Blood Count
(Blood donation closeup - male wrist with blood-filled plastic tube and surgical tape)
Vincent likes to take blood.
There’s something satisfying in knowing how quickly the body replaces it, restores its perfect balance. Less than 12 hours to make up the amount he’s drawing now, in the little vacuum vial for lab tests; 24-48 hours for the pint stored in each donation bag in the refrigeration room at the end of the corridor. Of course, that’s just the plasma – platelets take a week to replenish, red blood cells one or two months. A mere eight weeks, tops, and you’re as good as new. One of the body’s most efficient functions. It makes him happy. It’s one reason he loves his job here in Accident and Emergency.
He knows, of course, that the other staff think he’s a ghoul, just because his smile’s genuine, not the saccharine, falsely bright kind everyone else here wears. “Alright Mrs X, let’s have a look, shall we? Soon get you sorted.” The words so often a lie, just like the tight, upturned lips, set in a determined non-grimace no matter what sort of gore or body fluids they’re presented with. Even if Mrs X is alright in the end, she’s got a long wait to get there, with doctors and beds always in shorter supply than the ways people find to damage themselves. By the time she’s seen to, her blood will have started taking care of matters itself: knitting the skin together, disinfecting it, replacing what was lost. Nine times out of ten, anyway.
Of course, sometimes they come in too damaged for the body’s beautiful efficiency to stand a chance. That’s what the Triage room’s for, round the corner; the blue-lit arrivals from road traffic accidents, mishaps with power tools, house fires. He doesn’t like working there so much, tries to avoid being sent to cover, unless they’re really desperate. There aren’t nearly so many happy endings. But here in A&E, even on a busy Friday night, Vincent has time for a chat while he draws the vial for testing. His fingers are steady and sure as he tightens the strap, inserts the needle, checks the blood’s flowing nice and clear. He’s an expert, been doing this so long he knows most of the answers a long time before the doctors get around to asking their questions. The blood tells him, in a language of its own; its tiny variations in hue, its viscosity, the speed with which it runs down the little plastic tube. If it were music, it would be a sonata, the opening of a symphony, each microscopic cell contributing to the swell of a harmony as specific to each individual as a fingerprint.
So it’s not the odd look she gives him that alarms him – an appraising, predatorial gleam in her catlike eyes that belies the wrinkles around them. It’s instinct, born of long familiarity, that raises the hairs on his neck, the moment she rolls up a sleeve to reveal the thick, corded vein. Only later does his logical mind pinpoint the details: the paper-thin skin, uncharacteristically tough; flesh and muscle as robust as those of a woman half as old as she appears to be, the vein prominent, as though it wishes to be found.
When the needle nicks into the skin and the blood begins to fill the tube, he has the strangest feeling, as though the earth has shifted slightly, as though he is seeing a false surface that hovers a fraction aslant from the truth. He takes her details on autopilot, and when, an hour later, the lab gets back to say there’s an abnormality with her blood and they need to admit her, he’s aware of a whining in his ear, like a warning siren heard from a long way off. He walks her to her room himself, and she never says a word, just smiles a secret, triumphant smile, like a wolf admitted to the lambing pen.
His mind skitters back across it all, flinching away from some of the details he can’t bear to look at, or bring himself to believe.
It began innocently. He went again to the first floor, to follow up on a blood sample, a patient with high blood pressure who hadn’t been able to tell him the dose of his medication. Thinking to check, Vincent opened the door to find her standing there; the woman with the strange veins. She was leering over the bed, her eyes savage and victorious, her mouth dripping blood and gristle. Beneath her, writhing mutely, a pale, middle-aged man beyond saving.
“Wha—?” he managed to gasp, before she lunged across the bed towards him. Leaving the prone man to his fate, Vincent backed from the room, as if facing down a wild animal. Slamming the door, he pulled the skeleton key from his pocket, his fingers shaking violently as he turned it in the lock.
At the nurses’ station, panting, he blurted the emergency code and room number. Instead of snapping into action, the Sister gave him an odd, crooked smile that set the siren in his head wailing at full volume. His eyes involuntarily flickered to the artery at her throat, as if he heard the blood jumping in it. It was smeared red, and thick with new scar tissue. That strange smile widened, the lips drawing back far enough to reveal pointed canines too large for any human. Vincent fled, his hand slamming the fire alarm as he went.
It was a mistake. People streamed from the hospital into the street, confused, some pushed in wheelchairs, some on gurneys. They were met by an army of shadows that descended like wolves. Whatever the creatures were, they had been waiting, lured, like their leader, by the scent of blood and weakness.
As the first screams rose, the hospital lights, a sickly, pallid glow cast over patients and staff alike, flickered and went out. All that remained was panic, fear, and shrieks that dwindled to whimpering amid the sound of tearing flesh and breaking bones.
Where had they come from? How long had they waited in the shadows, laying their plans? Why now? Vincent couldn’t guess, couldn’t fathom. He only knew that everything had changed in a moment, and now, instead of patients and doctors and nurses and janitors, there were only hunters and hunted, predators and prey. His civilized world, where blood was a carefully calibrated system of healing, was wiped out, spilled in an instant. Now blood was food again.
They did not go, the creatures, once their appetites were slaked. In fact, it seemed the more they feasted, the greater their hunger became, driving some deeper into the city, some inside the hospital, its alarms and deadlocks useless now. Vincent, his mind struggling to grasp what he saw, had gone to ground where he felt safest — surrounded by blood.
And so, he sits shivering in the refrigeration room, hoping its chill will hide his own warm body from their ravening senses, or perhaps, desperately, that their thirst for blood might be slaked by the neatly sealed packages piled around him.
Something tells him, though, that they prefer their blood fresh. And that, if they find him, his body won’t have a prayer of replacing what they’ll take.
