CHAPTER 10
Doctor My Eyes
The cute doctor took one look under the bandages and said, “Uh-uh.” I insisted I needed it working tonight and vascular surgery was not her gig. She also warned me I might not be able to get it fixed. Certainly not at 3 A.M. on a full moon.
Shortly before dawn I walked out of Memorial Hospital. A little woozy, maybe, but ready to roll. Or close enough for day two of the full moon. And I’d picked up a PUFF.
Wait. What?
Lots of people in New Orleans knew about Hoodoo Squad, because we were the thin green line between hoodoo and them or their families and friends. The drug dealers and innumerable burglars, muggers and other lowlifes of New Orleans treated us like we were royalty. How do you think doctors and nurses felt?
When I got to the emergency room, they were waiting for me. The security guard was real polite and deferential about all the guns.
“You really can’t keep them, sir,” he said. “It’s not just that it makes the doctors and nurses nervous. Sometimes there’s drug reactions and stuff.”
“Got that,” I said. “I agree, even. But how far do you want me to be from my weapons in the event somebody turns into a loup-garou in reception?” The way my night had been going it wouldn’t have surprised me.
We compromised. They got stacked in the room. Just in case.
The emergency room was overflowing. Standing room only.
I never even sat down. Not because I was one of the standing only, but because I never even went to intake. I went straight to one of the curtained alcoves. I heard some muttering.
“Why’s he so special?”
“Hoodoo Squad.”
“Oh.”
That was the locals. The few tourists that said anything were told to shut their stupid tourist yap.
I got out of the top of my gear and got the wound looked at right away by a nurse.
“That’s a bad cut,” she said. “Normally we’d stitch the outside. Veins heal.”
“I need to be going. I need the vein. Tonight.”
“I’ll get the doctor.”
The doctor was the attending, not an intern. He looked at it and shook his head. “To get you up and going, I’ll need to call in a vascular surgeon. And it won’t be one hundred percent.”
“I just need some mobility, Doctor.” I put it in the formal You’re an MD tone. “We’re down to four people.”
“I heard about Mr. Baldwin,” the doctor said, holding the vein closed with a hemostat. “Who else?”
Jonathan’s test had come back positive. He was officially a werewolf. I was told later that Agent Higgins had done the honors. I’d have done the same.
“Greg Wise, Doctor,” I said.
“Oh, not Greg!” the nurse said. “I liked Greg.”
“Sorry, miss. He’s gone.”
“I’ll put up his cup,” she said with a sniffle.
Hoodoo Squad really did have their own coffee mugs in the emergency room. I didn’t have one—yet. I had one the next time I got carried in.
And when one of us would buy the farm, they’d put them up on a special shelf. It was like the memorial wall at the MHI compound. They showed it to me one time. It was sobering.
“I’ll call Dr. Einstat,” the doctor said. “It may be some time.”
“Understood.”
Some time turned out to be about twenty minutes. Dr. Einstat, wearing scrubs, was still blinking sleep from his eyes but looked sharp enough to repair an artery in his sleep.
“I came out on the full moon for you, young man,” Dr. Einstat said, examining the wound. “You’d better be worth it.”
“Doing the best I can, Doctor. Any chance you can get me up and going at thirty percent on the arm? Tonight?”
“Might be able to do better than thirty,” Einstat said. “You’ll need surgery, you understand.”
“Any chance on a local? I really don’t have time for recovery from general.”
“Light general,” he said. “Valium drip. And you look like you could use a unit of blood…”
It’s amazing how much better you feel after a unit of whole blood. Vampires have a point.
I got an alcohol sponge bath from an old nurse’s aide who had clearly been around the hoodoo block a time or two.
“I heard Mr. Wise has gone to the Green Lands,” the nurse’s aide said, continuing to sponge off all the various crap I’d gotten on myself. “A terrible business.”
“Green Lands is a good description,” I said. “Been there briefly once. So green.”
“We all go to the Green Lands someday, son,” she said. “If we do not fall to the Shadow.”
“Working on it,” I said.
A few minutes later they wheeled me out, still in my stinking, ichor-covered armored pants, and wheeled me upstairs into a small surgical suite. An anesthesiologist came in, hooked a valium drip into my IV and I sort of drifted off.
I really like valium drips. I hope heaven has valium drips.
I woke up a while later in recovery. My arm had a heavy set of sutures on it. Much heavier than normal. About every millimeter. Also a very strong clear bandage encircled my right bicep. Which was comfortably numb.
“You’re going to have to favor it,” a young doctor said. “I know you have to be mobile and have some use, but you’re going to have to favor it.”
“Tell Dr. Einstat thank you,” I said. “Can I get up?”
“I wouldn’t recommend it, but that’s up to you,” the doctor said.
“I’ve got to go.”
A pretty nurse’s aide helped me to my feet. My gear was right there in the recovery room. It was torn to shreds, literally. My tactical vest was ribbons. I realized I’d left some magazines back in the cemetery. God knew what else.
All I wanted was to lie back down. Whole blood or no, I was exhausted.
Death is lighter than a feather, duty is heavier than mountains.
I started getting my gear back on.
While I was getting dressed in my stinking combat suit, with the help of the nurse’s aide, the same security guard came in and cleared his throat hesitantly.
“We’ve got a situation downstairs,” he said.
* * *
Her name was Sylvia Parks.
Despite the awful necessity of what MCB does, awful is an accurate description. As the Doctors Nelson insist, victims need care and understanding to overcome their experiences. MCB sort of makes that impossible in the main. If you run into the supernatural and go to a counselor talking about werewolves or vampires or the boogie man, they get the nice young men in the clean white coats.
Sylvia had been a captive of vampires. Are there worse things, supernaturally? Yes. Is being a vampire captive bad on toast? Yes.
She’d been physically rescued but her mind was pretty well gone. She couldn’t restrain herself. She had to talk about it. A county counselor had recommended her for admission. Because everyone knows vampires aren’t real.
She spent months in a psych ward until she was convincing enough about no longer believing in vampires to get discharged. She got into drugs to help with the nightmares. She slid down the ladder into prostitution and wound up in New Orleans as a down-and-out streetwalker.
She’d been found in a cheap motel room, dead from a heroin OD. Just another statistic.
She was taken to the hospital, pronounced DOA in the ER and shipped downstairs to the morgue for processing. No ID and not from around here. As a Jane Doe she was left in the morgue until identified or they gave up, usually ninety days. Where she hung on a hanger until she woke up.
Uh, hanger?
Yeah. Forget what you see in TV shows like Quincy. There are roll-out trays in most morgues but they’re for bodies which are undergoing advanced autopsy requirements where the MEs are going back to them multiple times.
Most big city morgues have a large cooler where bodies are on shelves, sometimes stretching up twenty feet. Those generally have some rotation system. But even that takes up a lot of space.
The morgue downstairs in the main hospital in New Orleans at the time had a hanger system. Bodies which were sufficiently together were held with a strap, like what they use to lift people up in a helo in rescues, wrapped in plastic and hung up on a pulley system. Very space-saving and efficient. Which was, clearly, necessary.
I don’t think New Orleans in the mid-eighties had, officially, the highest death rate from murder in the nation. But remember the MCB. Most supernatural deaths were recorded as something else. In fact, when I was in the emergency room, an intern came for the question and answer period.
Every emergency entry had to have a reason for injury for statistical purposes. Federal law. I later ran into some people in the federal government who compile those statistics and hated the MCB for throwing them off. You might run across the statistic that the most dangerous place in the world is your own kitchen or bathroom? That’s because MCB’s most common form of death, when there’s a supernatural event at a house, is “Died due to electrocution in bathtub/slipping in shower” or “died due to slipping while replacing kitchen fixture.” Fire imp in the house? “Kitchen fire started by frying oil.” Every agent gets the suggestion in training and uses it assiduously.
Yeah. Your bathroom is the most dangerous place in the world. Sure.
By the way, Mr. Robinson whose son turned into a loup-garou? He wasn’t a hero who tried to hold the line and save his wife and daughter from a werewolf. He had gone nuts over dinner being burned and killed his whole family. That was the official story. Keep that in mind the next time you see “father kills whole family then commits suicide.”
But back to the point. When I was still in emergency, a young intern had come in with a clipboard. Before he could even open his mouth, I said: “SOCMOB. Sierra Golf Kilo. Oscar oscar November.”
“You’ve done this before,” he said, grinning and writing it down.
What did I just say?
SOCMOB.
“Seriously, Doc, I was just Standing on the Corner, Minding My Own Business.”
That was and is the most common opening for “I got into a fight.” It is never the fault of the person who is injured. They were just Standing on the Corner Minding their Own Business. SOCMOB.
Who had attacked me?
“Some Guy with a Knife.” SGK.
Where did this guy come from? Were you confronting him?
“Out of Nowhere.” Oscar Oscar November. OON.
That’s what the doctors write down.
Individual: SOCMOB.
Assailant: SG or SGK or SGG (some guy with a gun) or, often, SGs. (Some guys.)
Where did they come from? OON.
SOCMOB, SGK, OON.
Q&A done.
Emergency doctors say that the most dangerous places in the world are street corners, not bathrooms, and the worst possible things you can do to cause assault with bodily harm are:
• Stand on a corner, minding your own business.
• Be walking home from prayer service, especially if you are carrying a Bible.
• Be sitting on your own front porch. Again, holding a Bible is a sure sign you’re about to get beat up or shot.
And Some Guy is an elite ninja assassin that travels the world harming perfectly innocent people for no good reason. Out of nowhere. Then disappears. Like it’s magic. MCB needs to put Some Guy on the PUFF list and the “MCB Most Wanted.”
I love emergency room personnel. They’re the only group on earth more cynical than Hunters.
But back to the vampire in the morgue.
I hadn’t been in the New Orleans General Morgue yet but I was impressed. Compared to Seattle, they had it down. The hanger room was behind a heavily sealed door with a fancy new electronic keypad. No zombies, vampires or other forms of undead were getting out of there. It was like a bank vault.
“What if you accidentally get stuck in there?” I asked the morgue attendant.
That, by the way, New Orleans or anywhere, is not a job I’d ever take. Or funeral home attendant. Just saying.
“There’s a call button and a phone,” he said dyspeptically. His name was Phillip Wohlrab. He was a dead ringer for Dave, the daytime coroner’s shift lead. Short, chubby, very pale. Thinning hair and he had to be not more than twenty-two. He reminded me of a mole rat.
The vampire was clearly hissing at us from behind two inches of armored glass. You couldn’t hear her but she was clearly hissing. When people woke up as vampires, they were usually confused and insane. Being tangled up and dangling from a bunch of straps probably didn’t help.
“Any chance this could wait till daylight?” I asked, looking at my watch.
She hit the armored glass so hard it broke her hand. Then again. Because it just regenerated back to normal.
He pointed to the stack of bodies that were piling up in the room.
“Day shift will shit a brick,” he said. “And we’ve got more coming in from Greenwood. I hate having to reprocess the already buried.”
I probably should have called for help, but last I heard, everybody else was busy too. I worked my right arm for a second and drew Mo No Ken with my left. It was set up for a right draw and it was a harder reach, but once out, eh. I’m fairly ambidextrous.
“Yeah, sure,” I said with a sigh.
He tapped the keypad and started to swing the heavy door open. He needn’t have bothered. It nearly crushed him against the wall.
The newly awakened female vamp was all hunger, strength and fury. Not much in the way of brains. Then again, that also described genius vampire Tedd Roberts, and he had been a vampire for a month. Since she was trapped in the straps, and I didn’t have a clean shot at her head, I just started slicing at limbs until I could get a good angle at her neck. It was more like hedge trimming than regular monster hunting.
“Now I’m supposed to clean this up?” Wohlrab said. There was vampire ichor all over the morgue and the body was starting to deliquesce.
“I just make the mess,” I said, reaching for my cloth to clean Mo No Ken. That hurt. This was going to suck. “Besides,” I said, pointing to the arm, “I’m injured.”
“Always excuses,” Wohlrab said with a sigh. “You’re worse than day shift.”
“Don’t you have a janitor or something?”
* * *
As I was walking out of the emergency room, Agent Marine came marching in. He was in full tactical rig-out, including helmet with FBI in big white letters on the front, and followed by a very confused-looking junior agent in the same gear.
He was probably there to do the honors for some poor schlub who’d gotten bit or to intimidate some out-of-town witnesses.
“Hey, Bob,” I said, half waving.
“Hey, Chad,” he said, walking past. “Sorry about Jonathan.”
“What?”
He stopped. “You didn’t hear?” He looked around to make sure none of the patients were close enough to eavesdrop. “Doctors found a bite. Lycanthropy test immediately came back positive. I ran a couple strips to be sure.”
“Shit.”
“Baldwin was a good guy. I made it painless. That’s all I could do.”
“Thanks.”
Bob nodded, then went back to work. The MCB agents were the only people having a busier night than we were.
In Seattle, MCB turned up for every damned incident and read us the riot act most of the time. In New Orleans, under Castro’s leadership at least, they just waved and met us at Maurice’s for drinks. I ended up having them over for grill-outs and vice versa. When the time came, MCB and MHI fought shoulder to shoulder to save Mardi Gras and died in a single pile.
I think the relationship in New Orleans is something that needs to be fostered. I get where the Nelsons and Shacklefords are coming from but…
Never mind. Enough preaching. Back to the monsters.