With a young baby, we haven't had much time to ourselves and my husband and I have had to drop some of our hobbies. In my case, my writing went on hold.
And then I received a "We miss you!" message. And a question was posted on a very old story that I'd dropped. And...baby was sound asleep with my husband on "baby duty" should she waken. Thus this story was born in a half-hour of frantic typing!
Dr. Trevallian: Origin
With an internal sigh, Dr. Trevallian called the patient. Time was 2:31 am, and despite ten minutes of intense effort and the finest ER available in London, the woman just didn't make it. The trauma to the body wasn't that severe. Lacerations, but none that compromised a major artery. A chunk missing from a calf; bloody, and it would have left a large scar, but not deadly. The worst wound was a broken wrist. Most likely a clot had migrated from the break to the heart, stopping it...but the death just didn't fit that profile. A puzzle, but now one for the coroner to answer.
There were another half-dozen patients in various rooms with similar injuries from a party that had gone very wrong. The police were interviewing those that were less severely injured. In a day or so the papers would have the story of how these kids had been injured. For now, he had the never-pleasant task of recording the death.
While filling out the short form, with a pause before writing "unknown" as "cause of death", he heard another doctor call out a time of death in the adjoining room. A murmur of strained voices, and then the head doctor peered in the door, her face showing unmistakable strain as she glanced at the body on the gurney and the flat line on the silent monitor. Voices raised slightly next door.
They were drowned out by a scream. A rush of the pair of orderlies to the room across the hall, then a pair of nurses...then one of the orderlies, staggered out, bleeding, and trying to block the door behind him.
Blood flowed under that door. The police slipped on it as the officers pushed past the dazed orderly into the room...and their shouts of fear and pain were immediate. They almost covered the heavy thud of the feet of the corpse behind him hitting the cold hospital floor tiles.
+++++++
Integra was deeply impressed. Not by the attack itself, certainly not by the inept bungling of the report that routed it through too many people before it reached her. Not by her troops, though they'd responded with commendable speed yet again. Not by the successful containment of the ghoul contagion.
No, the night had begun with frustration and disappointment. They'd reached the hospital too late to save everyone. The typical delays of bureaucracy had kept the report of the attack on the college students from reaching her ears until the victims were already in the hospital. She'd flung the phone down, shouting for the troops to load up immediately, then releasing a string of curses entirely unsuitable for a genteel young aristocrat but absolutely suitable for a commander facing yet another homicidally-incompetent twit. Within a quarter hour, the troops were pulling into the hospital lot...and twenty minutes after she received the call, her troops were shooting the last ghoul.
And also quietly pulling the bitten and injured aside to watch closely. Not all of them would ghoul, but in that precious span of minutes, they'd be able to make their last decisions. For a few, that meant a last call to a loved one, for others, a short scrawled will witnessed by the soldiers on observation duty. A few tried to tell their listeners of ghouls every time; a soldier would quickly grab the phone away and quietly let the listener know that the person had succumbed to the poison accidentally released by persons unknown. They'd become delirious, and the prognosis was poor.
A very deadly poison was good call for a closed casket, to explain the severe damage and decay of the ghouls, to blame the mindless hunger on delirium. She'd used it only a handful of times in her handful of years as a leader; her rapid, decisive response to vampire attacks had kept victims to a minimum and witnesses nearly nonexistent. Here, though...there were victims, six already-destroyed ghouls and five potential ghouls from hospital staff...and the police officers that hadn't been warned in time to leave it to Hellsing. Over a dozen eye witnesses needed to be fed a cover story. There should have been more, on a Saturday night the ER was busy and between staff and patients, over a hundred people were in that small ward with six staggering, ravenous ghouls.
And only five were injured or dead. Less than a dozen had actually seen the ghouls. And she'd found all the rest blockaded behind a fire door, with a fierce doctor armed with a fire extinguisher ready to take on whatever came through it. He'd seen what happened, and was too much of a realist to deny it or try to explain it.
Corpses were rising from their gurneys and attacking people. The "Why" and "What" and "How" were not important. He'd evacuated the entire ER in moments. The lobby had emptied out into the parking lot. Those trapped, the ghouls between them and the exit? That doctor had shoved and shouted them into the nearest safe spot, putting great metal doors between them and the monsters he'd seen.
And then blocked those doors with tipped file cabinets and desks. And grabbed a fire extinguisher, armed a few other sturdy souls with everything from mops to chairs, and waited. The first Hellsing operative through those fire doors had been met with a file cabinet at waist height, chairs stacked on top of it, and a faceful of carbon dioxide and powder from a well-aimed canister. At least that had happened in a hospital, and the doctor wielding the canister had been over the barricade and treating the soldier competently and quickly.
Amazing. Resourceful, brave, as decisive as she herself was. Clearly a natural leader; the other ER doctors, nurses, and staff had obeyed him immediately. Effective. And, most important of all, not a bit intimidated by or in denial about the ghouls.
The Hellsing soldiers and their leader had finished within half an hour. A cover story, the infected victims quickly put down as soon as signs of ghouling appeared, the others convinced that all they'd seen was due to the effects of a mixture of hallucinogenic compounds and caustic vapors. They'd briskly and efficiently completed the cleanup, loaded into the convoys, and returned to Hellsing.
With one important addition. The new Hellsing physician, Dr. Trevallian, receiving his briefing from Ferguson on Hellsing and his new position with them.