The Night Walkers
It was a messy wound certainly, but Dr. Allison Cameron had seen messy wound before. What else was to be expected working in the A & Éirigh of a public teaching hospital? She bent over it and gentle dabbed the long ragged line with disinfectant. It was a knife wound, caused by a long sharp object that had cut deep into his flesh. Messy but fairly standard.
It took Allison Cameron maybe fifteen minutes to clean and bind it and finally she stood back and brushed fallen strands of hair from her face. The man hadn't moved once while she had been binding his wounds, he hadn't twitched when the disinfectant that she had applied liberally had stung him and nor had he responded to any of the run of the mill questions that she had asked him. She tugged his chart from his bed and looked at it, blank, unfilled spaced stared back at her. Slowly she looked around until she found the doctor who she had been sure had filled in the chart.
"Why is it not filled?" she asked.
"Can't get a word out of him," the young doctor replied and rushed off to help with a gun shot victim that had just been wheeled in. Cameron turned back to her patient. She would just have to do the job herself.
The man, a young man of no more than twenty or twenty five was struggling to rise, groping around his belt as if he had lost something, staring into space. Cameron placed one hand on his shoulder and eased him back into a lying position.
"You shouldn't be moving," she said quietly. The man shifted his head, a painful twitch, to stare at her.
"Tell……tell….tell them its….them," he hissed, his words coming out in gasps and between the blood that was seeping down from the corner of his lip. His hands were still grasping at his belt, continuous closing on nothing, opening again and then closing on nothing again.
"Tell who?" Cameron asked. The man stared at her as if seeing her for the first time and then looked down at his ruined red shirt. For a split second he was completely calm, the frantic grabbing stopped and he balanced one finger on his brest.
"It's the Nightwalkers," he said quietly, his voice suddenly perfectly controlled. "Tell the Brothers they are here." With that he lay back and closed his eyes and despite all of Dr. Cameron's best efforts, died.
Cameron stared at the corpse as they wheeled it away. The wound had been messy certainlly but he should not have died from it, there had been no internal bleeding, none of the vital organs had been cut. It was just a messy wound, deep but not dangerous. Slowly she turned away, a feeling of shame filling her. She had failed.
Cameron took one more look at the corpse and then turned back to her work. There was nothig else to do.
Who were the brothers anyway?