everything else out, Lucy knelt by the dying man. He stared up at her with eyes full of panic at the surety of his own imminent death. The other man, the huge one, the… other… he stayed by the dying man’s head, holding a cloth to the wound.
As Lucy looked into the dying man’s eyes, she felt a pull of recognition, but batted it away. It didn’t matter, and she’d seen too many faces in this job to go through the catalogue.
Adrian went to the third body, kneeling down into a pool of blood leaking from its chest.
‘Not that one,’ the man by Lucy said.
Adrian ignored him, checking for a pulse on the man on the ground.
Lucy smiled at her patient, trying not to think about the blood soaking through the green of her uniform at the knees. ‘Can you hear me?’ she asked.
The patient nodded; the movement set off a cough of bloody foam.
‘Okay, don’t move.’ She looked up at the kneeling man. ‘I need you to take it away for a second, alright?’
The patient stared up in blank-eyed horror at the prospect. The kneeling man eased his bloody palm away, revealing a wound which pooled red within seconds. She tried to ignore the fact the laceration had two distinct entry points.
‘I’ve got a laceration of the jugular here, Adrian. It’s a nick. Can you get me a suture?’
‘Sure. This one’s dead,’ Adrian said of the third body, the one whose gaping chest wound made that fairly apparent. He crossed back to Lucy and rummaged in his bag. He looked warily at the kneeling man. ‘What can you tell us about what happened?’
The man kneeling over the patient ignored the question. ‘Save him,’ he commanded Lucy.
‘I’m going to do my best. It would help if you answered my colleague’s question.’
The man paused.
Lucy placed a pad against the wound to stop the flow and looked up, waiting for him to answer.
He looked tired. ‘A bite,’ he said, looking at the floor. ‘The other man, he bit him, drained him. Made him drink… he will need a transfusion. He cannot die.’
‘Not my call,’ Lucy said, fixing Adrian with wide eyes as he settled opposite her, taking the pad from the other man, easing him out of the way.
‘He will need a transfusion,’ the man said again. ‘O neg.’
‘Friend of yours?’ Lucy asked.
‘Yes.’
‘What’s your friend’s name?’
‘Cain.’
The twinge of recognition from a moment earlier resolved itself, and she looked back at the man staring up at her with blind panic. ‘Cain?’
‘Lucy,’ the dying man whispered back.
She offered him a weak smile and got to work. Her hands worked quickly, trying to stem the flow. The nick wasn’t too severe, but a slight movement could tear the artery, spilling what blood remained in his body so fast the heart would shut down. Better he die here because she tried to save him than he died halfway down the stairs.
‘I need to call this in,’ Adrian said in a low voice.
‘I know,’ Lucy replied. Adrian was talking about the police.
The kneeling man stood, moving backward.
Adrian leaned in, his voice little more than a whisper. ‘You should see the other guy. Chest wound, looks like…’
Neither of them said it, but the look between them said it all. They’d walked into a horror movie, and there was a decent chance they’d not make it to the end credits.
Adrian looked up and got to his feet. ‘What the fuck?’ he said. ‘Where did he go?’
‘What’s happening?’ Lucy asked. She couldn’t look up from what she was doing for more than a second, holding a man’s life in her fingers as she applied a lateral suture to the tattered artery of her patient.
‘He’s gone.’
‘The big guy?’
‘Both of them. Dead one, too.’
She chanced a look up. They were alone in the room with the dying patient.
‘You know him?’ Adrian asked, motioning to the patient as he joined Lucy once more.
‘Long time ago,’ she replied, her brain too full of the task at hand to dredge up old memories. She placed the gauze back over the wound. A quick patch job — it needed a surgeon. He at least had a hope of getting to the hospital.
‘One thing at a time,’ she said. ‘Call it in from the road. Help me get him up.’
‘He needs a stretcher,’ Adrian said. Lucy’s stomach lurched at the thought of being left alone in this place while Adrian ran for the stretcher.
‘I can walk,’ Cain said, his voice a burble of blood.
They helped him to his feet and walked him slowly back to the ambulance. The walk down the fetid staircase seemed to stretch into forever; drawn-out seconds in which Lucy expected to be launched upon by some fresh horror with each tentative step.
She took a deep breath of fresh air as soon as they were outside, wanting to purge her lungs of the spoiled air of that place. Slowly, they walked Cain to the ambulance.
Adrian pulled open the back doors. Their patient stepped up gingerly before laying down on a stretcher with a wince. Lucy lifted the back up so his neck was elevated and looked at him. Tall, middle-aged, vaguely handsome if you ignored his pallid skin and the bandage attached to his neck. His cotton shirt was tacky with blood.
‘Cain?’ she said.
He looked at her and tried a smile. She smiled back. His was a face she’d never thought she’d see again, but it wasn’t altogether unpleasant to find before her. At the same time, he looked an entirely different person than the one she’d known. She imagined she looked as different to him. All those years of distance had forged them into entirely new people.
‘We’re going to take you to the hospital, okay?’ she said.
‘What?’ he said, sitting up. ‘No. No hospital. I can’t…’
Whatever he couldn’t do was unclear. He fell back onto the gurney like a cut puppet.
‘Shit,’ Lucy said. ‘Blue lights.’
Adrian closed the doors and ran round to the front, gunning the engine and pulling away from the house with a squeal of overworked tyres.
Lucy checked Cain’s pulse. Weak, but still there. He’d better hang on, she thought, because she had a hell of a lot of questions.