The Paramedic's Witch, page 7
part #5 of Extreme Medical Services Series
“That’s my daughter, Jo.” Dean held up a hand to forestall questions. “Don’t ask, I’ll explain it on the way to ECMC.” He walked with Jo around to the passenger side and opened the side panel door for Jo to climb in. There was another occupant sitting in the back seat already. Another teen-aged girl with bright pink hair looked out at them with a big grin on her face.
“Hi, Dean. Gibbie wasn’t sure if you needed anyone else to help out and I was available, so I came along.” The teen, Marian, was a werewolf girl who had also taken the CERT class and had ridden along on some of the emergency calls Dean had shared with the team while he was suspended from the Ambulance a few months before.
“Marian, this is Jo …”
“I heard. She’s really your daughter? That’s awesome. I could use someone my own age along on these little adventures.” Marian slid over on the bench seat and offered it to Joanna. Both Marian and Gibbie were in navy blue cargo EMS pants with plenty of pockets to stow supplies and small bits of EMS equipment. They also had light blue uniform shirts with CERT patches on their left shoulders. They both looked much more official than they had running emergency calls with Dean before. He noticed the change and said so.
“Marian, Kristof and the rest of the CERT team members decided we should have something to wear that identified us as sort of official responders,” Gibbie said. “Marian designed the patches. I like them.” He twisted to show Dean a good look at his.
“That is pretty cool,” Dean said. It would help to play up their transport ambulance cover when they got to the hospital. James assured them that one of the ER docs who supported the Unusual program at the hospital would have transfer orders written up by the time they got there, but it would not hurt to look the part as well.
Dean wished he had time to go home and change as well. But, since he wasn’t on official Fire Department business, that might cause a bit of a problem. Many of the nurses knew him, though, so if he threw a stethoscope around his neck and acted confident, they could probably pull this off without a hitch.
The four of them closed up the beat up white van and pulled away as Celeste turned and headed back upstairs. She would get the accommodations arranged for the new arrival on their return. They were only five minutes from the hospital, so if all went as planned, they would return soon with their patient.
Dean had Gibbie pull the van up next to the ambulance entrance, careful not to block the way since they weren’t a real emergency vehicle. Marian and Jo had hit it off on the short ride over and were chatting away in the back seat by the time they arrived. Dean turned and looked at the team.
“Okay, Gibbie and I are going to head upstairs to the fourth floor and the psych unit. It should not take too long. You two ladies move to the front seats and wait for us.” Dean looked at Marian. She was older than Jo by a year and he thought she had her license. “Marian, if Gibbie doesn’t mind, I’ll have you drive the van on the way back to the Nightwing building. Do you have your license with you?”
“It’s in my backpack, Dean,” she said patting her bag.
“Good, you and Jo keep the van running. I want to move quickly. Every minute counts and we have to get him back to James and Celeste before he turns completely. Gibbie, come on, and keep that vamp strength ready to go in case we need to restrain him.”
Gibbie nodded and together Dean and the vampire climbed out and headed into the hospital. Dean grabbed a spare wheel chair staged at the ambulance entrance to the ER and then went inside to get their paperwork from the doc before heading upstairs.
Everything was ready to go, waiting for them, and they were soon riding up the staff elevator to the fourth floor to collect their patient. Dean hoped they weren’t too late.
* * *
———
* * *
The elevator opened on the fourth floor to silence. Dean and Gibbie rolled the wheelchair out into an open waiting area situated in a hallway that ended in a large door. Dean had never been up here during his time as a paramedic, but he knew from the description the doc gave them downstairs that he had to be buzzed in to the locked psych ward via that door at the far end of the hallway.
As they neared the far end of the hallway and reached the speaker panel on the wall next to the door, he reached up to press the intercom button to reach the night nurse on duty. That was when Dean noticed the door was not latched closed. He got Gibbie’s attention and pointed to the door. Gibbie’s eyes got wide but neither of them said a word.
Gibbie pointed to himself, indicating to Dean that he’d enter first. Dean was glad he did. If there was a hungry vampire on the other side of the door, he knew he would be no match for it. The paramedic kept the wheelchair between himself and the doorway as his partner pulled open the door and stepped into the ward on the other side.
Dean was not prepared for what he saw. There was a common room with tables and chairs on the far side. The furniture was in disarray and overturned. The overhead lights were darkened and a few of the fixtures were broken. He followed Gibbie through the common room towards the nurses’ station desk situated where the common room opened up, with a hallway lined with doors to both the left and the right.
This was where they encountered the first body. It was obvious that the nurse had died as a result of a vampire attack. The ragged double wound caused by a vampire’s elongated canines was evident on her neck. She had been drained of blood, with a great deal of it pooling on the floor around her crumpled body. Gibbie knelt down and looked her over, when he turned back to look at Dean, the paramedic was shocked to see that Gibbie’s normally pleasant face had hardened and his fangs were clearly evident. He was in full vamp-mode now.
Dean whispered to Gibbie, his voice sounding loud in the silence that enveloped them on the ward.
“I saw some blood around her mouth. Is she going to turn?”
His vampire partner nodded. “It will be a few hours yet, but yes, she will turn eventually, Dean. I smell a lot more blood and death up here. I think she’s not the only new vampire we are going to find. We need help.”
“Let’s check the rest of the floor before we call, maybe we can stop him from turning anyone else.”
“If you say so.” Gibbie didn’t seemed convinced. He stood up and led the way down the right-hand hallway.
Each of the doors were open. Each patient room contained a body in the same condition as the nurse. The same was true for the left-hand hallway except for the last door on the right. It was locked closed and Dean looked in through the window set in the door so the nurses could check on their patients. He saw a figure on the bed, curled up and rocking back and forth.
Dean checked the door’s number and went back to the nurse’s station, pressing the corresponding button there. It unlocked the door with a click and he went back to the room. Opening the door, Gibbie entered first and then jumped back with a frightened shriek as the figure turned over revealing the canine face and hairy arms of a werewolf.
“Back, stay back, vampire. I will not let you turn me into one of your minions,” the werewolf said.
“I don’t want to change you into anything. I can’t. You’re already a Lycan. We came up here and found everyone dead except for you.”
Dean came forward and stood between Gibbie and the werewolf. “Calm down, take some deep breaths.” Dean kept eye contact with the werewolf and hoped his smile would help calm the partially shifted werewolf down. “That’s it. Keep taking deep breaths, in and out, slowly breathing until you feel more in control.”
It took a few minutes, but the shift to werewolf reversed and soon Dean was sitting on the side of the bed talking to a normal-looking man.
“We came up here to take a newly turned vampire from the ward to a safe place. This is what we found. What is your name?”
“I’m Ronald. I’ve been depressed lately and my wife suggested I come in and get my meds situated here before I came back home to her.”
“Do you know what happened up here?” Dean asked.
“About two hours ago, there was some commotion outside of the room. I had gone to bed early. I didn’t feel well. My door was locked and I couldn’t see much, but I could hear the screaming. Then I saw him. He was covered in blood and he just looked in at me. He smiled. It was a horrible, awful smile with fresh blood dripping from his fangs.”
Dean laid a hand on the man’s shoulder and urged him to continue.
“He said, ‘I can’t feed on you. You smell different.’ Like he didn’t know what a Lycan was. Then he tuned and ripped the door open across the hall and fed on the girl in there while I watched. Before he was finished, he forced her to feed on a wound he made in his wrist. Then he drained her, leaving her on the floor like some sort of trash and came out smiling at me. Then he left back down the hallway.”
“Okay, Ronald. You stay here. You’re safe for now. We’ll have someone come and check on you in a little bit.” Dean led Gibbie from the room and down the hallway back towards the nurse’s station.
Dean looked at Gibbie. “Is he still up here, maybe hiding somewhere?”
The vampire shook his head. “I would have detected him right away. He has left the immediate vicinity. I don’t think he can feed anymore, or change any other vampires. He only has so much blood to give and he has tried to turn about eighteen people up here so far. He has to find someplace to hide out. He’ll seek out some familiar surroundings in which to make a lair.”
Gibbie looked back out to the hallway and shook his head. “I haven’t seen anything this bad since back in the old country. There were a few rogue vampires around that would do things like this. The rest of us would work together to catch them. It was always a messy business.”
“Well, we need more help up here,” Dean said. “We are going to have eighteen new, hungry vampires in a few hours. They are going to have a whole hospital on which to feed if we’re not careful.”
Gibbie nodded. “James needs to send us some help or there is going to be some major carnage up here.”
“You don’t think this is major carnage?” Dean asked. He had never seen anything this bad before, not even when a trio of demons had ripped apart a family of dryads.
“You think this is bad, Dean? Imagine what this hospital is going to look like when each one of those eighteen bodies out there turn and start feeding their way through the building.”
“So we’ve got two problems. We’ve got patient zero loose in the building, or maybe the city at large and we’ve got to stop the eighteen new vampires up here from going rogue and killing or turning more people. Great.”
Dean’s phone buzzed in his pocket and he pulled it out and looked at it. It was a text from Jo. “Dad, we have a problem. Get down here.”
“Gibbie, I’ve got to go down and check on the girls in the van. You call James and Celeste and get what help you need to manage these new vampires as they start to turn.”
Gibbie nodded and pulled out his phone as Dean headed back to the elevator to go down and see what the problem was outside.
10
After her dad and Gibbie left, Jo moved up to the front passenger seat of the van while Marian moved to the driver’s seat. It was cool to meet another teen for a change. She had left all her friends behind when she came back to the past to help her parents out. It took a conversation with another teen girl like herself to make her realize how much she missed kids her own age.
They talked about a lot of things while they waited outside the hospital ER. Marian had just broken up with her boyfriend of six months and was pretty vocal about how guys were all pigs. Jo listened and nodded occasionally while her new friend explained how her ex had cheated on her with another girl at school.
She was still half listening and half looking out the window when she noticed a guy in a hospital gown descending the exterior of the hospital building. Because of her hunter amulet, given to her by her mother years before, Jo could see in the dark nearly as well as most Unusuals and she saw the man clearly despite the darkness of the cloudy night.
“Hey, Marian,” Jo interrupted her companion. “Didn’t my dad say they were going to the fourth floor?”
“Yeah. Why?” Marian started looking around at the building through the windshield, craning her neck so she could see better.
“Oh, no reason. Other than the guy in a hospital gown, covered in blood, climbing down the side of the hospital. It looks like he came from that open window.” Jo pointed. “Should we try and stop him?”
“I think so,” Marian answered. “I think I’m strong enough when I shift to outlast a vamp. After all, we just need to hold on to him until your dad and Gibbie get back. You stay in the van and call your dad. Tell him we think we found his guy.”
Jo took out her phone and texted a message to her dad while Marian got out and started walking over to where the guy was climbing down the building. She watched her friend’s hands elongate into claws while she watched and her face changed and shifted to an elongated wolf’s visage.
The turned teen werewolf had just reached the base of the wall when the man dropped the rest of the way to the ground. When he turned, Jo got her first good look at his face and saw the blood dripping from his fanged mouth. The blood stains on the front of his hospital gown were even worse than those on his back and sides. This guy looked like he’d laid down in a wading pool filled with blood.
Jo opened the door and stepped down from the passenger side of the van. She called out to warn her friend to be careful. If this guy had been feeding, he would be a lot more powerful than they anticipated. She was too late. The new vampire turned around as Marian walked up to him. She had her hands outstretched in an effort to calm him and get him to stay where he was. The werewolf teen never got the chance to say another word. The vamp charged her and swatted her aside, slamming her into the brick wall of the building. Her head slapped against the concrete wall. Jo watched in shock as Marian crumpled unconscious into a heap on the pavement.
“Hey, that’s my friend,” Jo shouted, regaining her composure. “Why don’t you come over here and try that on someone who knows how to handle scumbags like you?”
The vamp snarled at her, showing his fangs and then started laughing. “You smell human, like those others upstairs. I guess I get to eat you, too.”
“You can try.”
The vamp charged her with all the power and speed granted by his blood-fueled, supernatural body. Jo stood her ground, reached inside her jeans jacket and drew out the loaded Glock pistol she wore there. Her dad hadn’t seen the shoulder holster rig she had donned with the outfit back at the apartment. With the calmness that comes from long hours of training and muscle memory, she aimed and unloaded the entire clip of fifteen rounds into the charging vampire.
Normal bullets might not have stopped him, but Jaz had given her daughter silver-lead alloy frangible loads. These broke apart inside the target, causing massive internal damage. They also had the additional benefit of hindering the regeneration capabilities of werewolves and vampires because of the silver content.
The charging vamp got no closer than ten feet from her before he fell to the pavement, writhing in agony, clawing at his wounds. Jo switched out a new, fully-loaded magazine for the empty one, releasing the slide on the semi-automatic pistol, loading another round in the chamber. Then, with her pistol trained on her target, Jo circled the vamp at a distance and made her way over to her injured friend.
Marian moaned as she approached and Jo took a moment to look down at her. Thank the Goddess she was alive. She had shifted back to human form when she was knocked unconscious. A noise from the street caused her to look back up and she caught a glimpse of waving hospital gown as the vamp sprinted away around the corner. Damn, should she try and follow him? Her mind was made up for her when she heard voices coming from the ambulance ramp.
“I’m telling you, I heard gunshots out here,” the first voice said.
“I’m not doubting you, I just question your judgement in coming out here without calling the police first. We’re just security guards,” said a second voice.
Jo holstered her weapon and adjusted her jacket to hide her shoulder-holster rig just as the two security guards turned the corner on the ramp into the ER. The first one pointed to the empty brass cartridges scattered on the ground outside of the van. The other saw her and Marian by the side of the building.
“I told you I heard gunshots. Look.” He pointed at the scattered shells on the ground.
The first guard’s partner looked at Jo and saw Marian on the ground. “Is she okay. Is she shot?”
“Uh, no. A bunch of guys came around the corner chasing another guy. They knocked her down and one of them shot at the other guy, chasing him down the alley and round the corner. That’s all I saw,” Jo said.
“What are you young ladies doing hanging around out here by the ambulance entrance anyway? It’s not safe out here at night alone.”
“Now you tell me,” Jo said rolling her eyes at him. “We were waiting for our friends to come back down. They’re paramedics and stopped in to pick something up.”
“Oh, you’re with Dean and Gibbie?”
“Uh, yeah. You know them?”
“Yeah, Dean just went with Gibbie upstairs to pick up a psych patient to take him somewhere. I don’t know why they would bring teenaged girls along with them on this type of thing, though.”
Marian was starting to come around. Jo knew that her regeneration capabilities would have her back on her feet in just a few minutes. She had to stall and keep these guys from calling for help until her Dad came back down and got the situation straightened out.
“We are high school students on a career day ride along. We thought we might want to be paramedics one day.”
“Well, you got an eyeful already tonight, haven’t you. How’s your friend? Does she need a nurse or a wheelchair to go inside?”
Marian sat up, rubbing her head. “No, thank you. I’m fine. Just a little scared.”
