“Sorry about the coin—I was preoccupied.”
She pounded on the bedrail with the butt of her gun. “It’s not fair! It’s not fair.”
“Annalee, if you’re not careful with that thing, it might go off.”
McHugh caught her breath and aimed the pistol again. “Ken, that’s the whole idea. So long! I’m going to enjoy this!”
That was the last straw. By this time I’d had it with the horse manure that went on in this flimsy excuse for a hospital, so I picked up the tray of veggies with my left hand and flung it at her gun hand, then followed up by whipping the pillow around and bouncing it off her head.
The pistol went off, the bullet bounced around the room a few times, and Annalee went down like a sack of potatoes. After I ripped the stupid IV out of my arm, I found the pistol. Obviously, it was cheap local manufacture, so I bent it a little so she wouldn’t try to hurt someone. Then I went downstairs and tore up the kitchen until I found some chocolate chip cookies.
Then I fainted, which seemed to be becoming a habit.
When I woke up, Nurse Clarkin was standing by my bedside. “Had a little fainting spell, did we?”
“I guess so. Where’s Annalee?”
“The doctor called the police and had her taken away. I’m sure she’s in jail right now. She tried to shoot you with an automatic, didn’t she? Silly woman—it must come from eating animal flesh.”
She stuck her hand down her blouse and pulled out an enormous muzzle-loading horse pistol. “Now, if she really wanted to shoot you, she should have used one of these.”
“I knew it, I’ve finally cracked.” I looked her up and down. “It looks like you’re pointing a pistol at me.”
“And it’s loaded with a silver ball cartridge, Spawn of Satan— I melted down some earrings. I saw your lab tests. You didn’t think we would notice, did you? Well, we’re trained professionals here!” She pulled the hammer back to a full cock position.
I was still a couple of nickels short of a quarter. “Nurse Clarkin, I have had a really rough week, and I’m having trouble concentrating. What were you not supposed to notice?”
“That you were a vampire,” Nurse Clarkin said agreeably, turning her body sideways and adopting a shooter’s stance. “Percussion cap pistols have their uses, but I have always been partial to black powder flintlocks. There’s such a sense of history about them, don’t you agree?”
“Oh, sure. Wait a minute. Are you serious about me being a vampire? Huh! That must be why I passed out on the beach.”
“You got that straight, sport,” she said levelly. “Your guilt was even published in the newspapers.”
“Oh, my Lord, that’s right! We left the names out of Lydia’s copy of the report, and Lydia read it wrong.” I put my head in my hands. “What a mess!”
Then I recollected that Clarkin was pointing a pistol at me. “Wait, let’s backtrack here for a minute. What did you mean by ‘my guilt’?”
“That you are a foul fiend in human form; an accursed, undead drinker of human blood; that sort of thing.” She waved the pistol negligently. “It’s in all the literature.” She gave me an odd look. “Now, did I remember to bring my mallet and stake?”
“I don’t like where this conversation is leading,” I admitted. “You don’t really want to go through with this, do you?”
Nurse Clarkin looked at me with glittering eyes. “It’s God’s Will, Limb of Lucifer.”
I heard a knock at the door and Piper’s voice. “Ken, are you decent? Can we come in?”
“Please do!”
Piper and Catarina opened the door and walked in, clutching their visitor’s passes. Piper had a gym bag under her arm.
Nurse Clarkin turned to them. “I was just about to shoot this vampire with a silver bullet.”
Catarina’s mouth twitched.
I pointed at the pistol and mouthed silently, Would you please do something about this?
“I’m sorry, nurse,” Catarina said softly and very gravely, “but this is a navy matter.”
“You’ll just have to wait your turn to shoot him like everybody else,” Piper threw in.
“Darn,” Nurse Clarkin said. She stuffed her horse pistol back down her bosom and stomped out of the room.
“You wouldn’t happen to know if I’m on drugs?” I asked.
Catarina sat down on one end of the bed. “Yes,” she said without elaboration. “How do you feel, Ken?”
“Like I died.”
“You almost did.” Catarina looked up. “I wonder if your nurse remembered to take her pistol off full cock?”
“I hope her belt’s tight,” Piper said. “What she’s got isn’t going to hold that pistol up.”
There was a muffled report and a little yip a short distance down the corridor.
“Sounds like a misfire to me. That’s why they switched over to percussion caps,” Piper commented.
“Changing topics, what happened to me?” I asked.
“When you didn’t come back after your physical, I tried to call you and got a little worried when you didn’t answer. Bunkie said she took you to the beach, so I sent Beam down to check on you. She scraped you off the sand with an acute case of skin poisoning.”
“I don’t remember being out there that long.”
“You weren’t,” she said gently. “Seriously, you’re lactose-sensitive now, and your system reacted to the milk in the milkshake you drank and whatever else you put away before Beam found you. Along with the sun, it threw your body into shock, and I wasn’t sure you were going to come out.”
“Oh.”
“You looked dead as a fish by the time I got to you,” Piper volunteered.
“When the lab results came in, they confirmed our suspicions. Beam and I decided we ought to break the news to you.” Catarina pursed her lips for a minute. “I gather Nurse Clarkin spoiled the surprise. Anyway, welcome to the club.”
It took a few minutes to sink in. “Yeah. So I’m a vamp. It figures, I guess. That dentist really liked my teeth.”
“Regrets?” Catarina asked.
“Well, I remember somebody saying, ‘I don’t regret anything that doesn’t add to my waistline.’ So what are we going to do?”
She smiled. “Just rest, Ken. Try and get your strength back. Things will work out somehow.”
“I know. ‘Trust me.’ “ I nodded my head up and down, and it even worked. Then I looked from Catarina to Beam and back again. “So why are the two of you smiling?”
“What makes you say that?” Piper asked, turning her head so I couldn’t see her expression. “We’ve been out shopping.”
Something clicked in my mind. “You went shopping?”
Catarina widened her smile, which was not a good sign. “We thought we’d get you a get-well gift.” That was Piper’s clue to reach into her bag and pull out a cardboard box.
I looked from one of them to the other. “I’m not going to like this, am I?”
“Go ahead, Ken. Open it,” Beam said.
I pulled the lid off. “It’s black. It’s clothing.” I held it up. “It’s a cape. A cape. That’s it—just cape it up, guys.”
“Sure, Ken,” Piper said, laughing. “We found it in a novelty shop. I want you to know we looked around for a set of plastic fangs, but we couldn’t find any.”
“Yeah, right. Beam, can Catarina and I be alone for a minute?”
Piper stepped outside. “I am going to get even,” I pointed out to Catarina. “For the cape, anyway. Somehow. I don’t care how long it takes me, I am going to get even.”
Then I started laughing, too.
Catarina leaned over and kissed my cheek. “Ken, I’ve talked to the doctor, and he’s willing to release you to us as soon as you feel up to walking. Piper’s going to stay here and bring you over as soon as you’re ready. The sector commander, Captain Crenshaw, is over in Commander Hiro’s office. I’ll phone her. She’s going to want to see you as soon as you feel able. Don’t keep her waiting.”
“How did Crenshaw get here so quick?”
“You’ve been out for six days,” Catarina said. Then she was gone.
Piper came back in, dumped some extra clothes for me out of her bag, and parked herself in a chair. “ Are you up for checking out?”
“Whew! Give me a few minutes, here.” I flipped on the monitor in the room and sorted through my mail. Buried in the garbage was a little message from Bunkie. “Call Squirrel McNutty about lattices.”
I showed it to Piper. “I thought April Fool’s was over a couple of weeks ago.”
She punched up Bunkie’s number on the phone and her image appeared. “Oh, hello, sir. How do you feel?”
“Only slightly dead. I have a message here to call Squirrel McNutty about lattices. Didn’t you guys wear out that joke with Ted E. Baer?”
Bunkie lost her composure ever so slightly. “Sir, I don’t know how to explain this, but that message is on the level. McNutty is a Rodent who turned himself in as a prisoner-of-war. It turns out that Squirrel McNutty was the boon companion of Woody Chuck in a Bucky Beaver story. He says Cheeves asked him to bring some lattices along.” She paused for a minute. “Sir, if this one turns out to be animal husbandry, I’ll take the heat.”
“Thanks, Bunkie,” I said sheepishly.
Catarina called a few seconds later. “Ken—I just wanted to mention that Elaine was waiting in the lobby for me to turn in my visitor’s pass. The police took her bomb away and have her in custody.”
There was a small explosion, which rattled the windowpanes.
“It sounds like the police bomb squad is getting in some OJT,” I observed.
“You’d better leave quietly out the back entrance. A minute ago, the lobby was crawling with reporters,” Catarina cautioned.
Piper and I slipped out the back, and she drove me back to the office, where Captain Crenshaw was waiting for me.
Captain Crenshaw was a large black lady with grizzled grey hair and crow’s-feet around her eyes. As I walked in and blinked at the light, she was sitting behind Hiro’s desk stroking Sasha Louise. Lieutenant Commander Stemm was standing behind her.
“Have a seat, Ensign,” she said in a voice that was intended to be friendly.
I sat down. Then I looked at her oddly. “You’re not going to tell me that that cat is one of your secret agents, are you?”
“No.” She let Sasha Louise jump down. “This is a cat. Not a particularly bright animal, even as cats go. Why?”
“Never mind, ma’am.”
“Are you sure you’re fit to be up, Ensign?” she asked with obviously feigned solicitude.
“I’m fine, ma’am. What did I miss?”
Crenshaw smiled. “You missed a lot of the hoopla. Your girlfriend, Christine...”
“Who? Oh! Go on, ma’am.”
“As I was saying, your girlfriend Christine has gotten most of the publicity so far. She’s a lot more photogenic than your shipmates. One of the local reporters got a real nice shot of her holding a dumbat a few seconds before the dumbat lost it.”
I closed my eyes. “Ma’am, you’re not going to believe this—” I started to say.
“That’s right, but it doesn’t matter,” Crenshaw said briskly. “You’re not on the hook. She’s signed up to model for a local outfit called Mall World, and I understand she’s going to host a game show.”
I silently thanked the Lord. “How are Sin and Trujillo doing?”
“They’re doing fine. We’re going to send them on the talk-show circuit.”
“And Commander Hiro?”
“He’ll make captain out of this as long as he understands he’s supposed to retire after we promote him.”
“How thoughtful.” I looked at Stemm. “Have a nice trip?”
Stemm glared. “Fourteen days’ worth of Roy Rogers and the Cisco Kid!” His mouth tightened, and his voice cracked ever so slightly. “I can’t wait to see you court-martialled!”
I looked at him, then said to Crenshaw, “Ma’am, I may not have had the advantages of an education paid for by the taxpayers, but I’m not stupid. Would you please explain to Lieutenant Commander Stemm why you’re not going to court-martial me?”
Captain Crenshaw looked down at Stemm. “Bobby, I left some suits out in the shuttle that need pressing, why don’t you go take care of them? Take the cat with you.”
Stemm gave her a stricken look and left the room, shutting the door behind him.
“How did things go with the Macdonalds?” I asked.
Crenshaw smiled like a big cat. “The Macdonalds? As soon as we got word about your situation from Commander Stemm, we accidentally blew away the first Macdonald ship we spotted. We sent the survivors back with a very nicely worded letter of apology. The Macdonalds were very understanding, and the situation there is defused, no thanks to you. I thought that two destroyers would do the trick here. As it turns out, we didn’t need them after all.”
“No thanks to you, ma’am. I don’t mean to be impertinent, but you could have left us with a little bit more to work with.”
“I deserved that, didn’t I?” she said briskly. “Oh, and sorry about your illness. Damn shame, that. Not duty-related, of course, so navy disability is completely out of the question.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’m sure my lawyer will be happy to look into that for me.”
It was Crenshaw’s turn to glare at me. “How did you get to be a vampire, anyway?”
“Ma’am, I guess it happened the usual way. I must have forgot to wipe the toilet seat before I sat down,” I said stiffly.
“Ensign,” she growled, “I am the deus ex machina that has to figure out how to clean up this mess. I am old enough and mean enough to recognise sarcasm when I hear it, and I think I’ve heard enough out of you.”
“Sorry, ma’am. Why am I here?”
“Oh, I just wanted to go over your testimony before the Naval Estimates Subcommittee. I’m sure they’ll all want to hear about your splendid little action here.”
“Big bucks in it for the navy, huh? This war will need a lot of editing before it gets into the history books. What happens when the committee members find out you had a couple of vamps running things at the time?”
Captain Crenshaw looked exceedingly pained. She coughed slightly and said in a very different tone of voice, “That was the part I thought we ought to go over.”
“Oh. Good. For a minute there I was beginning to wonder which one of us was rattlebrained.” When her eyes started bugging out, I asked her, “Does that really work? I mean that husky-voiced, sweet-young-thing type of approach?”
She looked at me cross-eyed, and then she laughed. “Every damn time, at least up till now. Hell of an inconvenience, that affliction of yours!”
“Ma’am, tell me about it.”
She leaned over the desk. “All right, young man. We are going to have to ship you back to Earth for slaughter. This is the first space battle in fifty years, and I doubt there’s any way to keep you from testifying short of stuffing you in a sack. As much as it pains me, I’m even going to have to make a hero out of you.”
“Why me?” I protested. “Why not Catarina or Piper? They outrank me—don’t they have to share in the blame? Or what about Hiro? This was his idea, anyway.”
“Hiro was inconsiderate enough to knock himself out and mention it in his report. Piper was operating the launcher on the space station.” Crenshaw grinned. “Nobody is ever going to fall for that particular trick again, and if we give Piper the lion’s share of the credit, every legislator is going to want to buy the navy an orbiting missile launcher to station on a space platform in his district. The universe will be a whole lot safer if the navy keeps a few ships instead.”
“And Catarina?” I rejoined mildly. “You know that none of this would have worked without her?”
“Lieutenant Lindquist submitted her resignation before this all blew up, and she announced to the press that she was a vamp. I don’t know if anybody’s mentioned it to you
, but the reporters covering the Macdonald crisis hired a cruise ship and headed over here when that fizzled. There must be three hundred of them floating around underfoot at the moment.”
I gaped, and Crenshaw smiled. “Unfortunately, Lindquist was inconsiderate enough to tell the assembled multitude that your ship handling was the hottest thing since sliced bread in a vacuum pack, which ties my hands. Her sense of humour leaves a little bit to be desired at times.”
“I’ll agree with that.”
“Anyway,” Crenshaw continued, “we’re going to have to take Lindquist off active duty before the hearings start, which is damnably inconvenient.”
I started rubbing the bridge of my nose. “Captain, I’m not sure you realise that half the planet must know I’m a vamp by now.”
“Not exactly, MacKay. Now that your friend Miz Dare understands that Lindquist was the vamp who wrote the report, she’s running a retraction. Right now, the only people who know you’re a vamp are your shipmates, my officers, and one nurse. As of ten minutes ago, the nurse was responding to therapy nicely.”
She drummed her fingers on the desk. “Obviously, we’re not going to be able to keep this a secret forever, but I think we can keep things quiet until after the hearings.”
“Ma’am, there must be fifty reporters looking into the story right now.”
“Ensign, by the day after tomorrow, you will be old news and they will all be gone. Now that we’ve announced it, half of them are sceptical about Lindquist being a vamp.”
“Ma’am,” I said, exasperated, “what about my little trip to the hospital?”
“Oh, that worked out beautifully. Publicly, we told everybody that you took a sword cut wrestling with Prince Genghis and probably fainted from lack of blood.”
“I got scratched by a cat.”
“No problem. We have containment on two levels. We told everybody privately that you had a nervous breakdown. Apparently, you’ve been acting a lot nicer than usual, so people who knew you figured you were due.”
“And the lab results?” I ignored the obvious retorts.
“A couple of reporters put two and two together and figured out that we submitted her tissue cultures under your name in case they tested positive. That’s old news, too. All we have to do is get you off this planet relatively quickly.”
McClendon's Syndrome (v1.1) Page 33
