Fergus triumphantly held up an IV bag full of blood, and plunged his teeth into it. Guttural slurping noises filled the room as he devoured the pint, crimson rivulets spilling over his chin as he drank eagerly.

  This primal display shook Fiona, and she mumbled, “I’ll go check the other operating theatres,” as she stumbled out the door.

  Matt gagged as he rushed out of the room. Jonathan was about to follow when Jimmy spoke to him.

  “Do you know much about hospitals, Jon? Where can we find more?”

  “Well, I guess these operating rooms are a good place to start,” Jonathan replied reluctantly, averting his eyes from Fergus’s feeding, “as they’ll usually keep a store of blood handy for emergency operations. Then we should look for a blood transfusion unit, ‘cause that’ll probably be the main blood bank for the hospital.

  “If we’re lucky, maybe their generators will have lasted. Or even if the power is out, they should have freezers, too, and defrosted blood should still be fresh enough.” Jonathan grimaced as he listened to himself. He was supposed to be having a romantic break in France, and instead he was involved in a quest to feed a hungry vampire.

  Having drained the bag dry, and finding no other blood in the fridge, Fergus was scraping any precious droplets he could collect off his chin and licking them off his fingers. Jimmy thought he looked like a wolf, licking his chops contentedly.

  “If you don’t mind, um, I’ll just go see how my brother is doing,” Jonathan excused himself as tactfully as he could manage.

  Jimmy nodded assent. Turning to Fergus, and displaying the strongest stomach of any of them, he asked, “You feeling better, Fergs?”

  Fergus nodded with a mixture of satisfaction and shame. “Sorry for that display.”

  “Nae worries, mate. You were hungry.”

  “Shall we rejoin the others?” Jimmy held the door open for Fergus. He suspected that he was worried about Fiona.

  Out in the hall, Jonathan was offering Matt a hand up from where he was sitting with his head between his knees. “You all right?” he asked Matt as Fergus and Jimmy passed them.

  Matt made an effort to collect himself, and he leaned on his brother’s shoulder as he stood. “Are we done with the blood hunt?”

  Jonathan frowned. “I don’t think so. I don’t know how much a vampire needs, but if you think about it, the human body contains 8 to 10 pints of blood, and Fergus just drank one back there. I’d say it’s bought us a bit of time, but I don’t know how much.

  “Plus, ideally we’ll want to get a supply we can bring with us.”

  “So we don’t start to look tasty,” Matt finished grimly. His feelings were conflicted. He had truly liked and respected Fergus. But he wasn’t convinced that Fergus the vampire was the same Fergus that he’d known and worked with. Plus, something else was bothering him.

  “Jon, I know it would be foolish to go back to Pollok House, but I keep thinking about those women. Not to mention everyone else we left behind.”

  Jonathan sighed heavily, haunted once again by his last encounter with Wullie. Instead of answering Matt directly, he said, “Do you remember, ‘The Day of the Triffids’?”

  “About the man-eating plants? Yeah, what about it?”

  “Do you remember the conversation between the protagonists early on, when they’re talking about how almost everyone is blind or ill, and likely to die? And that they can’t save everyone?

  “They have to accept that it’s a new world, and the best they can do is try to survive. Trying to rescue the masses, while it makes for dramatic movies, isn’t realistic. Not when your chances of surviving are already so low.

  “Do you want to be a dead hero, or alive to see the sunrise?”

  “It still doesn’t seem right,” Matt said petulantly.

  “I don’t like it any more than you do, bro,” Jonathan replied. “But grand moral gestures aren’t going to save our skins.”

  He strode ahead to catch up with the others, who had moved on down the corridor. He knew that Matt would need to brood some more before he came to terms with reality. He was always especially sentimental after one of his drinking binges.

  Further along the hall, Fiona led the way. Though she was ashamed to admit it, she was trying to avoid looking at Fergus. His frenzied drinking in the operating theatre had frightened her. It was easier when she could just pretend that nothing had changed.

  Maybe not that much had changed, though. Fergus still possessed the same sensitivity and intuition that he always had. He was giving her the space she needed just now: letting her be the first to speak to him, when she was ready.

  They entered another operating theatre. A metallic tang hung in the air.

  “Smells like a metal works,” Jimmy commented, trying to place the odour.

  “Isn’t that what all hospitals smell like?” Matt asked.

  “No, I can smell the antiseptic,” Jimmy replied. “But there’s something else . . .”

  “Look at this mural,” Fiona pointed to a scene of a stick-figure family next to a house and tree painted on the wall. “Did we cross into the children’s ward?” she asked as she stepped across the room to take a closer look at the artwork.

  “Brown’s a pretty depressing colour if you’re trying to brighten up the lives of sick children,” Matt said. Then his eyes swept over the rest of the room, and took in what was lying behind the door. “Oh –”

  He rushed out of the room and vomited in the pristine corridor. Fiona followed his gaze, and all of the blood drained out of her face.

  She pushed past Fergus, who was reaching for her, and ran down the hall, away from Matt’s reeking sick, away from the monstrosity on the operating table.

  Jonathan had frozen in his tracks, not sure that he wanted to see what had so upset the other two. Jimmy raised an inquisitive eyebrow at Fergus, who was in the doorway, between them and what Matt and Fiona had seen.

  “That’s not paint on the walls,” Fergus explained flatly. “There’s a corpse on the table.

  “It looks like mid-operation, someone decided to switch from surgery to finger-painting.”

  Jimmy blinked uncomprehendingly. “Are you saying that’s blood? Someone painted an entire drawing with someone else’s blood?”

  Jonathan suddenly longed for some fresh air. He hadn’t come across many of the harmless zombies, but his travelling companions had told him about the adult-children, as they called them, that they’d met. People so brain-damaged that they had reverted to childhood, obsessed with juvenile games to the exclusion of all else. Including finger-painting, it would seem. He left abruptly, going to his brother.

  Always pragmatic, Jimmy asked Fergus, “Anything for you in there?”

  “Not fresh enough,” Fergus shook his head. “Let’s keep our eyes open.”

  “D’you think there are zombies in the hospital?”

  “There could be. Vampires can sense each other, but I’m not getting any of that. So I think we’re safe on that front. But I have no better idea about zombies than you do.”

  “Guys!” Everyone cringed at the loudness of Fiona’s shout echoing along the empty passage. “Get down here, quick!” She sounded elated.

  Fergus and Jimmy ran to join her; Matt and Jonathan followed at a more sedate pace. As they entered the room Fiona had disappeared into, they felt a chill in the air.

  Fiona had opened the door to a large, humming refrigerator. She flourished her arms like a game show hostess, showing off the prize even as goose bumps appeared on her arms.

  “Whaddya think? They’re still cold.”

  A dozen shelves were crammed with bags of blood.

  Chapter 3

  “You’re a star, Fiona!” Fergus exclaimed, his eyes widening in delight at the veritable feast spread before him. He slipped an arm around her waist and squeezed appreciatively.

  “Fiona for the win!” Jonathan crowed. He slapped his brother on the back, and then immediately regretted doing so when Matt’s cheeks puffed out as he suppressed a gag reflex. Matt wandered over to the laboratory bench, his back to the others, and started flipping through papers scattered across the table.

  Jimmy grinned broadly, “Will this keep you going for a while, Fergus?”

  “A very long while,” Fergus replied. He picked up a bag and held it to the light, turning it from side to side as if he were assessing the merits of a merlot.

  “Jon, help me find something to move these in?” Fiona asked. “There should be some sort of refrigerated transport containers here, I would think.” She wasn’t quite ready to witness another display of Fergus feeding, so she happily made herself busy with searching the shelves.

  “I’ll give them a hand,” Jimmy added as he punched Fergus playfully in the arm. “Drink up, mate.”

  Fergus gathered two handfuls of blood bags, and he carried them into an adjoining room. He knew that once he started drinking, he wouldn’t want to stop. He thought it best if he did this away from his friends.

  Part of it was courtesy, but he was also fighting a baser instinct. The hunger was so strong that he worried he wouldn’t be able to control it if someone happened into his path while he was feeding.

  Fergus was still coming to grips with his new identity. For all that he appeared calm and in control, an internal battle raged without respite. There were moments where it had taken every ounce of self-control that he could muster to stop himself from harming his friends who were so close, so warm, so alive, with fresh blood pumping fiercely through their veins . . .

  Fergus gave himself a shake, and focused his attention on the food he was holding. He ripped the valve off the first blood bag, and tilted his head back to drink.

  In the other room, Matt was staring at the papers held loosely between his fingertips with growing perplexity.

  “Jon, you took biology at university, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, computer geek,” the reply came from inside a supply closet. “I took physics and chemistry, too. You know, real sciences?” he gently teased. “I never understood how ‘computer science’ came to be on the list. They should insist that you arts majors take at least one real science.”

  Too perturbed to rise to this ribbing, Matt threw back, “Ok, hot shot. Maybe you can tell me the significance of artificial blood, then?”

  “Artificial blood?”

  Matt shook out the page he was holding, and read, “‘Researchers have announced that they believe an artificial blood that they have created from stem cells could be ready for testing in humans within three years.’”

  Jonathan’s face drained, “What are you reading? Where did you get that?”

  “It seems to be a press release,” Matt replied. “The paper is headed ‘Victoria Infirmary.’ Do you think it’s this lab that’s working on artificial blood?”

  A clatter and crash from next door momentarily interrupted their conversation.

  “Fergus? You all right?” Jimmy called out in concern. Fiona had already started to cross the room in the direction of the ruckus.

  “Jonathan. Why do you look so pale?”

  “Artificial blood doesn’t actually contain any nutrients or anything like that. It’s really just a fluid to allow oxygen to be pulled from your lungs to other parts of your body,” Jonathan looked increasingly worried as the noise from next door amplified. There was a sound of breaking glass.

  “It’s a stop-gap measure that scientists have been working on. It bears as much resemblance to real blood as plain water does to chunky vegetable soup.”

  Matt continued to look at him blankly, not comprehending.

  “Matt, if this fridge is full of artificial blood, not real blood, it’s not going to help Fergus,” Jonathan explained, now having to shout above the din.

  “It might even harm him.”

  A piercing scream cut them off. They ran to where Fiona and Jimmy stood, horror-struck, in the doorway. Where the air had been filled with crashing and banging, an eerie silence now replaced it. All that could be heard was their own halting breathing.

  The next room had been turned upside down: all of the furniture overturned. A chair had been smashed through the window, teetering precariously on the sill amidst broken glass. The light fixture hung down at a crazy angle.

  And there was blood everywhere. It ran down the walls in gruesome rivulets, splattered the upended furniture in grim polka dots, covered the floor in an unctuous slick.

  A still form lay huddled in the middle of the chaos, miraculously untouched by the blood that painted everything else darkly red.

  “Fergus!”

  Fiona was the first to break the paralysis and run to their fallen friend. She grabbed his shoulders, fearing the worst.

  But he was still with them. Fergus murmured sadly into the floor, so low that she hadn’t been able to hear him from across the room.

  “It’s okay,” she whispered, brushing the hair at the back of his neck. “It’ll be okay.”

  Fergus’s moaning rose in a keening pitch, crescendoing into a wail that shook the last shards of glass loose from the window frame.

  “It’s useless! Utterly useless! Worse than useless!” Rage and despair mingled in his voice. “Why don’t you just give me poison and be done with it!”

  “Fergus?” Fiona tried, full of concern. “What are you talking about?”

  “This!” Fergus shook a half-empty blood bag in Fiona’s face, spraying her with crimson. “This is not real blood! It’s worse than water! It makes me hungrier!” He turned and threw the bag against the wall so forcefully that it burst in an artistic splat.

  “We didn’t know –”

  Fergus shook Fiona’s arm off, so hard that she was thrown back onto her bottom. Her breath oomphed out of her.

  Jimmy stepped forward protectively, though the concern in his eyes wasn’t just for Fiona. He couldn’t imagine the turmoil Fergus must be experiencing to make him so wildly violent.

  Fergus met his gaze, his eyes glowing red. Despite Jimmy’s massive frame and muscular build, he was no match for Fergus’s enhanced speed and strength. Fergus squared his shoulders and shifted his weight forward. His legs coiled under him, and he sprang.

  Instead of going for Jimmy, though, Fergus seemed to disappear into a smudge of smoke and fly out of the room. In the last instant before he transformed, Jimmy thought that he’d seen his raging glare soften into an expression of pain.

  Matt and Jonathan stood looking in the direction that Fergus had taken, their mouths agape.

  Jimmy offered Fiona a hand up. “Y’okay?”

  Fiona grimaced ruefully as she wiped at the blood on her face. “Sorry that I’m always ending up on my backside and that you’re left to pick me up.”

  “’Salright,” Jimmy smiled at her.

  “Umm, has anyone else noticed that Fergus is crazy!?” Jonathan ventured.

  “He’s going through a hard time right now.”

  “Jimmy, he just almost ate Fiona! And he looked like he was going to kill you, too!”

  “But he didn’t.”

  “But he could have! And he still could!”

  “We need to get him some real blood. Then he’ll be fine,” Fiona insisted, but not without a waver of doubt in her voice.

  “Fiona. I know you loved the man that was Fergus, but he’s not a man anymore. He’s a monster! He could hurt you.” Jonathan’s chin trembled slightly.

  “And we’re putting our lives at risk wandering around with him. We should be preparing a defensive position somewhere, not be on a wild goose chase to feed a beast.” He turned toward his brother, who was leaning out of the broken window. As usual, Matt was trying to take himself out of any conflicts.

  “Stop shining that flashlight around! Are you trying to set up a dinner beacon for any zombies in the area?” Jonathan shouted in exasperation.

  With a guilty start, Matt pulled himself back through the window frame. Throwing Jonathan a black look, he stomped out of the room.

  “No one is forcing you to stay with us, Jonathan,” Fiona hissed.

  “Yeah, well, maybe I’ll leave!”

  “Go ahead,” she said icily.

  They stared at each other in wilful confrontation. Jimmy shuffled uneasily, causing broken glass to crunch softly under his feet in the tension-filled silence.

  “Guys, come look at this,” Matt’s voice floated quietly to them from the adjoining room.

 

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