by Renee Carr
The bite was strange, and even the doctor pointed it out. “Usually when a dog bites, or any type of animal, they clamp and rip. This literally looks like something bit him, then carefully lifted its fangs out of him. In fact, it meticulously missed every main vein that runs through the arm. Besides the normal testing, there’s no reason for just that bite to be studied.”
I wrote as the doctor talked, putting the notes in the file. He was right, though—the bite was strange and it almost pulsated through his veins. His arms themselves had strong, blue lines where his veins normally sat. He looked almost undead, but I knew that was impossible; things like that didn’t happen outside of stories and movies. There was no reason for me to be afraid of him. He was completely harmless.
Still, he was completely unconscious as well, and he was running a massive fever. The doctor yelled out orders, moving him to different sides, getting him dressed in his hospital gown, and getting emergency supplies just in case. “I want him to have the rabies shot, and I want you to swab the whole bite, taking a tissue sample as well. I want all of this done before you start sewing him up. We don’t want to have to cut him back open just because we didn’t get a good enough sample.”
I understood, and I was the only one trained to do so in the setting we were in. I put on a pair of gloves and the other nurse grabbed my glasses. They were magnified ones that allowed me to see more intricate details to the holes. I cut a piece of tissue off and put it in the sample glass, sending it immediately off to the lab. One of the other nurses finished taking the blood samples as I swabbed the entirety of the injuries. They weren’t going to need a lot of stitches since they were just puncture wounds, but we did so anyway just to make sure the bleeding stopped.
I put the needle through the skin, back and forth, over and over, until the holes began to shut tightly. When I was done with each one, I tied the knot and very carefully clipped the sutures. I dropped the scissors and the needle into the metal pan on the table next to me and rolled it back. As I began to stand up, the patient sat straight up in the bed, his mouth wide and a loud, deep scream bellowing from his chest. We all paused in shock, staring at him, not able to react to something that sudden.
Several of the nurses jumped back to the door and watched as his eyes rolled back into his head and his body slammed back down on the stretcher. Immediately, my hands went to his neck, followed by my stethoscope to his chest. He was still alive, he was just unconscious. The only thing I could think of was that the medicine was keeping him from fully waking up and he was having bad dreams. The doctor came running into the room, looking at me and then looking at the patient. “What happened?”
I shook my head, stepping back. “I don’t know. He sat up screaming, then passed back out. He didn’t seem to recognize where he was or even that he was awake.”
The doctor looked at my readings and very carefully nodded his head. “Good, order some sedative so that doesn’t happen again. Put it into his IV, and give him some anti-nausea medication just in case.”
I agreed and sent one of the newer nurses out to retrieve the medication. As I wiped his face down, getting the caked blood off and mopping the sweat from his brow, I couldn’t help but notice just how handsome of a face he had. Not only that, but I lived in a very small town, and I didn’t recognize him a bit. We all kind of knew each other, and if we didn’t know each other, we had at least seen each other around. This guy wasn’t familiar at all. It was obvious he wasn’t from the same small town.
Finishing up cleaning him, and injecting his sedative into the IV, I watched as his facial muscles began to relax and his body allowed him to collapse with the medication. I passed off the samples to another nurse and took off my gloves, tossing them in the trash. “I want one of you to stay right here in the room with him just until we know he’s stabilized a bit. I want to go talk to the brothers.”
Walking out of the ER, I pushed through the doors to the lobby and both of the guys stood up and approached nervously. “He’s stable but still unconscious. He had a moment where he sat up and screamed, then he fell right back out. Do either of you have his identification?”
They both looked at each other and then back at me, shaking their heads. “We can get it for you; it’s back at the campsite. We’re from Galena, not far away, here to spend the weekend celebrating our little brother’s graduation from college with a fishing trip. I’m Eric.”
I shook Eric’s hand and the other guy held his hand out as well. “I’m Brighton.”
“That’s great, I’m Libby, but I really need to know who he is.”
Eric looked as if a lightbulb suddenly went off in his head, stopping the panic that he was showing. “Sure, his name is Christian Holbrook, and he’s our older brother.”
“Did either of you see this wolf that they are saying attacked him?”
The guys both shook their heads. “We didn’t, we were at the campsite when we found him stumbling up, his eyes almost glazed over. Before he could tell us anything, he passed out on the ground. We didn’t even know that there were wolves out there.”
Eric had the camera around his neck. “Yeah, we didn’t know there were wolves. We have been told the wolves had left the national forest long before we ever went there. All he kept saying was a very large wolf, a very large wolf. Then he whimpered and he was out. We obviously could see something was wrong, so we rushed him to the car and then out of the park to the hospital. That whole time he was unconscious and bleeding.”
I let out a long sigh, finding it all so very strange. Stranger things, though, had happened at the park, and just about anything was possible when you mixed humans with raw nature. “Thanks, guys. If you can think of anything else, let me know. Whenever the doctor’s done, one of the nurses will come out to get you so that you can visit him. But don’t stay too long because even if he wakes up, he’s going to need rest. We don’t really know what’s keeping him under, or what is causing the fever that he has, but we’re going to get to the bottom of it.”
They both thanked me politely and I headed back into the ER. As I walked toward Christian’s room, grabbing his file and entering his information, I couldn’t help but feel almost personally attached to this case. There was no real reason for me to be, but something inside of me was pulling me toward him, and I couldn’t tell if that was good or bad.
5
Christian
I looked down at my feet, and they were bare. I could feel the leaves crunching beneath them and all around me was a thick fog. Even though I couldn’t see very far, everything was familiar. I was in the national forest, the same place I had been when I had found my way into the cave. I began to walk faster, this time with no sounds around me in the woods. As I approached the dark, dripping cave, I slowed. There would be no need to go inside this time; what I was looking for was patiently resting at the entrance to the cave.
The wolf was strong and unafraid, unlike the last time I saw it when it was shaking and nervous. It was the same wolf that had bitten me, only this time it wasn’t growling or snarling at me. This time, those big, beautiful eyes shimmering through the sparkling, silver hair looked at me the same as a human would. There was no fear in my heart, and I stood close, watching those radiant eyes scan over me for a moment.
“You were meant to be here,” a voice said from inside of my head.
I looked around for a moment, but I didn’t see anyone. My eyes fell back onto the wolf and I realized it was him talking to me through my mind. “What do you mean?”
The wolf blinked at me. “The change will come, do not be afraid.”
“What change?” I asked, confused at what it was saying.
“When the change happens, and it is complete, I will be here to help you,” the wolf replied. “Do not be afraid.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Please explain it,” I pleaded, taking another step toward him.
But he didn’t say another word; he just sat there staring at me. I want
ed to reach out and touch him, but the closer I got, the further away he felt. Everything was so confusing with the fog rolling in around us. There was a cold chill that blew over me, raising the hair on my arms and the back of my neck.
When I looked back up, I saw the wolf entering the cave. “Wait…”
“You are one of us now,” the wolf whispered as it disappeared into the darkness.
That line echoed in my head over and over again as the fog grew closer. I felt as if it were going to strangle me, completely swallow me whole. I began to panic, turning and running. Every step I took, though, the fog just got closer. I stopped and dropped down onto all fours, gripping the dirt with my fingers. As the dewy mist blanketed over me, I gasped and opened my eyes, finding myself no longer in the woods, and no longer dreaming.
“It’s okay,” a woman’s voice said from beside me. “You’re in the hospital, and you’re safe.”
The hospital?
My eyes shifted around the ceiling, squinting against the bright lights glaring down at me. Slowly I turned my head, finding a beautiful woman in scrubs pressing the buttons on a machine that was hooked up to my body. Another voice arose, a much more familiar one. “Hey, buddy, we’re so glad to see you awake. Just take a deep breath, everything’s okay.”
I looked over at Eric and blinked, turning back to the woman, not understanding who she was as I watched her. She pulled out a stethoscope and pressed the cold metal to my chest, her eyes glancing up at me. When she took the pieces out of her ears, she wrapped a cuff around my arm and started the machine. “You were brought in here yesterday. You were bitten by what you kept saying was a wolf. You had bite marks on your arms, a high fever, and you kept going in and out of consciousness.”
Her stare went from me up to the doorway where another woman stepped into view. “Can you get the doctor for me? Tell him that the patient with the bite is awake.”
I tried to clear my throat, but it was so dry. She poured me a glass of water and held it to my lips, letting me take a sip. She was gentle and warm, and I felt drawn to her.
She pulled the glass from my lips and sat down on the stool, smiling at me sweetly. “How are you feeling?”
The water coated my throat enough for me to speak. “Nauseous, achy, and my muscles hurt. It feels almost like they’re growing inside of me. Like my whole body is changing.”
She stared at me for a moment, giving me a curious look before reaching over and taking a chart in her hands. She jotted down everything that I said, glancing up at me from moment to moment. “Do you understand where you are now?”
I nodded my head. “The hospital. My brothers are here.”
She gave me a warm smile. “Very good. I’m going to go check and see where the doctor is. There’s a nurse’s button, your brothers know where it is. If you need anything, you press that button and someone will come right away. They know to check on you if they hear that button. You can have some more water, but be careful, drink it slowly.”
I shook my head at her, still slightly bewildered at what was going on. I had thought that the bite and the wolf were all a dream, but it seemed now that it wasn’t. It seemed now that I needed to keep the dream I had to myself. Looking down at my arm, I saw the gauze wrapped around where the wolf had bitten me. It all felt so hazy in my head, yet everything I knew to be true was turning out to be.
Eric walked up on one side of me and Brighton on the other, helping me to sit up in the bed. Brighton lifted the back of the bed and I leaned into it, putting one hand on my ribs. I was so sore. Eric pulled a stool up next to the bed. “Man, we’ve been terrified. You’ve really stumped these doctors. They have been running test after test on you to try to figure out why you were losing consciousness. That and how a bite like that on your arm could’ve happened. Do you remember it?”
I rubbed my forehead a bit, staring down at the blanket as I thought about what had happened. Again, everything felt so hazy. “Parts of it. Not really a lot. I remember going into a cave, and I remember passing out, but then I don’t remember anything after that up until seeing your faces for a moment before passing out again. I’ve been having the strangest dreams.”
Eric chuckled and shook his head. “Strange dreams about your hot nurse, huh?”
Both of them chuckled and it seemed to snap me out of my haze. I laughed with them and shook my head. “I’m really glad you two are here. I would’ve been way more than confused if you hadn’t been.”
Brighton stretched his arms out and yawned. “What choice do we have? Leave it to you to ruin the whole trip. Seriously, if you didn’t want to be the one responsible for cooking dinner the next night, you could’ve just asked me. You didn’t have to go throw yourself into a wolf den.”
“Wolf?” I asked. “All this was because of a wolf?”
Eric shrugged. “That’s what you’ve said. And as much as I wish you were lying, you aren’t really known to do that. Though, nobody’s seen any wolves in the national forest for decades. So, if you didn’t have a run-in with one, you happened to find the one that’s been hiding out forever. Of course, that doesn’t surprise me in the least.”
My mind kept fluttering back to the dream that I had, those words echoing through my mind. You are one of us now. How could I be one of them? I wasn’t a wolf, I was a human that was in the wrong place at the wrong time. “Did they test me for…”
Brighton scoffed. “Everything under the sun? The black plague? Pregnancy? Yeah, they tested you for everything and everything came back negative. So, either this wolf gave you something that no one’s ever seen before, or something else happened other than just the wolf. When the park rangers heard about what happened, we had to take them to the cave you were in. They didn’t find anything there.”
I shook my head, staring off into space. “No, I suppose they wouldn’t have. The wolf ran off after it bit me.”
Eric lifted an eyebrow. “And you don’t find that weird at all? That a wolf would attack you and just run off? Not, oh, I don’t know, eat you as a snack?”
I hadn’t really even thought about it, and it wasn’t like I was an expert on wolves and how they hunted. I wasn’t even sure that wolves ate humans. What I did know was there had been more wolf talk and more furry creatures in my life in the last few days than there had been in my whole life. Now that I was starting to think clearer, I just wanted answers. I wanted to get out of the hospital and go find them, but I could already tell by the way that my brothers were looking at me, coupled with the number of things that were hooked up to my body, I wasn’t going anywhere.
“Look who’s awake,” a man said as he walked in, obviously a doctor. “I’m Doctor Brian, and I’ve been attending to you since you came in here yesterday. You mind if I look you over and ask some questions?”
I shook my head, watching my brothers back up and the pretty nurse from before stand beside him. The doctor put on a pair of rubber gloves and began to press his fingers to different places on my body. “Is there any specific place that hurts you the most besides the bite?”
I shook my head, wincing at every single touch. “My body is really sore, all over. I feel like my muscles are twisted and my bones are lengthening. It’s very strange, and it’s making me kind of nauseous. I feel as if my body can’t rest, and my head is pounding. I can hear my heartbeat in my temples.”
The doctor listened as the nurse wrote down different things into the file. He stood back and bit the inside of his cheek, looking me up and down. “Interesting. Since you’ve been unconscious, we haven’t been able to talk to you about how you feel. So, we’ve just been running every test that we can think of. The majority of them have come back negative; the ones that aren’t just haven’t come back yet. Do you have any history of medical conditions?”
I thought about it for a moment but then shook my head. “No. I rarely even went to the doctor as a kid except to get my vaccinations and when I had chickenpox. Ever since then, I’ve been really healthy. I have a physical every y
ear, but that’s about it. The only other thing that has happened in our family is that my mother had cancer, but my father’s very healthy. He has low cholesterol, a good heart, and never even gets the flu.”
“I see…” the doctor said, his voice seeming to fade off into the distance.
Suddenly it felt like everyone was in a tunnel around me, and I closed my eyes, trying to focus back in on one voice. Something strange shot through my body and all of my muscles tensed. I clutched my teeth tightly and I began to shake, seizing right there on the bed. Whatever had happened, my whole body was changing, and I wasn’t sure whether I should be scared or curious. All I knew was the last time that I was curious, nothing good came of it.
6
Libby
“Pull the sheets all the way back,” the doctor yelled, hurrying to Christian’s side and nodding to his brothers to step outside.
This was when I was at my best, emergency situations, but for some reason, seeing him like that almost put a pause in my step. I grabbed the blankets and threw them back over the edge of the bed. As the doctor filled a syringe with medication, I rolled Christian onto his side and cleared any pillows from around him. Seizures were some of the hardest to watch because literally you just had to secure the patient, and wait it out.
“Libby!” the doctor yelled.
