Chapter 3: Welcome to the Ward

NORI'S POV

I’ve been watching this man for five days. Another nurse said that she doesn’t think he’ll ever wake up, but I know she’s wrong. There’s a distinction you learn to make about humans when you’ve been alive so long. You learn to tell who’s a fighter and who’s a victim. A victim will freeze in fear when they see your fangs. They’ll shiver as you get closer and they sense that you’re a predator and they are prey. A fighter will square up to you like a wolf assessing a challenger for their position in the pack. They don’t shiver. They roar their right to live as they choose. This man, injured as he is, flirting with death, is no victim. I can tell by the stubborn set of his brow, the angry sounds he makes as his head thrashes on the pillow, that he’s all fighter. He will wake.

Still unconscious, burning with fever, he locks his jaw. His veins stand out under his skin. His lips turn white. He’s in so much pain. I look around, making sure I’m the only nurse in the ward and the other patients are asleep or hidden behind curtains. Then, slowly, with one hand on his broad chest, I dip my head to his neck. I bite him slowly, feeling the faint pop of his skin under the points of my teeth. His blood is hot, hotter than it should be, flowing over my pallette like fire. I run my tongue around the puncture, making sure he’s getting as much from this fluid exchange as possible. I don’t take much, barely anything. He’s not well, and I’ve fed recently enough that I’m not hungry. As we get older, we need less nourishment. Weston would say it’s our bodies nearing perfection. I say, it’s because we’re no longer hungry for life. Our physical hunger adjusts to match that.

As I pull back, the wrinkles in his forehead ease. Against my cool skin, his raging fever burns less and less. The anesthetic qualities in my saliva have done their job. It’s not a permanent fix, but he’ll feel better for a bit. He sighs, and I push his hair off his forehead. He is a roughly beautiful man, his face craggy with stress from the war, his coloring everything I’m not. I’d hazard a guess that he’s Latino, perhaps Spanish. His hair is a dark color, deeper than a chocolate brown but not entirely black. His skin is a rich copper with a pink tinge to his lips and cheeks. It’s impossible to tell his age as he sleeps. This war has aged all humans by decades. The youngest of the deployed look like men beat down by eons of sorrow and disasters. Men looked like this once, after the Tumu crisis. In a month, over 200,000 people had fallen beneath the sword. This is still so much worse. Was I a human, I’m not sure I’d have the stamina or hope to continue on. Thankfully, I’m not. Or at least, I haven’t been for so long, I’ve forgotten what it was like.

As I’m checking Army Specialist Perez’s vitals, making sure he’s stable now that I’ve drunk from him, Lyla comes in. Her uniform is stained, and she looks like a wave of blood crashed over her. I can smell it as soon as she’s over the threshold.

“Rough night?” I ask her.

“Three amputations. One of them a forequarter. We’re low on anesthesia. We used Lidocaine,” Lyla grumps, her eyes dull.

“Are you okay?” I ask, watching her jerky movements. There’s no way she’s okay. Maybe I should bite her, too. There’s no physical pain to reduce, but it could help soothe her nerves. Unfortunately, I’m not a bottomless pit and it’s gauche to ambush your coworkers.

“Just check on Private Johans while I get changed. This is unsanitary,” Lyla barks. I don’t mind her tone. She’s just a person who has barely two decades of experience on this earth, and she’s reached her limit. I look away, toward the private’s bed.

“Please,” Lyla says, and I hear her voice crack. I really should bite her.

“I’ve got it,” I say, shooing her away.

I move down the row of beds, peaking in on patients hidden behind curtains. None of these men are in good condition. Private Johan’s bed is one of the last in the third row. The curtain is wide open, because we need to keep an eye on him at all times. It hasn’t helped. He’s continued going downhill for the two weeks we’ve had him.

He’s awake, slumped to one side. I slide over to adjust him on his pillows, but his hand falls on my wrist.

“Lyla?” he asks.

This happens sometimes. Men get attached to one of their nurses, perhaps because something about them reminds the soldiers of a woman they left behind. They begin to have feelings that seem reciprocated because the nurse is attentive and gentle. In fact, some of the ladies flirt a little, a harmless way to build some morale for healing. This soldier seems to have built up an unrequitable romance with Lyla.

“She’s not on the floor right now. Can I get something for you?” I ask the young man, sitting him up straighter with no effort. He’s so light. He’s wasting away.

“I was hoping she’d help me,” he says, pausing to gasp after every word or two.

I’m a predator, and like many other predators, I have a natural sense of when something is sick, weak, dying. Humans do too, although their sense of this is much slighter. It expresses itself as disgust, a desire to move and look away. It’s a method of protecting their fragile existences. Their bodies use visual cues, barely noticed smells, and anything else at their disposal to assess someone’s condition and decide if they need to get away to shield themselves from catching something that may make them as equally unwell. For me, for my kind, it isn’t disgust we feel. It’s something much more eager, more vulturine.

I feel it now, standing so near Private Johans.

“I’m sure I can help you,” I say, holding my canines in my gums by sheer willpower. This is ridiculous. I’m not even hungry. Nor am I some green fledgling.

He sighs. It’s a wet, gurgling noise that comes from his throat instead of his chest.

“Lyla, I was hoping…” he said, forcing the words past his lips one at a time. I nod patiently. I have all the time in the world. It’s he who doesn’t.

“She would help me end it. We all know I’m not going to get better,” he says. He tries to raise his hand, probably to touch his face, a thing many humans do when they feel uncomfortable.

I think of Lyla, somewhere in this underground bunker washing off the blood of several men, peeling herself out of scrubs that are drying into a shell against her skin. She’s taken care of this man since he came in. She went into surgery with him, assisting with pulling the shrapnel from his lungs. It was she who had to tell him that one lung collapsed and the other was pierced with shrapnel as well. It was she who had to tell him infection was setting in, that he probably wouldn’t be getting better, that we didn’t have an adequate supply of antibiotics and none of the appropriate potency to fight off this kind of septicity.

Now, he is asking her to kill him out of mercy. She might do it. Hell, it’s a good decision both in terms of the dignity of this man’s life and in keeping the needs of the clinic in mind. Not wasting more medicine on him saves some for the next man who needs it, a man with more of a chance to survive.

“Are you certain?” I ask, bending over to whisper to him. The other men don’t need to hear this conversation.

“I’m tired. I’m ready to be with my family,” he says back, reaching up to touch my hair. It’s not a flirtatious gesture. In fact, it reminds me a bit of what a small child would do at bedtime with his mother, a way to comfort himself.

“There’s no one left for you?” I ask, looking at his bedside table. There’s a folded, flaking photo there of him with his arms thrown around an older woman and another young man who looks very like him.

“No. They’re all gone. And I miss them. There’s no reason to make me wait to die,” he says, losing his ability to speak. His words are becoming more hoarse, more cumbersome.

“Okay,” I say, “Okay. As long as you’re sure. We’ll miss you Christopher Johans.”

He finds the strength to smile at me when I agree. It was a lie. I won’t miss him. I haven’t missed a human’s presence in my non-life for centuries. However, it was a tender half-lie. Lyla will miss him.

I partially close the curtains around his bed. I reach to switch off one of his monitoring machines, the one that reads his blood oxygen level. I brush his hair back off his head, much like I did with Army Specialist Perez. However, whatever inner storm convinces me that Milo Perez will wake is silent in Private Johans. Instead, he is peaceful, even his laboring body has suddenly gone tranquil. I lean in, I bite him, and I drink until I know he’ll never wake again. I don’t drain him immediately. I want no signs to point back to me. However, it’ll happen in the next hour or so. And he’s in no pain. I switch his monitor back on, run my fingers over my lips to make sure they’re clean, and tuck another blanket around him so he’s not cold as he moves out of this world. Then, I walk out.

A few moments later, another nurse enters the floor and relieves me of my duty. My shift is over.