DRACULAS (A Novel of Terror)

by J. A. Konrath

  “Where is she?”

  “Hiding in the OR. But don’t worry, she isn’t as scary as she looks.”

  Jenny

  “I’M scared.”

  “Me too.”

  “I wet my pants again.”

  “How about we sing a song?” Jenny asked the children.

  She was also pretty frazzled. Since Lanz left, there hadn’t been any other monsters trying to attack them, but a few minutes ago a pack of them had run down the hallway. A large pack, maybe thirty or forty. Jenny knew that on an average day there were over a hundred and fifty patients in the hospital. If you figured maybe eighty people on staff, plus a few dozen visitors, there could be almost three hundred of those things roaming around.

  While Jenny had no desire to draw their attention, some quiet singing was probably less harmful than four young boys wailing uncontrollably.

  “Does everyone know Old MacDonald?” she asked.

  The boys nodded.

  “Okay, we’ll start with chicks. And let’s use our indoor voices. Are you all ready? Old MacDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-Ohhhh. And on his farm he had some chicks…”

  The kids fell in with the E-I-Os. Jenny kept a strained smile on her face and sang through the cluck-clucks, and the moo-moos with the cow, and the oink-oinks with the pig, and just as she began the fourth verse she forgot what the next animal was. A horse? A duck? A dog?

  “…and on that farm he had a dog, E-I-E-I-Ohhhh. With a—”

  “SCCRRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”

  Jenny whipped around and stared, open-mouthed, at the creature at the door.

  Lanz had returned.

  He was cramming himself into the door’s broken window. But rather than getting stuck this time, his whole body slid through, flopping onto the floor of the closet.

  The children screamed in horror. Jenny didn’t think, she reacted. In preparation for an attack, she’d filled every syringe on the crash cart, ten in all.

  She was going to stop the fucker’s heart.

  She grabbed the first two needles, one in each hand, gripping them in her fists with her thumbs on the plungers. Succinylcholine, a powerful paralytic. Etomidate, an anesthetic. Both went into Lanz’s back, and as Jenny injected him she noticed, with a combination of horror and revulsion, that he was missing his left arm. Two clamps dangled from the fleshy stump, their stainless steel handles clack-clacking against the tile floor.

  Lanz screeched again, his remaining hand locking around Jenny’s ankle. She left the needles sticking in his back and reached behind her, managing to snag two more just as he yanked Jenny off her feet.

  Fighting the urge to pull away, Jenny sat forward, stabbing him with two more overdoses. Lidocaine and diazapam.

  Lanz opened his horrible mouth, his teeth locking onto Jenny’s foot, beginning to chew. She tugged her foot away, pulling free of her shoe, and then scrambled back toward the children.

  She’d injected Lanz with enough drugs to put a track team into a coma. But that didn’t seem to matter. Spitting out her gym shoe, Lanz began to slither toward her, eyes wide, mouth wide, his talons outstretched and his massacred face shuddering in what looked like ecstasy.

  Lanz

  BLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOOD!MUST!HAVE!BLOOD!

  The bitch nurse had jabbed him with a few needles, but that didn’t matter. He’d just amputated his own arm without sedation. A few measly shots weren’t going to stop him. Dr. Kurt Lanz M.D. was invincible.

  Inching forward on his belly, he undulated in Jenny’s direction. Her terrified face—a rictus mask of pure fear—was delightful. She kept the delicious children behind her, as if she could somehow stop the primal force that was Kurt Lanz using just her sheer will.

  He reached forward, stretching out his arm, a talon hooking into the cuff of her pants.

  Then things started to get strange.

  First, his lungs stopped working. They seized up, unwilling or unable to take a breath.

  Then his head began to feel full and heavy, and the floor beneath him seemed to shift.

  His vision blurred, going dark along the edges.

  The drugs! It’s the drugs! My body can’t metabolize them fast enough!

  Lanz snarled, tugging Jenny toward him by her slacks, sliding her across the floor until she straddled his face—an obscene imitation of a sex act.

  Blood! Blood will revive me! Blood will get these drugs out of my system!

  Lanz stretched open his jaws, ready to bite Jenny’s pelvis in half.

  Then something punched into Lanz’s back. Something sharp and cold. He felt it stick up under his scapula, straight into his left ventricle. The pain made him gasp.

  “Potassium chloride,” Jenny said.

  Potassium chloride?

  KCl was used to treat hypokalemia and digitalis poisoning. But in large doses it was the primary drug used in lethal injections for death row inmates.

  Potassium chloride stopped the heart!

  Lanz moaned, the drug working instantly. He curled up, twitching and spasming, the pain stormtrooping through his entire body in agonizing, dizzying, pounding waves. He vomited, but it wasn’t the contents of his stomach. It was his stomach, hanging inside-out from a slimy loop of esophagus, spilling out the precious blood he’d been digesting.

  Even with everything going on, the smell of blood activated his biting reflex, and he chomped down on his own regurgitated organs, screaming as he chewed.

  “You always were an asshole, Lanz,” he heard Jenny say.

  As his eyes rolled up into his head and his brain kicked out its last few beta waves, Dr. Kurt Lanz MD thought, Smart, smart girl. I probably shouldn’t…have fired her…

  Adam

  “DID you stop the bleeding?” he asked.

  “The Pitocin stopped it, but she’s lost about fifteen hundred milliliters and her vitals are way down.”

  They entered Stacie’s room, and something inside of Adam broke apart seeing her still lying unconscious and bloodless in the bed.

  “Where’s my daughter?”

  “Resting peacefully in the nursery. The blood?”

  He took his pack off and unzipped the pouch, handed Herrick the first unit of O-positive.

  She already had the intravenous line lodged into Dee’s arm, and she hung the bag on the metal stand’s hook and plugged the IV line into the plastic, Adam watching the line of darkness push down the tube toward his wife’s veins.

  He touched the back of his hand to her cheek—clammy and cool.

  “Is she going to make it?”

  Herrick didn’t answer.

  “Nurse?”

  Adam glanced over his shoulder.

  Herrick stood with her hand cupped to her mouth, spitting blood and…were those teeth?…into the palm of her hand.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  She looked up at him, confusion brimming in her eyes. Tried to speak, but more teeth were loosening, and she plucked one of her back molars out—root and all.

  Said something that sounded like, “I don’t feel right.”

  Adam reached out to touch her shoulder, but she retreated and ran out of the room.

  He turned back to Stacie, took her cold hand in his.

  “I’ll be right back, sweetie. You’re going to be okay now. Just rest.”

  He leaned down and kissed her on the cheek, and as he turned to leave the room to see what was wrong with Herrick, something standing in the doorway stopped him cold.

  A little demon-girl.

  “You get out of here,” he said.

  She hissed at him.

  He noticed a pair of scissors protruding from her chest.

  “Go on!” he shouted.

  But she didn’t go on. Just stood there, drooling out of those horrific teeth, black eyes gleaming in the blue-glow of the emergency lights, watching him almost like she was gearing herself up for something, and then he realized she wasn’t looking at him.

  It was the blood bag.

&nb
sp; She moved forward and before he knew what he’d done, Adam swung and hit the little girl with a devastating left hook to the face, felt her nose sink in, his knuckles pop, and she went sliding back across the floor.

  Something possessed him—a livid, white-hot jolt of rage, and as the little girl tried to sit up, the minister rushed forward, grabbing a knot of her hair as he shot past, and dragged her out into the corridor.

  He could feel her struggling, trying to regain her feet, so he ran harder, hit a full-on sprint as he approached the junction, and then he gave one hard tug and sent the demon-girl careening into the nurses’ station.

  She crashed head-first into the wood paneling and lay unmoving on the floor.

  Adam could hear noise everywhere now.

  From Room 12—Brittany’s room—God-awful screams, figured she was pushing the baby out, and he hoped Nurse Herrick was in with her.

  The barricade was rattling, too, a demon trying to squeeze itself through the square window-frame.

  The demon-girl jumped to her feet, hit the ground running, coming straight toward Adam, talons out, screeching like some battle cry, and it happened so fast Adam didn’t even react, just let the monster slam into him at full-speed.

  They crashed hard to the floor, the little girl’s talons digging through his black pants, pinning him to the linoleum.

  He looked down, saw her head moving toward his crotch, those shark teeth snapping.

  Adam reached out and grabbed another handful of the little monster’s hair and torqued her head a half second before she decapitated his johnson.

  He brought his legs up around her and squeezed her between his thighs, straining to crush her ribcage.

  She screamed, tore one of her talons out of his leg and swiped it at his face.

  Adam could hear those demons trying to break through the barricade, couldn’t see them from where he lay, but he could hear the ominous crack of wood splintering.

  The girl struggled to inch toward him, close enough now that he let go of her hair and started punching—direct, solid blows to her face, her eyes swelling shut as she screamed.

  And then suddenly he felt her talons close around his neck, and her face—the nightmare wreck of it—inches from his.

  He stared into those black, soulless eyes that glistened with…

  …joy…

  It was unmistakable.

  This little demon-girl looming over him, saliva dripping in long, bloody strings from her fangs, was pleased as punch, as if she’d finally managed to catch her first real prey.

  I can’t be killed by a little girl.

  Please God.

  Not like this.

  Wait! Someone had appeared behind the girl—he craned his neck to see who it was as those monsters ravaged the barricade beyond the nurses’ station.

  Brittany! It was…Brittany?

  Brittany stood in bare feet on the cold linoleum, her head tilted, watching Adam.

  Her face had exploded, and her stomach too, and in the cavity a little eight-pound demon with a face full of half-inch razor whites was slowly chewing its way out, Adam thinking…

  This is a hell worse than any I ever read about. Please God, please…where are you?

  Jenny

  IN a night filled with countless horrors, killing Lanz had to be the worst one of all.

  Jenny huddled with the children once again, not even knowing what she was saying, but continuing to speak in soothing tones until their hysterics leveled off. Then she found a spare blanket and draped it over Lanz’s body so they wouldn’t have to look at it. She kicked something wet and lumpy—is that his stomach?—underneath the cover and then retreated back to the corner of the storage room.

  “It’s okay now,” she said. “We’re all going to be—”

  But she heard something that stopped her.

  Squeak…

  Squeak…

  Squeak…

  Could it be…?

  The boys screaming in unison, so loud and shrill it hurt Jenny’s ears. She whipped her head around, following their shocked stares and saw…

  That clown. That damn clown.

  It stood next to the window, peering inside. Benny the Clown’s teeth were gone, and it looked like he’d been gumming barbed wire. But the red nose and the fright wig remained, as did patches of white make-up, reflecting multicolored hues of pastel in their glow lights.

  Jenny summoned up courage she didn’t know she had and said, “It’s okay, kids. It’s okay. He can’t get in.”

  “I hate clowns!”

  “That’s not a real clown,” another boy said. “That’s just some guy dressed up like a clown!”

  “It’s a monster clown!”

  She hugged them. “Don’t worry. The monster clown is out there. We’re in here.”

  “He’s doing something!”

  Jenny didn’t want to look at the creepy thing again, but she felt compelled to. Benny the Clown was holding something in his hand and waving it into the broken window.

  A blue handkerchief?

  Squinting at it, Jenny realized it was sticking out of the vest pocket of his clown outfit. Benny the Clown gave the cloth a sudden tug.

  The first handkerchief was tied to a second, yellow handkerchief. He fed both through the window and kept pulling.

  Attached to it was a red one.

  Then a green one.

  “Go away, you goddamn clown!” Jenny ordered.

  But Benny the Clown continued to pull out handkerchief after handkerchief. Five…ten…fifteen…then…

  That’s not a handkerchief.

  The next thing he yanked from his pocket was a human spleen.

  The spleen was attached to a kidney.

  The kidney was attached to a gall bladder.

  Then a lung. A bladder. A descending colon. And something that might have been a trachea.

  Jenny was speechless. Not only because this horrible perversion was being presented to her and the kids. But because of the effort that went into it. Benny the Clown had taken the time to tie all of these unconnected parts together.

  Finally, with flourish, he ended the ghoulish display by tugging out the last organ. A human heart.

  Then the bastard actually bowed.

  “You sick son of a bitch!” Jenny screamed. “Get the hell away from us!”

  But Benny the Clown didn’t go anywhere. He continued to stare at them, as if expecting a round of applause.

  Jenny turned away, hugging the children. “Don’t look at him, kids. We don’t have to worry about him. He’s just a big bully, trying to scare you. He doesn’t even have any teeth. He can’t hurt us. The big loser can’t even get in.”

  Then Jenny heard a sound that chilled her to the very core.

  A sound that was both familiar, and totally out of place.

  BRRRR-RRRR-RRRRR-RRRREEEEEEEEEE!

  The starting and revving of a chainsaw.

  The blade poked through the aluminum door like a finger through a wet tissue.

  The children screamed. So did Jenny. She screamed for their lives, and hers, and for Randall’s, because she knew it was her husband’s chainsaw, and he never would have let Benny the Clown take it, which meant he wasn’t going to save her because he was dead.

  As Benny the Clown cut the door off its hinges and stepped into the storage closet, Jenny’s biggest regret was that she hadn’t gotten to tell Randall how much she loved him.

  Randall

  HE hated to admit it, but Randall felt a lot better after his encounter with Clay. The new gun helped. But, really, the guy wasn’t a complete dickhead after all. Oh, he was still a dickhead, but perhaps a smaller one than Randall had originally thought.

  Randall turned a corner. The emergency lighting in the corridor wasn’t nearly bright enough to give him a full view of what was happening, but he could see blood all over the floor, and two draculas on their hands and knees, greedily slurping it up.

  Two draculas. He had four bullets. If Clay’s advice
about making sure that loved ones weren’t behind what you wanted to kill was correct, then Randall could line up his shot carefully and take them both out with a single bullet.