Plague

Chapter 9 Day 2 12:05 AM

Chapter 9

Day 2

12:05 AM


Jim Collins was a forty year old man who had been hospitalized for two days because of his physician’s concerns that he had developed a bleeding ulcer. Jim was a hard-driving, type-A personality who ran his very successful boutique stock brokerage well enough to enable him to pocket large amounts of money. This enabled him to keep his wife, as well as his girl friend and his mistress well taken care of: none of them had any reason to complain. He knew the hospitalization was just orchestrated by his wife through his doctor to give him a mandatory vacation. His loving wife was, he knew, very concerned about his health.
He had experienced some stomach pain, but he had not vomited blood or had black tarry stools, like the other patients with bleeding ulcers he had talked to.
Jim had been laying in his bed, watching television, his between-bed curtain drawn so he could have a respite from talking with his roommate. The guy’s name was George. George Thomas. George was, to Jim’s mind, only slightly smarter than a dog turd. However, George was 6’3” tall and had told Jim that he could bench press 450 pounds. The guy worked in some menial job, something Jim had silently laughed at, when George, who liked to talk, had told him about it. While not admitting it, especially to himself, Jim, all 5’10” and 150 pounds of him, did feel physically intimidated by his room mate. He felt better when he considered himself a mental giant compared to the other man.
He heard George snoring, and was pissed at himself for not being able to fall asleep. Anything would be better than the poor excuse for cable television the hospital offered.
Jim was trying to doze off when he heard someone enter the room. Whoever it was walked heavily, almost seeming to drag a leg, he thought. Jim heard a female voice speaking several words to George. He couldn’t make out the words, and thought that they were slurred. After speaking for a short period of time, the words stopped. Jim didn’t hear her anymore and again started to fall asleep.
He startled when the curtain around his bed, separating him from George, was suddenly jerked back. He opened his eyes and looked at the nurse standing there looking at him. He had never seen her before. She was a big woman, he thought, heavy set and she looked messy as hell. She limped towards his bed, bending her head down to talk to him.
He lay there and watched her come closer to him, aware too late that she wasn’t carrying any medications or even a stethoscope. She was dragging her right leg as she limped up to his bed. Just before she got there, she spoke to him, but he couldn’t understand what she said. Her words were just too slurred. Jim also noticed that she had trouble looking at him. Her eyes seemed to move around in separate orbits; both eyes never looking at him at the same time.
The nurse got to within a couple of feet of the head of his bed. He finally stopped trying to analyze the situation and asked, “Excuse me, but who are you?”
She didn’t try to answer him, she just moved ever closer.
“Please,” he said, “I want to know your name. Who are you? What do you want?”
Jim thought he heard her say, “Molehill,” or something like it.
She finally stopped walking when she was standing up next to him. He looked up at her and said, “What do you want?”
Nurse Mulvihill said nothing. She bent over at the waist, until her head rested on the pillow, next to Jim Collins, who was doing his best to move away from her, if for no other reason than she stank, his sensitive nose told him.
Faster than he could account for it, she was climbing onto his bed, her face looking toward the ceiling as she moved her legs onto the bed. Jim tried his best to move out of her way, but the sheet and blanket were tightly tucked into the other side of the bed preventing him from getting his arms out of the covers fast enough to tear the blanket off of the bed; he couldn’t climb or even fall out of the bed on the side away from the nurse who was forcing herself down on his bed.
“What are you doing?” he asked her as she started to move her body closer to him.
“I asked you a question. I demand to know what you are doing!” he said, his voice getting louder.
He was caught in his bed; she was lying on top of the bed clothes, and he had been pushed all the way to the other side of his bed. He did his best to turn his head and get a better view of this foul smelling, gimp of a nurse in a dirty white uniform.
He started to say something else, but his voice caught in his throat when he saw something begin to extrude from her right ear. From the time he first thought he saw a small movement somewhere around her ear, to the time he saw something extrude from her ear, something that looked like a squishy arrow head with a tail that was moving it across his pillow towards his head.
Jim Collins had no time to speak or even scream before the thing rammed itself into his left ear and disappeared into his brain.
*******
Less than a half hour passed. The thing that had been Jim Collins picked its head up from a pillow and looked across the room. The body of George Thomas looked back at him.
Jim had no recollection of the nurse who had paid him a nocturnal visit. She was no longer in the room.
George’s body looked back at Jim and without speech Jim’s brain knew what was needed.
Both men got up from their beds, put their clothes on, and without speaking a word to each other, moved together out of their room, down the hall to the stairwell and through the door. They didn’t stop until they had reached the bottom of the stairway and exited through the door onto the first floor of the hospital. They walked together, neither saying a word, both walking with the same speed, towards the front door to the hospital.
A nurse passing them did a double take and asked, “Don’t you gentlemen realize that visiting hours have been over for quite a while? Where are you going?”
The thing that had been George, looked at the nurse and said, “Home.” It then turned and, along with Jim, walked down the hall and into the main lobby, then out the front door and down to the long-term parking lot to Jim’s car.
Still without a word, the two men got into Jim’s SUV and slowly, at first, then with better coordination, Jim drove it out of the parking lot and took a right. He left the hospital property and within minutes was on Interstate 5 heading south, towards Los Angeles.