CHAPTER TWO
Private Lewis Sans monitored the radar screen at night. Although an important duty, it was not a terribly invigorating task, but he did his duties, slightly disappointed that nothing interesting ever happened on his watch. So, he spent most of the night chatting with the other officers in the room when their superiors were out of earshot.
Sergeant Tyler Johnson and Privates Davis Lyle and Melinda Coolbaugh all seemed just about as bored as he was. With the lack of anything exciting on radar, the conversation had quickly turned into a bragging episode by Johnson about how the hot date he had last night was. Everyone had their attention turned to what he had to say.
"She was crazy… but man did she know how to dance," Johnson said, with a dreamy smile on his face.
Lyle and Sans laughed and teased.
"Yeah, how much did she cost?"
"One bill? Two bills? Ten an hour?"
Johnson smirked, "Shut up you two."
They continued to laugh.
"I think you're drooling, Ty," Coolbaugh shot out.
"Yea, well… you should have seen her. You'd be drooling, too, you know." Johnson defended.
"Just what is that supposed to mean?" Coolbaugh said sharply as she stood up and grabbed her
swinging hips. "I've got moves, too!"
The three men in the room smiled widely and chirped out some catcalls. They quickly silenced when they
noticed someone walking by the monitoring room. His sharp eyes peered in through the window, glaring at the young officers with a silent warning. They exchanged glances with smirks and eyebrows raised, but lowered their eyes back to the monitors without another word.
Silently, Sans wondered just how much of this story was being fabricated on the spot and how
much of it actually had taken place. The story had been believable at first, however, the tale had gone from Tyler insisting that he and his date, Jennifer, after dinner and a nightclub party, had ended up somehow in a large brawl, and then several of Jennifer's friends and a hot tub had amazingly found their way into the night's adventures. Pretty impressive, since he still managed to be in his barracks, and up at the crack of dawn this morning.
"You're so full of it," Davis Lyle retorted when the coast was clear.
"No, I'm serious," Johnson defended with a smile that almost gave away the fact that he had to be
lying. "I promised 'em all I'd give 'em a tour of the base sometime."
"Girls night out on base, right Ty?" Sans suggested and he and Lyle exchanged sarcastic glances. "Hope you saved one for me."
"Yea, me too, sounds like there was enough of 'em," Lyle laughed.
"Don't believe me," Johnson pouted, "but I tell ya… they all had at least to be D size."
Sans and Lyle burst out laughing and Johnson smiled, shaking his head, mocking with his hand the size of his date's chest.
"Don't you guys have anything better to talk about?" Melinda moaned.
"No." Private Lyle said promptly.
"Yea, we're guys," Sans added in, smiling.
Melinda rolled her eyes and spun around in her seat, glancing down at the radar screen again to be
sure all was well.
"What do girls all talk about when they're together?" Johnson called over to her. "Nails, clothes, hair…"
Lyle mocked tapping a few buttons on the computer console in front of him, then looked down at
his stretched out fingers and lifted his voice an octave higher.
"I need a pedicure," he teased.
"That's manicure, you idiot," Sans laughed.
"What?" Lyle said.
"Fingers get manicures. Toes get pedicures," Johnson informed him.
"Looks like you boys do a fine enough job talking about nails on your own," Melinda teased
them. "Must have learned all that from your date last night," she laughed.
Sans and Lyle twisted around in their seats again, glancing at the monitors, or just about anywhere else to avoid eye contact with Coolbaugh at the moment. She smirked again and stared at Johnson victoriously.
"Last night, us real girls talked about trucks and guns. So I guess I'll just leave the finer details of life to you boys," she added.
"Ha, ha." Tyler sassed back.
Melinda grinned widely and drifted back to her computer console. A little beeping noise in the room caught her attention and all eyes turned towards Sans' monitor station as he spun around in his chair.
"What is it, Lewis?" Melinda called out.
"A blip," Sans said uncertainly. "Low, and hot."
Johnson stood up and strode over to the monitoring screen. "And fast," he pointed out.
"Jesus, what the hell was that?" Sans said as his eyes fixed on the monitor.
The radar flared to life in an instant. Something was definitely out there, overhead, and moving
damned fast.
"A plane?" Coolbaugh said as she trotted over to stare down at the screen over Sans'
shoulder.
"It's moving too fast," Sans said as he scrambled to check current flight paths for all local air
traffic. "Nothing on this flight path anyway."
"It's moving right through Virginia." Lyle stated.
"Get the Major in here, now," Johnson ordered and Lyle quickly headed off for the door.
"Looks like it's going towards D.C… no wait… Charlestown now." Coolbaugh said, following
the blip on the screen.
"Something must be crashing. Maybe something's got a blown engine… that's why it's so hot."
Johnson said.
The radar was showing a mass, big enough to easily be an airplane but just not quite the right size
for anything they could immediately think of. Whatever it was it seemed to be in a hurry to get to West Virginia. The officers watched the monitor without a breath. Terrorists were of course the top fear. It had been a long time since a terror attack, and although the three of them could not fathom what could be worth crashing into in Charlestown at zero two hundred hours, the tension caused by the thought of a new terror war on America could be felt in the room.
"It can't be crashing," Sans whispered. "It just stopped."
"Stopped?" Lyle and Coolbaugh echoed nearly simultaneously.
"Near Charlestown…. just outside of it," he nodded.
Johnson returned to the monitor as the little white spectacle moved off again.
"What in the hell? Now it's moving off…out of our sensor range." Sans stated.
Just then, the door to the monitoring room opened and the Major entered. "What have you got
people?" he barked instantly.
"Unknown bogie, Sir. Came into scan range fast, low and hot." Sans began as he pressed up a
button to replay what the machines had recorded.
"Flew through the grid stopped near Charlestown, then took off again out of scan zone."
The Major watched the screen for a moment and replayed the image twice before asking the question that no
one had the answer to.
"What in the hell was that?"
The officers remained quiet and the Major headed to the phone and called for more officers to come
into the room. He returned to the monitors, quickly noting them for anything else unusual then watched the replay one more time. In a moment more officers entered and watched the screen over and over again.
They backed up and stood just away from Sans, but he could overhear their whispering.
Whatever this thing was, no one exactly knew, but it was certainly a concerning issue. Either something had crashed and the apparent stopping and resuming course was some kind of strange glitch in the systems, or something else had happened.
It had to be terrorists. Sans watched one officer rush out of the monitor room and head into the
next room, pick up a telephone and speak into the receiver after being ordered by the Major to get on the phone and find out if anyone else had reported anything unusual. The officer was gone a few minutes before returning, looking just as confused as he did before he made the calls.
"Sir, it was a bogie." The officer said. "It showed up on radar, but no one saw anything."
"Christ," the Major said. "Get me the Defense Secretary and get people out to the stop site now."
"Isn't that a little rushed, Sir? I mean, we don't know what…" another officer started. The glare
he received from the Major made him stop mid-sentence.
"That's right, Acosta. We don't know what it is. Could have been an airplane. Could have
been terrorists. What the hell did they do? Where did they come from, and where are they going?" The Major rambled off then stepped out of the room.
The situation on the base turned intense as officers scrambled to figure out what had just been monitored. All the four lower ranked officers in the room could do was keep their eyes on their screens and their ears perked towards the overlapping conversations in the room while they continued to monitor for anything else.
The anxiety in the room was almost tangible. Sans could feel his own adrenaline pumping through his veins. There had been lots and lots of nothing during his five month tenure, but this was really something. Questions floated around the room from officer to officer. Each was wondering, if it had been terrorists, what did they do, where did they go, and where did they come from.
After the quick talk about terrorists and the possibility that they dropped a bomb or managed to
pull some sort of aerial attack, crash, and run, the group of young officers felt queasy and ill but also oddly excited and revved up at the same time.
Whatever did happen, there was a very strong possibility that these four friends would not see
the outcome, but they could at least hear of it through other people on the base that they knew, whose duties would allow them access to such information. For now, all they could do was watch their monitors for anything else until their duty shifts ended. They sat in silence for a few moments more. Tyler Johnson glanced over his shoulder to the next station where he saw Sans bring the radar recording back up on the monitor. Both men watched the images and gulped and the blip soared off the screen.
"It doesn't mean it was terrorists," Johnson stated.
"What else could it have been, Tyler?" Sans retorted quietly.
"Well, maybe it was just a glitch, you know." Johnson shrugged, trying to get a cool tone back
in his voice and act like he was longer worried about the blip on the screen.
"Maybe it was aliens," Coolbaugh added for a laugh.
The ice in the room began to break slightly, but as their duty shift approached the end, the four
officers focused more intently on the monitors watching for anything else.
As the morning sun was cracking through the skies, the four officers coming on duty on Saturday June thirteenth came into the monitoring room and headed towards their stations. Sans and Coolbaugh briefly conversed with some of the replacement shift to see if they knew anything. The two officers they spoke with shrugged. They, in fact, didn't even know about the radar blip at all.
"Well, maybe we'll hear something later."
Coolbaugh looked very disappointed that there was no update. Sans was simply glad. Any update probably wouldn't have been a good one, and no news could indicate that the blip was nothing at all, just a glitch in the system, perhaps.
The officers strode across the base to have some breakfast and chatted coolly as they walked. They barely reached the cafeteria when the west gates, just beyond the building opened to allow a small fleet of military vehicles and ambulances through. The group watched as several doctors and nurses from the infirmary ran out to greet the ambulances as they backed up to the double doors.
Sans could feel his adrenaline jump up again. Tension fell over the small group of officers that had now gathered just outside the eating hall to watch stretcher after stretcher and stretcher get lifted out the ambulances and rushed into the infirmary building. The sheets that covered each of the patients were pulled up over their heads, as paramedics might do cover a cadaver, but neither Louis nor any of his friends had ever seen such haste, almost indeed a panic, over a dead body.
"What is going on?" Sans asked in a shocked whisper.
They all stared wide eyed, but none of their questions got answered from what they could see of the rushing medical staff. The bodies of the victims were too well covered to even see their faces, let alone any injuries. The group was silently certain of one thing though, as the double doors into the infirmary unit slammed shut, the total of seven patients on the stretchers, must have been some of the compliment sent to investigate the blip on the monitor.
It had been a little over two and half hours since Sans saw the blip on the monitor. That left plenty of time to get a soldier compliment to the designated area just outside of Charlestown and get brought back to base. Once the rushing medical staff and commanding officers had all headed into the infirmary and disappeared behind cinder block walls and steel doors, the people outside were left confused and wondering. The small crowed returned to their original destinations, quietly mulling over what they had just witnessed.
Curiosity and anxiety were running equally as high. Sans could feel it as he unenthusiastically watched a small pile of morning rations get dumped onto his serving tray. He ate more out of well trained habit than any hunger he may have had. He barely even noticed what he was eating, instead, his eyes kept scanning the room, and all too often he would glance or sometimes stare out the row of windows at the other end of the great room. There was only one set of windows in the cafeteria, and they did not face the direction of the infirmary, but still, he was certain he could see people frantically running back and forth outside.
The mess hall was apprehensively quiet as Sans and his friends ate a very quick meal and headed back out in less than fifteen minutes. Exhausted from an overnight shift, they had all planned to return to their barracks for some much needed rest, but sleeping at a time like this seemed a near impossibility. So, the group of officers milled around outside, staying within visual range of the infirmary just to see what they could see. They were careful to play the role of unconcerned off duty officers out of fear of reprimand, or worse, simply being sent off for lurking too close the infirmary.
Not that all their mingling helped any. The solid walls of the medical unit left everything to the imagination. They saw and heard nothing as two hours passed. No one else entered or left the building and there was no one making haste around the base. What ever had happened was more than likely over.
The infirmary was going to keep its secret. At least for now. So, they headed off for some rest. Sans returned to his barrack unit with the same questions on his mind as he imagined everyone else had on theirs. He laid on his cot but found himself unable to even shut his eyes. Eventually, though he was not aware of when, he did finally find some sleep, but the distant sound of a helicopter landing stirred him and he shot up as though a gun had fired.
After a moment to clear his eyes, he glanced out the window, noticing the bright red LED's on the clock next to him displaying that it was now just after noon. He watched a helicopter power down, just barely within site on the landing zone. He could see several people making their way quickly passed the landing pad, but he did not recognize them. Curious to know if this landing had anything to do with the events from the overnight, he headed out to the main base.
There was much more activity now, but not more than usual for this time of day. Officers were coming and going, some were jogging the fields, no one seemed concerned or panicked. It was a typical afternoon on the base, nothing more nothing less. Except for the helicopter.
Sans eyed it wonderingly, then turned his head to the far west end of the base and stared at the infirmary. Its deep gray cinder block exterior seemed even deeper. The building seemed menacing for some reason, like it was harboring the atom bomb or some other horrible secret. He saw Melinda Coolbaugh coming towards him from the direction of the infirmary complex. She looked wide eyed and anxious.
"I don't know much, I'll tell ya that right now." She said in her Minnesota accent as Sans opened his mouth.
"Well, what is it that you don't know?" He asked quickly as they were joined by Davis Lyle and Tyler Johnson.
"I've got a friend who has medical duties, you know, Katrina." She paused.
Sans nodded hurriedly, "Yeah, and... what?"
Coolbaugh shook her head quickly, "Well, she told me that she is not even allowed in the infirmary. It's been closed to all non-essential personal."
"Well, did she at least see anything?"
Coolbaugh shook her head. "She said she didn't see anything, but she heard something about getting one of the people prepped for surgery."
"Does she know who the people were?" Johnson asked.
"Or what happened at the site?" Lyle continued the interrogation.
"Look, she doesn't know. I don't know. Sorry. That's all I know. They've closed the infirmary to all non essentials. That's it."
"Well, why would they do that?" Lyle wondered aloud.
Sans shook his head slowly. "Something secret must have gone down."
"Either that or their worried about contagion," Johnson added.
"No," Coolbaugh frowned, "Katrina didn't say the place went bio-hazard."
"You know, suddenly," Johnson said as he put his hand on his head, "I'm not feeling so well. I have a headache, I think I need to go to the infirmary."
"Don't do it," Melinda warned. "Don't even try it."
Sans agreed, "Besides you're not going to see anything if they won't even let medical personnel in there!"
Johnson's headache quickly absolved. "Fine, well, I'm going to at least try to figure out who was sent out. Somebody has to know. See ya later."
He walked off towards another group of men that he knew and quickly jumped into their conversation. Melinda, Louis, and Davis all stared at another for a moment.
"It's probably nothing, you know, just some high ranked over reaction." Davis said with a grimace.
"Yeah, maybe." Melinda added.
"I dunno guys, it just doesn't feel right, you know. Something's not right."
The remainder of the afternoon passed by in a haze. Sans jogged, Coolbaugh returned to her barracks, and Lyle wasn't seen again until dinner mess, while Johnson practically interrogated the entire male population on the base to find out anything. They all met again at a table in the mess hall, which was brimming with more whispered gibbering than it was in the early hours of the morning. By now, nearly eighteen hours since 'the blip', the entire base had heard about the events, and everyone was talking. All eyes seemed to be panning the large room, as though many were looking for who wasn't there, trying to figure out who was in the infirmary.
"Well, did you find anything out?" Coolbaugh directly asked of Tyler as she seated herself next to him.
He shrugged, but stayed silent.
"Well, come on then, what did you find out?" Davis prompted.
"Somebody I talked to said his friend's barrack-mate didn't ever show back up. Patrick Morris."
"Well, maybe he was one of the seven." Sans said.
"Or maybe he just went on leave. I don't know." Johnson said, obviously disappointed that he didn't find out anything more solid.
By the end of dinner mess, the atmosphere amongst the officers had changed dramatically. Many heads grouped together and within an hour, a list of ten names was created on a napkin. The list was that of people not dining with the rest of their comrades that evening. Others were able to vouch for at least two of the names as being on leave. That left eight more, but it did not mean that any of those names were the people in the infirmary right now. It left everyone even more curious and concerned as the bulk of the group returned to their barracks by the late evening. All through out the night the barracks seemed to be filled with the murmuring voices of curious soldiers. But no answers were given back to the questioning voices.
Dr. Carlos Murray was hustling about his rounds, checking in on his patients. The emergency room seemed to always be bustling like a madhouse at any given moment, but weekends were particularly challenging. While most people were out enjoying themselves on the weekends, the medical world usually found that work from Friday evening through Monday morning was ten times harder. It seemed everyone with a weekend off would always find one way or another to hurt themselves and end up in the emergency room. To Dr. Murray and his staff, it felt like half of Philadelphia was in the Mercy Hospital's emergency room that morning.
He checked in with an elderly Mrs. Peterson in exam room one. She had been taken ill last night, and her granddaughter had finally convinced her to visit the hospital. They seemed to have wanted to avoid a large crowd and long wait, so they though that six a.m. on a Saturday would be a good time, if there were such a thing as a good time, to go to the hospital. At any rate, it was a good thing they did come in, Dr. Murray thought as he quickly marked off directions for his nurses to admit the old woman that she came when she did. It looked like the onset of kidney failure.
When he finished in exam room one, he hopped over to three, skipping right over two because the police were not done taking a statement from the battered woman in the room. In exam room three, Dr. Murray found his patient to be a young boy that had been hit in the eye with a baseball during a fight with his older brother early in the morning. He looked into the worried eyes of the boy's mother and evaluated the young man. He was soon able to put her and the youngster at ease when he informed them both that his eye was uninjured, and some ice therapy would be all that was needed.
"It will stop hurting soon. But you will have a black eye for a while."
He worked non-stop for over four hours straight, hopping from room to room and seeing everything from very simple problems that could have easily been handled by their usual doctors on Monday morning, to the worst injury in the emergency room this morning, a fractured leg. A carpenter doing some early morning work before it got too hot had slipped off the roof he was building and came down hard into the lawn below.
Murray had been a doctor for seven years now. Over the time of his service to the medical profession, he had seen plenty of tragedy, from newborn infants dying to elderly people spending their last few days, weeks, or months suffering from illness and dying slowly as their families broke down in tears watching them fade away. He had wished that he could save them all. Of course, death was a natural part of existence. It was inevitable. Sometimes, the only thing that any good doctor could hope to do was to keep their patients from facing death in pain and agony.
There was a certain amount of acquired desensitization regarding death, of course. There was always that undefined level of separation from the patients a doctor cared for. It would be impossible to treat patients properly otherwise. It would be impossible to work in such a situation, taking care of injuries and illnesses of every extreme, without lulling into a sad state of depression. Murray had learned to maintain that separation a long time ago. Not everyone was savable, he learned.
Murray called for a nurse to help him stabilize the man's leg. There was no displacement or shattered bone, but he definitely needed surgery. He would be fine after a good long haul of time off and immobility. Although, when informed of this particular treatment plan, the man became very angry. Murray had seen this reaction before a hundred times. He realized how hard it was for someone to learn that they can not work for a long while, when their livelihood depended on it.
But all too often upon giving this sort of information to his patients, Murray was treated as though he had conspired against the powers that be to maliciously keep his patients from working. Once the man was finished berating Murray for not understanding that he had to work, the nurse was able to help him set his leg and move him to pre-op waiting.
Afterward, he headed back to room two to check on the woman that had come in earlier. Police were still in there and he could hear the young woman crying. He glanced around and saw three more over whelmed doctors pacing quickly up the corridor. A nurse yelled out about another emergency coming in, and the double doors flung open as frantic and confused looking paramedics wheeled in a stretcher, and another stretcher, and another, and another.
There must have been an accident or fire, he thought as he watched the stretchers wheel down the hall. All of the patients' faces were covered with some sort of material, although he couldn't recognize what that material was. Perhaps something cool to soothe burns, he thought. The paramedics rushed the patients into an open emergency exam area, a look of pure fear and confusion on their faces. Several frantic police officers followed immediately.
As the nurses ran to assist, one grabbed at Murray's arm. Murray followed the group down the hall. The looks on the faces of those staring down at the four victims was nearly indescribable. Something horrid simply must have happened to these poor people. An eerie feeling overcame Murray as he quickly approached the exam area where the patients had all been wheeled into. There was a strange sort of silence that filled the ER suddenly, even nurses behind the desk on the other side of the emergency area were silent and peering through the large space to see the new patients. All the doctors, nurses, paramedics, and police officers, and patients in the wing seemed to have lulled into a shocked state of silence. Even the equipment quieted down. It almost felt like mourning at a funeral.
When he walked into the exam area, pushing aside the curtain as he came through, Dr. Carlos Murray joined in the silence. Everyone simply stood by allowing their eyes to adjust fully to what they were seeing. No one seemed to know what to do.
"All right," one doctor said. "Somebody's gotta' fill me in. What the hell?"
A paramedic looked up at the doctor. His eyes were filled with shock and fear and his voice barely cracked a whisper.
"We….they were…" the young paramedic swallowed, stared at the patient on the table and tried to pull himself together.
"They responded to a call…" another paramedic chimed in. His voice sounded equally shocked. "They never contacted back to the station afterwards…."
It wasn't until Dr. Murray looked beyond the patients' heads that he even came close to understanding what was going on. They were all police officers.
"Somebody… a disturbance…" another baffled paramedic said.
"There's more," a nurse pointed out. "More….civilians…. Coming in now."
The group turned and glanced at the nurse. Just behind him, they could see the doors swinging open yet again. Murray could not imagine that more people were arriving in the same condition as the police officers. What was going on?
Three more stretchers lined up in the corridor outside the triage rooms. Murray could see the outline of two males and one female. They looked barely out of their teens. Although everyone could plainly see the condition of the seven people before them, no one could understand what they were seeing. As the object that covered one of the police officer's faces moved, the audible gasp of the officer below it seemed to echo throughout the emergency room area. Everyone around the recumbent man jumped away with a shriek.
"What the hell are those things?" one officer demanded.
He looked nearly ready to break down.
"Jesus Christ." Another officer emphasized.
"All right, you'll…you'll all have to leave…" one doctor ordered.
"What the hell is going on?" the first officer demanded again, unwilling to leave his friends behind.
"As soon as we figure that out, we'll let you know," another doctor said.
"Well, do some fast figurin'… they're dying!" the officer retorted.
It took a moment to clear the officers and extraneous personnel out of the area. It seemed everyone wanted a peek at the patients, and Murray could understand why. He, too, wanted to have a closer look. As the extraneous people left the room, the teams of doctors and nurses were now able to closer examine their patients.
Each of the patients did have something on their faces, but whatever it was, it was certainly not material to cover burns. Murray stepped in closer, moving up alongside Dr. Richardson, the head surgeon on duty that morning. He stared down at the police officer, leaning in to get a closer look.
The thing was wrapped around the man's face. It looked like some sort of giant hand simply holding on the officer's face. The thing was a sickly sort of peachy brown color with a spiny ridge down its back and long, slender legs that reached around the man's head.
"This… thing…. is alive." Richardson confirmed as Murray peered closer.
It was some kind of animal, for sure. It almost had the appearance of a crab crossed with a daddy long leg spider with a tail added on. The thing pulsed occasionally on the officer's face and Murray could see a subtle twitch in the thing's demonic fingers from time to time. The animals' tails each were wrapped securely to their victims' throats. It did not appear they were holding on tight enough to strangle, but each time someone poked or prodded at the animal, Murray noted, it would tighten its grip.
The doctors instinctively tried to yank the fingers loose. No one was successful on the creature's individual fingers, so two teamed up and tried to pry one of the extremities loose.
"Holy shit," Murray said as he used all his force combined with Richardson's and still the thing would not budge.
Murray knelt down and stared at the creature from all angles. It had its fingers wrapped so tightly to the very back of the officer's head he could see blood seeping out from under all eight of the spider's grotesque limbs. It appeared that the animal had dug right into the top layers of skin with its hold.
"My God," Murray whispered to himself.
"Try again," Richardson said, and he, Murray, and three more people all yanked on different legs.
Another nurse joined in and grabbed hold of the creature's body and the top of the officer's head with one hand, and at the base near the tail with the other. As they all counted up to three before they pulled together, the animal tightened its grip. When the team yanked the creature tightened so much that the officer below started heaving, gasping for air. The animal was suffocating the man.
"Christ," he exclaimed as they pulled. "This thing's not coming off!"
"Let go! He's choking!" Someone yelled.
The group of people all dropped their grips and the animal loosened its own.
"Let's try just getting the tail off first," Murray suggested as he slipped into a pair of exam gloves and joined the pulling party.
He took a firm hold on the tip of the monster's tail and tried to unravel it from the man's neck. He and Richardson pulled with all their might, but the creature would not release. It responded to vain attempts at loosening its tail by clamping down with its fingers that much tighter. More blood oozed from officer's head.
"It's tightening down again." Richardson said.
"What in the hell is this thing?!" Murray exclaimed in frustration as he watched his fellow doctors try desperately to pull the things loose.
"Wait…" Murray finally said. He was knelt down next to the officer, his own face only inches away from the horrible creature's legs, staring at the small spaces made between the animal's body and the officer's face.
"What is it?" Myrk questioned.
"This thing's got….got something…" Murray couldn't quite put into words what he was seeing. "There's something going down his throat."
"What?" Richardson said as he too knelt down to have a peek. "Jesus."
"Maybe they're feeding…" Murray said he stared at another patient. "Like a...parasite...or something?"
"The animal is living off the host, and therefore must keep the host alive to feed," Murray whispered.
"We've got to get them off these people." A nurse said abruptly.
"No! If we do that maybe they will die!" Dr. Richardson defended.
"I don't think we can remove the animals," Murray shook his head. "Maybe this tube is holding the animal on...like an anchor from inside."
"Or maybe it's that damn tail," Richardson retorted with a 'let's try again' look in his eyes.
Murray fell quiet, stood and stared down the line of patients, trying to understand what he was seeing, but he simply could not. Seven people lined up in a row through the emergency room, all with some kind of never-before seen horrible crab monsters on their faces. Four police officers and three teenagers. Where did they find such animals? Were there more of them? What was going on?
"Nurse," Murray turned to the group of baffled R.N.'s behind him. Although he addressed no one in specific, one nurse answered.
"Yes?"
He swallowed and let his eyes drift back to the row of patients, beyond which he could see the other, mobile, patients in the other exam areas all peeking out, staring at this horrible and awkward sight.
"Would you please talk to the officers and paramedics that brought them all in. Find out what happened. Where they were, if they know what...what these things are."
Without a word she nodded and headed off to find the group of officers.
Meanwhile, a small group of doctors had now gathered. Physicians from other floors, other departments, had heard already about the mysterious animals that had been brought in. They whispered amongst each other, each new doctor suggesting that the animal simply be pried loose.
"We need to see what that...tube... is going down their throat. Where does it go? Perhaps that affects why we can't move the animal off." Richardson suggested.
"Let's...uh...let's take one down to CT and see what a scan might show us." Murray whispered.
In a rare moment that several doctors agreed upon one course of action, one of the stretchers was immediately wheeled into the elevator while the rest of the patients were wheeled into any available empty space and curtains put up to block curious onlooker's watchful eyes.
The CT scan machine was up and running in no time and the doctors that eagerly watched the monitor waited with anticipation of the scan's appearance. When an image finally did pop up, they could not make heads or tails of what they were seeing. They could clearly see something down the throat of the fallen police officer. It entered the trachea and ended just before the bifurcation of the lobes of the lungs, where the doctors could see a very small mass that should not be there.
"What is that there?" Murray asked quickly upon seeing the outline of the mass.
"It could be a tumor." Another doctor suggested.
"Maybe the guy smokes, could be the onset of lung cancer." Richardson responded.
"It could also be related." Murray said, still eyeing the monitor.
No other abnormalities showed up on the scan.
"Let's scan them all. See if that mass is there in any of the others."
As the hours passed, all seven victims were scanned, and all seven had the same results. Other than that information, the team of doctors were still unsure of what exactly the creatures were, or what to do about them. The police officers and paramedics explanation of the events that took place in the early hours that morning left the doctors with more questions and less answers than they had hoped for, and a growing number of news vans were now lining the parking lot, asking all the same questions as Murray himself.
From all he knew, two officers responded to a call, in a small wooded area just outside Philadelphia. Murray was informed that it was common place for kids to get into all sorts of trouble, have fights, do drugs, or who knew what else. Two of the now immobilized officers responded to the call, and according the testimonies of the paramedics and officers that still waited in the lobby, when back up was called by a panicked officer, two more patrols showed up and with in ten minutes the others arrived to find this group of seven unconscious with the animals attached to their heads.
If it wasn't right in front of his face, Murray would not believe his eyes. Even with seven victims in front of him he had a hard time accepting what he was seeing. He sat in his quiet, dimly lit office and tested the limits of his knowledge for any useful information that could possibly apply to this situation. Nothing came to him as the hours passed. He just could not understand what the animals were or where they had come from. Surely nothing like this had ever been reported before. He was certain nothing on Earth even came close to this. Just as he was considering an extra terrestrial explanation for the events going on a few levels below, the ring of the telephone jostled his mind back to reality.
"Hello, Carlos Murray," he said plainly into the receiver.
On the other end was a colleague that Murray had often tried to remember to keep in touch with, but usually failed to do, except of course when there was a challenging case to discuss. The woman on the other end barely even said hello before she questioned him about the "chaos" going on at the hospital.
"Well, I wouldn't call it chaos here just yet," Murray said.
"There? No, I mean here. I've got thirty-two patients here, been coming in all morning. They have some kind of animal attached to them. Like a parasite."
His heart leapt into his throat as the lovely voice on the other became shaky and weak as she described in exact detail more those thirty patients in her hospital. Murray felt his hands trembling and his heart racing as he spoke to her. The conversation ended on a solemn note. Fear was in both doctors' hearts. This was something new, something serious, something all over the country in a single night.
He wondered where else was this happening, and how did it happen in the first place. So many questions rushed into Murray's mind he squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed his hands through his hair trying to chase unanswerable questions out of his mind. He took a deep breath and stood up with great resolve as he turned and strode prominently out of his office door. He glared straight ahead as he walked to the elevators and deposited himself back into the emergency room area. His mind was made up. Something had to be done. He approached a weary Richardson and a still frantic group of nurses, clearly pushing overtime. He barely noticed that yet more new patients had arrived with animals attached to their faces, nor did he bother to look outside to see the media frenzy and a massive crowd flooding out of the waiting lobbies and into the parking lot.
"Prep one of them for surgery, I don't care which. We're taking it off."
There was no question in his voice. He barked the order like a commander and waited to see those he commanded hustle about making it happen. However, the room came to a halt. No one rushed towards the patients, no one headed to the surgery ward. No one spoke, no one barely breathed for what seemed like a short eternity. Murray ignored this and turned intently on one of the unconscious patients.
"We don't know if they'll die under surgery," Richardson suddenly whispered in Murray's ear.
Murray didn't even notice that Richardson had slid over to him. He simply maintained his stare toward one of the seven victims.
"We don't know what these animals are doing to them." Murray stated clearly. "They may die if we do nothing. We need to try something."
He turned abruptly to Richardson, voice in a whisper inches from Richardson's ear.
"I just got off the phone with a good friend. These animals are in California, too. Overnight," he snapped his fingers, anger, frustration and fear taking command of voice. "Just like that. Three thousand miles apart. She's got more than thirty of these patients."
Richardson's eyes grew wide and the room fell into a silent moment of shock.
"They are considering surgery as well. It needs to be done, get them prepped. Start with him," he pointed to the man whose feet he was standing near.
This time, Richardson nodded in agreement as he swallowed deeply and headed with Murray in the direction of the surgical suites.
Nurses soon followed, pushing the patient and hustling about making it happen. In record time, the patient was prepped and wheeled into surgery. One of the nurses instinctively gripped an endo-tracheal tube, awaiting the moment for her to intubate the patient. She stared down at the patient's smothered face and shook her head as she lay the tube down on a table next to her, feeling slightly foolish. The nurse took a deep breath and tried to control her shaking hands as she watched the rest of the team continue on.
Murray and Richardson walked into the room from the adjacent scrub area, followed closely by a small crowd of other physicians. The tension in the air was tangible as Murray took a deep breath and reached, without trying to second guess himself, for a scalpel.
"OK," he said determinedly. "I'm going to make an incision in the animal's...finger...leg...leg, just at the last joint here."
He then cleared his throat, wondering if the group of people in the room could hear the nervousness in his voice.
He shut his eyes just for a moment, but it was too long. Already within that brief moment a rush a self questioning overwhelmed him. He gritted his teeth against the urge to stop and do nothing. He did not know what removing the animal would do to the police officer below it. He knew the man's family had arrived and was awaiting any word from the surgeons about the fate of their husband and father. He tried to control his hand from shaking but he was sure that it was now noticeable.
None the less, he redirected his mind, and moved the scalpel blade closer to the creature's leg. Very slowly and carefully he found the perfect incision spot and with no more hesitation, he cut into the animal's leg. The creature pulsed and tightened its tail in response to the slice as an odd hissing sound filled the tense and silent room.
"What!" Murray said as he moved the scalpel blade closer to his eyes to evaluate it.
"My God."
The entire blade and handle were dissolving away. Murray dropped it to the ground as the path of dissolution nearly touched his finger tips. At that moment, he realized the crew on hand were all staring not at the fallen blade, but at the surgical table and ground below.
The corner of the table, just below the patient's left ear was gone and as Murray's eyes tracked down to the floor, he found a quarter-sized hole just short of his left foot.
"The floor's been burned clean through!" someone said in shock.
Richardson and Murray looked between the animal's leg and the floor.
"The thing has acid for...blood?" Murray asked aloud.
"I think it burned through the floor down there too," Richardson pointed out, carefully looking through the hole in the floor to the floor below.
"Be careful," Murray whispered in shock. "Don't get too near."
"We can't proceed." Richardson added.
Murray turned as if to argue the point, but stopped and nodded instead. Richardson was right. They could not remove the animal by manual force and they obviously could not cut the creature off the victim's face. One small drip from the blood of the animal would burn a hole through the patient's skull for sure, if it could go through steel surgical instruments, a steel table and two levels of flooring.
Murray dropped his head.
"Ok, let's put him back." He paused. "Let's get them all checked into rooms now. They could be here a while. We need to call the CDC or animal control, I don't know. Get all the patients into an isolated wing."
He turned his back on the nurses and his patient and began to remove his surgical cap and gloves as he walked away with an overwhelming feeling of defeat surrounding him. He barely made it to the other end of the room when a nurse called out.
"Wait! Something's happening."
He turned back and watched. The animal was pulsing and moving more than it had all day. The tail twitched and the suspense in the room jumped up several notches. No one moved, as though all were afraid that movement might startle the animal and make it do something horrible.
The leathery 'tentacle' pulled back from the officer's mouth and disappeared inside in vulvular fold of skin on the underside of the animal. The long, hard fingers eased their grip around the officer's scalp and the strange little crab creature simply flopped off to one side, hung there loosely for a moment, then unwrapped its tail from the man's throat and hit the floor with a dull thud, accompanied by gasps from the people that filled the room as they jumped away and stared.
Murray moved in towards the creature. He quickly grabbed a pair of exam gloves and groped an instrument tray near by for anything sufficiently long enough to keep him as far from the thing as possible. All eyes stared at the strange creature that had folded its legs against its belly. Murray slowly reached the hemostats forward and jabbed lightly at the creature. He felt his own body jump a little in anticipation that the animal on the floor might do something, but the creature did not move.
"Be careful, Carlos," he heard someone say, but his attention was focused on the animal at his feet.
He poked at it again and satisfied himself that it was dead.
"It's dead." He said certainly. This was the first thing he was certain about since the patients arrived.
"You killed it!" Myrk said with a gleeful victory in his voice.
"I couldn't have," Carlos added doubtedly. "I don't see how…."
For a short moment no one said anything.
"Let's get the patients into rooms and monitored. I want someone in the room with them at all times." Murray stated.
The nurses nodded and they headed out of the surgical room. Meanwhile, Murray and his staff stared at the dead animal on the floor before them.
"What do we with it?" Myrk questioned.
"It needs to be sent for study," Murray said quickly. "Let's bag and freeze it for now."
The men wrestled their fears for a moment and then, utilizing the longest instruments they could find, they picked the animal off the ground. Its leg had stopped dripping acid blood, which was a relief to the wary men trying to handle the little monster. Just as the three men managed to wrestle the cadaver, which easily measured four feet from tip of head to tip of tail, into a bag, an excited nurse came bursting into the surgery room.
"Doctors!" She exclaimed without hesitation.
"What' happened?" Murray questioned as he stepped forward.
"They've all fallen off! The animals! They're all dead on the ground!"
Wide eyed, and almost making a small smile, Murray and the others nearly leapt out the surgery room and sprinted down the corridor, around a corner, into the elevator, and down to the emergency area where all the patients had spent most of the day. Just beyond the triage area, Murray could see the line up of stretchers. Lying on the ground near all the stretchers were the cadavers of the spider-crab creatures that had spent the last twelve hours clasped onto their victims' faces.
A wave of relief rushed over the concerned and frightened hospital staff. At least the patients appeared to be out of immediate danger. Besides some deep cuts into all the victims' heads where the animals' bony, acid filled fingers had dug in, each of the patients appeared uninjured and in no pain at all. In fact, they all seemed rather comatose. Once the patients were wheeled to rooms, where they were joined by their families, none of whom had played witness to the sight of their loved ones with a spidery pulsating animal attached to their heads, the medical staff was able to take a deep breath and evaluate the condition of the seven patients.
It was nearing midnight, close to fifteen hours after the first three victims, the trouble-making teenagers, as they were reported, opened their eyes. Aware of their surroundings and completely able to interact with others, each seemed to suffer from memory loss of what exactly had happened to them. But for now anyway, Carlos Murray saw no immediate danger. Within the next hour, the other four patients woke up from their nearly fifteen hour coma- nightmare.
They all explained nearly the same events, with the same symptom of memory loss.
"I just remember hearing something… a noise… thought maybe it was a dog or something. I looked over and…. And… that's it. That's all I remember." The first to regain consciousness explained. The others all shared a similar story.
While the teenagers openly admitted to sneaking into to the wooded area to smoke marijuana, and the police officers could recall with great detail walking into the grove and finding what appeared to be a burnt up ATV with three unconscious teenagers lying next to the wreckage with their faces covered in a leathery, moving shroud, not one of them could actually remember the creature attaching to their faces.
After speaking individually to all the patients, Murray retreated to his office for some sleep.
He thought briefly about calling his colleague in California, but he imagined she was probably just as confused and exhausted as he was with the day's excitements. He just his eyes as he lay on the sofa in a small room just off of the main work area and decided that in the morning, he would reevaluate the mass in all seven chests to try to determine just what the alien creatures had done to the people.