could do to your heart didn’t stop you from wanting to eat them. Like nurses who still smoked and worked in oncology. Charles watched me watching him eat, and tilted the cone toward me. I waved away his offer—it still felt too early to eat; my stomach was on night shift even if I was awake—and he shrugged.
“You sure you don’t want to talk?”
“Yeah.”
Charles measured me as he polished off the fry cone. “Here,” Charles said. He wiped his hands on his napkins, and then opened his coat and reached for his shirt buttons.
“What are you doing?” I whispered, and glanced around to see if other restaurant patrons were looking.
“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.” Three buttons down, he started pulling the fabric out and away from his neck. “Seven years ago. Were attack. Shattered my clavicle. I couldn’t lift my arm over my head for six months.”
I couldn’t see anything—it was shadowed by the clothing he’d bunched away to show me. But I believed him that the scars were there. Even if they didn’t show—they were there. I shook my head. “I’m not showing you mine. Just trust me, it looks like I got a C-section from an epileptic.”
Charles released his collar and straightened his shirt. “That sucks. But on the plus side, at least you didn’t wind up needing to start a college fund.”
“True that.” I helped myself to one of the loose fries on his tray.
“So now we’re scar-buddies. Right?”
I nodded quickly, a little ashamed at how badly I wanted Charles and I to get along.
“Then listen to me, Edie. What I’m trying to say is this—I remember how it was to be you. All excited about the adventure—it’s not a safe way to be. You have to protect yourself. You have to remember that to them, we’re disposable.”
I didn’t need to ask who
them
was.
Them
was the vampires that’d tried to kill me. And also the boyfriend who’d left town. I’d felt pretty disposable then. The new scars didn’t help me to not feel like that, either.
“So no heroics. Be safe. I want to keep you around.”
I was genuinely glad someone unrelated to me did. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” He finished his soda and stood. “Let’s get back. Only five hours of films to go.”
We bundled up and pressed outside again. “What do you think the next film will be?” I should have gotten a Diet Coke for the road. Maybe then the need to pee would keep me awake through class.
“
Ignoring Ebola: One Thousand Ways to Die
,” Charles suggested. “Or,
Mr. Radiation, Uncle X-ray’s Spooky Friend
.” He did a little cartoon dance, and I laughed.
“I liked the one where they explained how to evacuate the hospital, by taking people one at a time down the stairs.” I wasn’t even sure Y4 had stairs. I’d only ever taken the elevator in and out.
“God. If we did that, it’d end up being some sort of horrible Hurricane Katrina thing. Some people would get left behind, others’d make bad choices. If it ever gets that bad, I’m staying home.” Charles hit the button to change the intersection’s light, and I decided to press my luck.
“So tell me about the were attack?”
Charles kept his eyes on the light across the street, but I could see him squint into the past. “Ask me when we have advanced life support recertification. We can trade war stories then.”
“Fair enough.”
There was a man with tufts of white hair sticking out from under his snow cap six lanes across from us, looking both ways, watching for traffic from either direction. The traffic slowed as the light changed. Charles and I stepped off at the same time, just as the man did across from us. We were across half a lane when a truck that’d seemed to be slowing down for the red light sped up instead. I heard the engine shift gears, looked up, and saw the man coming toward us do the same.
It hit him.
He crumpled forward against the hood, arms out, like he was hugging it in a moment of game-show triumph. Then it launched him into the air and I stopped in the middle of the road, stunned, unable to believe that I was actually watching someone fly. He made an arc, landed, bounced, and skidded to a stop, smearing red behind himself.
Half a second for the impact to occur, another half a second for the landing, and then the sound of screeching brakes as all other rightful traffic through the intersection came to a halt—except for the truck, which kept going. It only missed the man’s landing body by inches, and drove away with his blood in its tire treads.
“Jesus Christ,” Charles said, and started to run for the injured man. I ran after him.
* * *
“I’ve already called nine-one-one!” yelled a bystander. I could hear someone retching behind me as we reached the man’s still form.
“Everybody, back! We’re nurses!” Charles yelled.
Fuck me fuck me fuck me.
I was no paramedic. I was used to people whom the emergency department had already cleaned up and put tubes and lines in. He was so injured—where to even begin? Charles knelt down, and put his fingers on the man’s neck. “He’s got a pulse. He’s breathing.” I knelt down beside him. Dark bruises were blossoming around both of the man’s eye sockets.
“Raccoon eyes,” I whispered, having only seen it once before on a trauma test in nursing school.
“Brain shear, go figure.” Charles spared me a dark glance.
We had no supplies. We couldn’t move him and risk injuring his spine. One of the man’s legs was twisted the wrong way, denim torn open, exposing meat and bone below. A moment earlier, and we’d have seen the stuffing of him, ragged edges of skin, yellow-white subcutaneous fat, red stripes of muscle tissue. But that moment had let his blood catch up with his injuries, and now it welled out from arteries and leaked from veins. It filled up his wounds, overflowed their edges, spilling like oil onto the ground, and when he ran out of it—I gritted my teeth and reached in, pushing against his broken leg’s femoral artery. Blood wicked through the fabric of my glove and was hot against my hand.
“Here’s an old-timer trick.” Charles knelt straight into the stranger’s thigh, his knee almost into the groin, only pausing for me to pull my hands out of the way. The blood leaching out of the man’s leg subsided—although that could be because there wasn’t much left. “It’ll clamp down the artery completely.”
I inhaled to complain now was not a good time for class—but I stopped when I realized teaching was what Charles did to cope. Our patient groaned, and tried to move his head. I crawled through the gravel and broken glass up to the man’s head. “Sir, you can’t move right now. There’s been a bad accident.” I put my hands on either side of his head. His snow cap had been peeled off, along with part of his scalp, and his wispy white hair was sticky with blood. “I’m so sorry, just please stay still.”
“Aren’t you going to breathe for him?” someone behind me asked. I glanced back and saw a man with a cell phone jutting forward.
“What is wrong with you?” I swatted the phone out of his hand, sent it skittering into a slick of blood-stained snow by the curb. “Show some respect!”
“Hey! That’s my new phone!” The bystander started pawing gloved hands through the grimy snow to get what was his. There was a shadow there, cast by the man himself, and I saw it shudder, swallowing the phone inside its blackness like a throat. I wondered if it’d been a trick of the light.
The injured man moved again, his whole torso shuddering. “No no no no no.” He reached a hand up to fight me, clutching around my wrist with the strength of someone who had nothing left to lose. “Stay still, okay? It’s all going to be fine,” I said, knowing I was lying. “Just stay still.”
He groaned and the shape of his jaw shifted, becoming narrow and more angular. His teeth pressed forward, stretching against the limits of his lips, lengthening, showing yellow enamel. His beard began to grow—just like fur. “Charles?” I asked, my voice rising in pitch. It was daytime, on a cloudy December day—but I looked over my shoulder and saw Charles’s face turn dusky, like the surrounding gray sky.
“Code Fur, Edie. We need Domitor, now.” He fished in his coat pocket for a phone. “I’m calling the floor.” The sound of a distant ambulance began in the background. “Get back here before they do.”
I stood, found my feet in the ice and blood, then I was gone.