Once Bitten

by Reinke, Sara

  “Let me in,” the woman breathed, and, mesmerized, feeling like his mind had suddenly become a helium-filled balloon that had been turned loose to face the leading edge of an oncoming tempest, John nodded sleepily.

  “Alright,” he murmured and when he plodded forward, it felt like he waded through waist-deep water, his footsteps clumsy and slow. He unlatched the twin panels of the hatch and pulled them open wide. It should have come as a surprise to him to see Lucy Weston leaning down, crouched in the doorway, her pale, nude form draped in the shadows of nightfall, her mouth unfurled in a sweet, nearly tender smile. It also should have set off a big bunch of warning bells in his mind, claxons Michael Gough should have put into place.

  Do not open the door to Lucy Weston. No matter what she says, no matter where you are, don’t let her in.

  Instead, he simply backed away, watching in mesmerized apathy as she ducked her head and entered the main cabin, her small feet dropping daintily on the steps. Her flesh was like marble, so pale it was nearly translucent, the hint of blue veins cutting miniscule trails just beneath the supple surface. Her corneas were bloodshot, making the blue of her irises look nearly iridescent.

  Her hands draped against his shoulders and she stepped against him, pressing her naked breasts against his chest. He could feel the bullet points of her nipples through the fabric of his shirt. More than this, he could feel the coldness of her flesh seeping into him.

  “Lucy,” he whispered, still staring into her eyes, because he wanted to tell her that her mother was looking for her, wanted her to come home, was frightened half to death for her.

  “Shhhhh.” Lucy pressed one cold fingertip to his lips, sealing them, stifling his voice. She reached between them, her hands slipping to his waist and she pulled his shirt tails out from beneath the waist band of his jeans. Unbuttoning the front of his shirt, Lucy eased the panels aside to expose his chest. Now when she brushed her nipples against him, it felt like ice against his skin.

  When she stepped forward, he moved obligingly back, again and again until the backs of his knees hit the edge of the bunk bench and he sat down hard. Still smiling ghoulishly, Lucy straddled him, slipping one leg on either side of his hips, nestling the cold vertex of her groin against his.

  “Do you want me?” she breathed, tilting his head back, drawing the tip of her nose, her lips lightly against his cheek, the delta of his jaw. Slowly, she began to peel back the tape and bandages covering his shoulder, exposing the twin wounds along the side of his throat. “Do you, John? Do you want me?”

  No, he wanted to say, but couldn’t summon his voice. No, no, no, I don’t want you. Not at all.

  She was cold, terribly so. Even the blade of her tongue as it slipped in a thin, damp line against his skin was icy. More than this, though, she had no breath. There was only that awful, permeating, paralyzing coldness, and he sat beneath her, helpless and immobilized.

  “I want you,” Lucy said, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw her open her mouth. He caught a glimpse of white—her teeth, the long hooks of her fangs—and then she bit him. He jerked beneath her, drawing in a sharp gasp, but didn’t fight back or resist. Just as he had from the moment he’d heard her soft fingertips scratching in beckon on the hatch, he felt hypnotized, his mind browning out into murky semi-consciousness.

  It occurred to him he could hear her sucking, a sloppy, sodden sound and he could feel her lips, the blade of her tongue palpating against his flesh, matching the rhythm of his heart as it sent blood spurting from his torn carotid in pulsating bursts.

  He groaned as he swooned, and then a bright flash of light, a thunderous reverberation and a thick, choking cloud of unexpected gunfire snapped him out of his dazed reverie. Something cold and wet slapped against his face, splattering against the backside of the wall, and when Lucy reared back, her mouth tearing away from his throat, he saw a large hole punched through her forehead, a cavernous channel filled with dark red, spongy, exposed meat.

  Lucy screeched, a shrill and horrible sound, more like a pissed off cat than anything remotely human, then she leapt off of him, arms and legs scrambling.

  “Bitch!” he heard her cry. Another gunshot swallowed her outraged cry whole. There was a loud series of crashes and thuds, the sound of splintering wood and breaking glass. Barely conscious, only dimly aware that blood was shooting out of his neck in a pair of gory geysers, John crumpled sideways onto the bunk, his eyelids drooping closed.

  After a long moment in which he struggled to breathe against the pungent stink of gun smoke, he felt hands flutter against his shoulders, rolling him onto his back. “John, can you hear me?”

  He managed a hoarse cry as the light on the bookshelf suddenly blazed to life, blinding him. Someone leaned over him, a silhouette against this backdrop of glare.

  “John,” this someone said again, a frightened and familiar voice.

  He blinked up at the shadowed outline of a head. “Sandy?” he croaked, bleary and bewildered.

  Her face swam into view and in her hand, he caught a glimpse of lamplight off of something metallic, some kind of mutant large-caliber revolving carbine, with the trigger and cylinder mechanisms of a pistol, but the elongated barrel and stock of a rifle. Just the sight of it was enough to trigger a panic attack in him, every muscle in his body seizing in sudden, bright alarm, his breath abruptly tangling in his throat.

  “What did you get…?” he hiccupped, trying to sit up, to scramble away from the gun. Big mistake. The moment he moved, his head swam, his vision side-slipped and his mind swan-dived back into shadow-draped oblivion.

  “This?” Sandy gave the butt of the gun an affectionate sort of pat. “Harlowe gave it to me for Christmas last year. I keep it in the trunk for just in case. The world is full of loonies, you know.”

  “Yeah,” he murmured as he fainted. “Chock full.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “John?” He opened his eyes a bleary half-mast and again found Sandy looking down at him, her eyes round and worried. “John, are you awake?”

  “I am now,” he growled. With a bleary frown, he looked around. In a bed raised to a slightly seated posture, he was draped in white cotton sheets, facing a TV set mounted into a metal stand in the wall. A non-descript bureau, spartan drapes pulled closed and wallpaper that looked straight out of a Best Western all complemented the décor.

  “Where am I?” he asked, although he supposed that the bedrails should have been a clear indication. That and the plastic tube running out from underneath the sheets and over the edge of the mattress, a catheter line that was apparently attached at one end to his dick from the feel of things as he moved slightly. Of course, the IV stands with bags of clear and scarlet fluid running down interlacing lines to ports taped to the backs of his hands were fairly good clues, too. And if he needed further enlightenment, the oxygen cannula he could feel inserted into his nostrils, slender rubber tubing draped on either side of his face, was a dead giveaway.

  “You’re in the hospital,” Sandy told him. “Sister Island Medical Center. Your mom wanted you flown down to Key West, or over to the mainland, but I convinced her that it was okay.”

  “My mom knows I’m here?” John tried to draw his hand up to his face to smother a groan against his palm, but the IV lines tugged uncomfortably taut, so he settled for looking around the room again, half-expecting to see Wilma wearing a groove in the linoleum floor fretfully pacing the outermost circumference. “Terrific. How did I get here?”

  He moved to pull the cannula out of his nose, but Sandy caught his hand and stopped him. “Ambulance,” she said.

  What? he thought, struggling to remember. “What happened to me?”

  “You were suffering from hemorrhagic and secondary hypovolemic shock. They had to stabilize your hemodynamic parameters with blood transfusions, but then you became coagulopathic and had to have additional platelet transfusions.”

  He stared at her and didn’t even have to say anything. She took his unspoken cue an
d offered English translation: “You almost bled to death.”

  “What?” he said hoarsely, startled and somewhat stricken.

  “Lucy Weston attacked you again. I had to put a .38-caliber slug through the back of her head to get her off of you.”

  She said this so matter-of-factly that he blinked at her stupidly, stunned anew. “What?”

  “Don’t worry,” Sandy said. “I didn’t kill her. I didn’t have time to get anything like silver bullets after I talked to Dr. Gough.”

  “He called you?”

  The Duh! look. “Of course he did. He couldn’t get through to you on your cell. Said you were in ‘extreme and mortal peril.’ His words, not mine.”

  This time, John was able to reach his face, to clap his hand over it. “Don’t tell me you believe that guy,” he said, racking his brain to figure out a way to explain to the police why Lucy Weston’s corpse would be found aboard his sailboat, with his secretary’s bullet in her brain—never mind how he’d explain it to Lucy’s mother, his client.

  “I know you don’t and that’s okay,” Sandy said. “I think it’s cute, your obstinate refusal to accept the obvious, even when presented to you by medical experts, simply because you consider it to be illogical.”

  “Michael Gough isn’t a medical anything. He’s a Ph.D sort of doctor.”

  Sandy crossed her arms. “I meant me.”

  “Oh, yeah. Your medical transcription experience.” John shook his head. “You do realize you killed the girl we were hired to find?”

  “I didn’t kill anybody. I told you, no silver bullets, no wooden stakes on hand. I was lucky I carry Mina in the car with me.”

  “Mina?” he asked. Then he remembered the gun he’d seen her hand, that bizarre and admittedly intimidating combination of rifle and pistol she said she kept in the trunk. Just in case, she’d told him. “Your gun’s name is Mina?”

  “No, my gun’s name is Wilhemina. I call it Mina for short. And like I said, I didn’t kill anybody. Lucy slammed past me to climb up the hatch and get away. Look where I hit your galley countertop.” Sandy pulled up the hem of her T-shirt to reveal the flat plane of her belly. A thick band of bruising, almost a perfectly horizontal stripe, bisected her midriff.

  “You’re saying she was alive and perfectly well after you put a .38-caliber round through her head?” John asked.

  “I didn’t say she was alive. I just said I didn’t kill her. I think Dr. Gough was right. She’s already dead. Worse, she’s un-dead. And if I hadn’t been there, right about now, I’m guessing you would be, too.”

  “Undead,” John repeated, shaking his head. “What were you doing at the marina, anyway? How’d you know I was there, not at Little Pink?”

  “I didn’t,” Sandy replied. “I told you on my message. I was on my way to pick up Gracie. Dr. Gough called me on the way. The office phone routes to my cell after hours. I saw the lights come on aboard the Quagmire and went to investigate. I thought someone was breaking in.”

  “Gracie docks a boat at Coconut Grove?” John asked. “I didn’t know that.” With a frown, he looked down at himself, the tangle of wires and tubes running in and out of his body. “How do I get this stuff off?”

  When he reached for the cannula again, she stopped him. “You don’t. They want you to stay here for observation.”

  “What? Why?”

  Another Duh! look. “So they can observe you.”

  His frown deepened as the little accountant inside his head began racking up charges. “Terrific. How long until I can go home?”

  Sandy shrugged. “I don’t know. A couple of days at least. Probably longer.” He groaned, flopping back against the pillows and she said, “They think you might have Lyme disease.”

  John blinked stupidly. “What?”

  “Lyme disease,” Sandy said again. “A tick-borne illness caused by bacterium called spirochete, most specifically borrelia burgdorferi.”

  “I know what it is,” he said. “I mean, why do they think I have it? I haven’t been bitten by any ticks.”

  “A majority of sufferers don’t remember being bitten,” Sandy told him. “And symptoms are pretty wide-ranging. Normally, the disease first presents with a signature bulls-eye-shaped rash around the initial bite wound, but that’s not always a given. In later stages, Lyme disease can cause headaches, muscle pains, fatigue, sleep problems, photophobia, auditory hyperacusis, extreme irritability, spatial disorientation. They’re testing your blood and urine to rule it out. They may need to do a spinal tap.”

  “What?”

  “A spinal tap,” she repeated. “That’s where they insert a needle between the third and fourth lumbar vertebrae, maybe the fourth or fifth, to take a sample of your cerebrospinal fluid.”

  “There’s no way someone is sticking any kind of needle in my spine.”

  “It doesn’t hurt. Much. I mean, they numb the skin with lidocaine before they—”

  “Nobody is sticking any needles in me,” John yelled again.

  “Well, they have to,” Sandy told him, folding her arms across her chest and looking at him sternly. “Because they don’t know what’s wrong with you, John, except that you have a whole bunch of symptoms that don’t seem to fit together under any one medical diagnosis.”

  He sat up and grimaced. “Where are my clothes? Hand me my pants. I’m getting out of here.”

  “John, look at me.” Sandy planted her hands on his shoulders and held him still. When she leaned over, it awarded him a nice view down the front of her blouse. “My face, not my boobs, please. None of your symptoms add up to one specific disease they can think of, but that doesn’t mean there’s not one cause for what’s happening to you.”

  “Don’t say it,” he said, because he didn’t know who was crazier, Sandy and Michael Gough with their Count Dracula conspiracy theories or the doctors who thought he needed tubes up his dick and needles in his spine.

  She held up her hand, ticking off on her fingers. “You have a sudden, unexplained aversion to sunlight. And to garlic.”

  “Garlic?”

  “The salad dressing? You said it burned your mouth. It had garlic in it.”

  He rolled his eyes. “That doesn’t mean…”

  Another finger ticked off. “You’ve been bitten repeatedly by a woman who only comes out at night, drinks your blood and doesn’t die when shot with regular bullets.”

  “Oh, now, this is just getting melodramatic,” he said.

  “And your body is pretty much shutting down, system by system, changing from the inside out. Transforming you.”

  “Transforming me,” he repeated and she nodded. “Into what?”

  “A vampire,” she said, and he groaned. “Dr. Gough said the same thing happened to Lucy. He emailed me the pictures, John.”

  “Those don’t prove anything,” he argued.

  “The only way to stop what’s happening to you is to ram a wooden stake through Boyd Wilder’s heart.”

  He groaned again. “You can’t do that.”

  She blinked. “You’re right. I have to cut off his head with a gravedigger’s shovel, too.”

  “They don’t use shovels to dig graves anymore,” John said. “They use backhoes.”

  “Ethel Merriwether has a shovel she used to dig a grave for her dog, Nutsy. She buried him on the beach, told me about it yesterday. The shovel’s on board the Cookie’s Cutter. I’m sure she’d let me borrow it.”

  “Sandy.” John shoved his fingers through his hair.

  “I can borrow some of Gracie’s old silver bullets,” she continued. “I asked Mike if those would work instead of silver nails in Wilder’s head, belly and neck and he said he thought it would be okay, especially since I was doing the staking and beheading, too.”

  He blinked in surprise. “Gracie has silver bullets?”

  She shot him the Duh! look. “You saw one of them in my living room.”

  “That?” He shook his head. “I didn’t know it was silver.”

&
nbsp; “Well, the shells are, anyway,” Sandy said. “The cases are only silver-plated. The circus had them custom-made for her. It was sort of her signature.”

  He raised his brow. “What, like the Lone Ranger?”

  Sandy beamed. “Exactly.”

  “Won’t the silver warp from the heat?”

  “She could hit a dime tossed in the air from ninety feet away. They must not have warped too badly.”

  Must not have, John agreed in his mind.

  “She told me they’re actually pretty tough. They don’t tend to mushroom out when they hit something, like a regular lead shell,” said Sandy. “I’ll show you when you get out of here.”

  Feeling those old, familiar inklings of anxiety at the mere prospect of getting too close to a bullet or gun, he squirmed and said, “Uh, no, thanks.”

  He heard a knock from his hospital room door and looked up to see his mother poking her head inside, her expression hesitant and curious. “John?”

  “Wilma,” Sandy exclaimed. “Hey, come on in.”

  John groaned, steeling himself mentally for the onslaught that was about to come. Sandy leaned down and planted a quick kiss on his cheek, “That’s my cue to leave.”

  “No, it’s not,” he assured her, catching her by the hand, trying to stop her retreat. “That’s your cue to kill me now. Quickly.”

  “Stop it. You’re terrible.” Sandy laughed. “I’ll be back.”

  “When?” he called after her, a rather desperate plea.

  She laughed. “Soon.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “I don’t care what that little secretary of yours says,” Wilma Harker said, cutting her eyes around the hospital room with the same sort of drawn-lipped, disapproving scrutiny she might have awarded a flop house. “She’s a nice girl and I’m sure she means well, but the doctors and nurses can’t possibly know what they’re doing here. I mean, just look at this place. It’s filthy. I wish I’d worn something besides sandals. I’m afraid I’ll catch something off the floor. They have those horrible diseases now you get in hospitals. What do they call them? Nasogastric?”