YOU HAVE WHAT I NEED
by Ian Rogers
Tamsin was stitching up an adulterer’s arm when the woman came in with the bite wound.
Just another night in Chicago Hopeless, she thought.
That was what the emergency room staff called North Chicago General. Not because things there were particularly hopeless—the death rate at North Gen was no higher than that of any other hospital serving a major metropolitan area. It was just the gallows humor common among doctors and nurses who worked in a high-speed, high-stress environment. Being able to laugh at the unpleasant things they saw on a daily basis was as much a survival technique for themselves as the medical care they administered to their patients.
The adulterer’s name was George Morse. He had come to the ER with a long gash on his arm and started talking a blue streak. That’s what some people did when they were scared and in pain. Usually Tamsin didn’t mind—sometimes their patter worked as a distraction that enabled her to complete her work—but in Morse’s case, she wished the man was a mute.
“It was my wife,” Morse said. “She cut me when she found out about Bettina. Grabbed the biggest knife out of the block.” He chuckled to himself. “I bought her those knives for our fourteenth anniversary. She was waving it around and I was trying to get it away from her before she could cut me, and well … she cut me.” He chuckled again. “She wouldn’t take me to the hospital, so I had to call a cab. Probably could’ve driven myself, but I didn’t want to bleed all over the upholstery in my car. It’s not leather or anything fancy like that, but I…”
Tamsin let the words wash over her as she worked the needle through the skin of Morse’s arm. She remembered something one of the attending physicians had said during her residency: Tune out the drama, focus on the trauma.
After she was done and Morse had been sent on his way, Tamsin went over to the triage desk, where a nurse named Joan Cuno was working on a crossword puzzle. “Slow night,” Joan said, stifling a yawn.
“Famous last words,” Tamsin said.
They both turned and looked at the automatic doors leading into the ER. They remained closed.
Joan shrugged. “I guess not.”
“Night’s not over yet,” Tamsin said.
Joan’s mouth stretched wide in another yawn. “Don’t remind me.”
“I was going to grab a coffee. You want one?”
“How about a caffeine IV drip?”
Tamsin laughed. “I’ll see what I can do.”
As she turned away from the desk, the automatic doors shushed open and a woman stepped into the ER. She was holding her left arm out in front of her, her right hand clamped tightly around the wrist. Blood seeped out between her fingers and dripped onto the floor.
Tamsin turned to Joan. “Now look what you did.”
* * *
The woman’s name was Rosalie and she said she’d been bitten by a vampire.
“A vampire?” Tamsin said. She swapped a look with Joan, who glanced up from typing the woman’s information into the computer. “Are you sure?”
The woman, Rosalie, frowned. “Well … no. But how often does a guy jump out of an alley and bite you? Usually they go for your purse or knock you down so they can…” Her cheeks flushed a bright red. “Well … you know.”
“Can I take a look at your arm?” Tamsin said. She was already reaching into her pocket for a fresh pair of latex gloves.
Rosalie hesitated, then held her arm out toward Tamsin. Tamsin held the woman’s arm gently in both hands and leaned in close to examine the wound.
It was definitely a bite, and definitely human. The only other bite wounds they got in here on a regular basis were from dogs, and the marks they left were markedly different.
“It was good that you came to the hospital,” Tamsin said.
Rosalie gave her a funny look. “Of course I came to the hospital. Why wouldn’t I?”
Tamsin stared at the woman, unsure how to reply. She didn’t want to tell her that most people who thought they’d been bitten by a vampire wouldn’t have come within a hundred yards of a hospital.
“Why don’t you come with me and we’ll get this looked at properly.” Tamsin turned to Joan, who was watching all this with wide, avid eyes. “Joan, could you tell Dennis that the drain in the break room is still clogged? I meant to tell him earlier, but I forgot.”
Joan nodded and picked up a Motorola radio. After Tamsin had taken Rosalie by her uninjured arm and led her off down a hallway, Joan keyed the mike on the radio and spoke in a low, breathless voice:
“Dennis? This is Joan. We’ve got a bite.”
* * *
Tamsin hated this part. Maybe she’s not infected, she told herself. Maybe it really was a crazy street person that bit her.
But they didn’t deal in “maybe”s at Chicago Hopeless. Anyone who had been bitten by a supernatural creature—or thought they had been bitten by one—was taken down this hallway. Sometimes they had to be dragged kicking and screaming. Tamsin took small comfort in knowing she never had to do that part. That’s what Dennis Nunez was for.
The hospital’s head of security was already waiting for them when Tamsin and Rosalie reached the door at the end of the hallway. Dennis was tall and broad-shouldered in his tan uniform, his shaved head gleaming under the fluo- rescent lights. Tamsin felt better the moment she saw him. There was another guard with him, a young man named Anthony Tam, whose mouth was usually quirked in a flirty grin. He wasn’t grinning now.
Rosalie looked warily at the two men. “What is this? What’s going on?”
Dennis hooked his thumbs into the top of his garrison belt and tried to strike a casual posture.
“Ma’am, we understand you were involved in an incident this evening. You said you were bitten by a supernatural?”
“Yes,” Rosalie said carefully. “Or … I don’t know. I think so.”
“Can you tell us what happened?”
“Well,” Rosalie said, “I was walking home from work when a man came out of an alley and grabbed me.”
“That must have been terrifying,” Dennis said. “It’s pretty late to be walking home. Where do you work?”
“I’m a barista at Cosmic Coffee, over on Pine Street.”
Dennis nodded. “I know the place.”
Tamsin liked watching Dennis work. She admired the way he spoke to the patients, the calm, even tone of his voice that managed to sound both interested and sympathetic. It was as much about putting them at ease as it was to gather information. Dennis used to work for the Chicago Police Department, and in moments like this Tamsin could see how he must have been in the interrogation room, playing the role of Good Cop to cajole a suspect into telling him things they didn’t want him to know.
“I don’t usually walk home alone,” Rosalie said. “Normally I get a ride with Cheryl—she’s one of the other baristas—but she’s been out all week with the stomach flu.”
Dennis crossed his arms. “The man who attacked you, do you remember anything about him? What he looked like? What he was wearing?”
Rosalie shook her head. “It was really dark. All I remember is him grabbing my arm and pulling me into the alley. I thought he was trying to take my purse, but I was holding it in my other hand. It wasn’t until I was able to pull away from him that I realized he had bitten me.”
“Then what happened?”
“I ran.” Rosalie looked at the three people standing around her. “What would you have done?”
“You did the right thing,” Dennis assured her. “Now, what made you think this man was a vampire?”
Rosalie’s cheeks had filled with color as she talked about what had happened to her. Now, as Tamsin watched, it drained out like a plug had been pulled.
“He didn’t say anything,” Rosalie said. “Not a word. He was making a sound. Low, in the back of his throat, almost like a growl. Or maybe that’s just how I remember it. And he bit me! Who would do a thing like that? It’s not normal. I started to think that he wasn’t normal. That maybe he was…”
“A vampire,” Dennis said.
Rosalie nodded.
“It was probably someone with a mental health issue,” Tamsin said. “Or maybe a drug addict. But it almost certainly wasn’t a vampire. You know what they say: you’re more likely to be struck by lightning…”
“Than to encounter a supernatural,” Rosalie finished. “Yeah, I’ve heard that before, but…” She raised her wounded arm. “… I thought it was best to be sure.”
“That’s very responsible of you,” Dennis said. He gave the other guard, Anthony, a brief look before turning back to Rosalie. “Now why don’t we get you into the examination room so we can get that bite looked at.”
Dennis placed his hand lightly against Rosalie’s back and guided her toward the door. Anthony swiped his ID card through the electronic reader to unlock it and held it open.
Rosalie went inside, taking small steps and looking all around like a frightened child.
The examination room, as Dennis had called it, was a room with another, smaller room inside it. This inner room was an enclosed chamber composed of four thick glass walls, with a tempered-steel ceiling and floor.
Rosalie turned to look at the three hospital personnel standing behind her. “What is this?”
Anthony moved around her and used his ID card to open the door to the inner room.
“This is the hospital’s paranormal biocontainment chamber,” Dennis explained. He ushered Rosalie inside as he spoke. “It’s where we treat people who have been attacked by creatures from the Black Lands.”
Tamsin followed them into the chamber, the tension thrumming under her skin like low-voltage electricity. She knew if there was going to be a problem, this is when it would happen. She watched as Rosalie looked around the chamber. There was nothing inside except a stainless-steel toilet bolted to the floor in the corner. It looked less like a hospital room and more like a prison cell—which, in a way, Tamsin supposed it was.
Anthony stood in the doorway while Tamsin went over to Rosalie and asked to see her injured arm. Rosalie held it out toward her. Tamsin cleaned the wound with an antiseptic wipe, then bandaged it with a dressing. It was the bare minimum of treatment, just enough to stop the bleeding and hold things over until they could determine if Rosalie was infected.
When she was done, Tamsin met Dennis’s eyes and said, “We’re good.” Then she left the chamber and Dennis took her spot in front of Rosalie.
“Now, ma’am…” Dennis began.
“Please stop calling me that,” Rosalie said abruptly. “You make me feel like an old woman. My name is Rosalie Lewis.”
“Ms. Lewis,” Dennis said. “Since you may have come into contact with a Black Lands entity, we have to keep you under quarantine until we can determine that you haven’t been infected with a paranormal pathogen.”
Rosalie’s face fell. “What?” She turned and looked through the glass wall at Tamsin in the outer room. Tamsin saw the hurt and betrayal in the other woman’s face and quickly lowered her eyes.
Rosalie turned back to face Dennis. “What do you mean ‘quarantine’? I was only … I was bit. I didn’t … I’m not sick!”
“Ma’am … Ms. Lewis, we can’t take any chances. If you were attacked by a vampire, there’s a possibility that you have been infected. Until we can make that determination, you have to remain in this chamber. For your own safety as well as that of everyone else in the hospital.”
Dennis stepped around Rosalie and took Anthony’s place in the open doorway. Rosalie turned to follow him, but was halted in her tracks when the security chief’s hand moved to the butt of the pistol holstered on his hip.
Copyright © 2022 by Ellen Datlow
