the night was an elderly lady who’d taken a fall. She was so frail they called for backup from a second crew to lift her as gently and supportively as they could. The second crew took her in, so Lucy and Adrian kept going from job to job, each one keeping them from returning to the hospital.
When they finally had a patient to take in — a young boy with a broken arm who’d trapped it somehow in his bed and snapped it trying to take it back out — she’d forgotten all about Cain. That lasted right up to the moment the admitting nurse took the boy off their hands and they stood in silence together on the threshold of the busman’s entrance to A&E, staring down the empty corridor.
‘Do you want to check?’ Adrian asked, sounding like someone who didn’t want to check himself.
‘Sure. You prep the van.’
She took a deep breath. There was an itch she had to scratch. She had to know — Cain was her… well… she was the one with the connection, after all. It made sense she be the one to go in.
Winding her way through the backstage area of A&E, the part the public only ever saw strapped to a gurney, was a strip-lit nightmare after the night outside.
‘Morning, love,’ a voice called out. Lucy turned and found Brian, the counter clerk, his stick-thin body barely filling his scrubs as he walked back to his desk with a pot of unnecessarily low-calorie yogurt in his hand and a smile on his face.
‘Hey, Brian,’ she replied, falling in step with him. ‘How’s it going?’
He waved his yoghurt in the air. ‘Oh, you know this place. The fun never starts,’ he said with a wide smile. ‘What brings you back here behind the veil, and where’s that lovely partner of yours?’
She laughed. ‘He’s setting up for the next job. I swung by to check up on a friend of mine who I brought in yesterday.’
‘Sure,’ he said, getting to his desk and slumping into his chair with a flourish. ‘What’s the name?’
‘Cain. Daniel.’
‘Cain, Daniel Cain,’ Brian replied in a terrible mock-Scottish accent. ‘I think I know who you mean. Strange case. Neck wound, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘They patched the wound fine, but he went tachycardic. They induced a coma. He’s still in intensive care,’ he said, calling up the record. ‘Doesn’t look like the specialist has been round yet. You can go see him, if you like?’
‘No, it’s fine,’ she replied, but it wasn’t. She had to go see for herself. ‘Actually, I might.’
He gave her an understanding smile, and she headed to the lift. Paramedics rarely ventured this far in, but nobody gave her a second glance. When she was first on the job, she’d come back to check on her patients all the time. After a few months, it got to be too exhausting, mentally and physically.
The sad fact was she’d lost too many patients to get emotionally invested in them, even the ones she saved. She stopped checking in on them altogether. Occasionally, she ran into a patient in a shop or on a night out, or working the concession stand at the cinema. At least she never had to pay for popcorn. Often she couldn’t remember the person she’d saved.
She found Cain in a darkened room, tucked under a tight sheet, only his head and shoulders visible. A tube ran from his throat, where it met with the several other tubes giving him drugs and sustenance. A large white bandage wound round his neck like a grotesque polo neck. With the blood washed off, he looked halfway toward the man she’d known, though there were still traces of it on his hairline, a hairline receded somewhat since the time she’d known him.
She moved over to the bed, looking down at the man she’d been on two dates with. She slipped her hand into his and found it warmer than she’d expected.
He’d been her boss, at least nominally. Both worked in the local evil call centre, selling unnecessary insurance products to people who didn’t need them. The place was more zoo than business, with the bosses doing lines of coke in the bathrooms at break time and televisions off the back of a dodgy truck given as sales incentives. In a place like that, who the hell cared if a team leader asked out a girl from the team next to him? In the grand scheme of things, it probably counted as the least egregious crime committed under that roof.
Like most of the staff there, Lucy fell into working there out of a strange mix of desperation and the ease of finding work there. Cain was no different. His marriage had spun apart, and he’d lost a career as a university lecturer in some kind of unspecified scandal, so the only place that would hire him was a place that considered ethics as an optional extra to its core business.
He was a nice guy, one of the few team leaders not to lose their shit when sales slipped. One Friday, when the office decamped to The Fox for post-hell drinks, Lucy chatted to him all evening. She found a quiet intellect, a quick sense of humour, and a pleasant smile. It was enough to give an instinctive yes when he asked her out, even though he was a good ten years older than her.
Their first date was the definition of awkwardness. He was a decent enough guy, but there was no spark, and he was nowhere near getting his shit together after the collapse of his marriage, something that became apparent ten minutes into their date.
Still, she agreed to a second. That went better, but not enough to warrant as much as a peck on the cheek at the end, let alone a third date. He was interesting, though she’d never understood how he went from university lecturer to sales agent for the devil’s own credit card company.
As something of a reformed goth, it had impressed Lucy when Cain told her of his research into the legend of Countess Bathory, allegedly the most prolific female serial killer in history. She was better known to Lucy as Countess Dracula from the old Hammer horror movies she’d watched with her dad, and figured this knowledge would stand her in good stead, but it turned out he hated the Hammer films, and what he called ‘the nonsense’ around her legend. This was a pretty big red flag to someone raised on Christopher Lee movies. Whatever had happened in the intervening years, he was obviously taking the Bathory thing to a whole new level.
He looked peaceful, at least. Despite the receding hairline and the fact he was in a coma, he looked better than he had when they’d dated — he’d worn the dishevelled look of a man who’d divorced the woman who’d kept him tidy. Here in the bed he was clean shaven, and halfway toward handsome.
‘Thank you,’ a voice said from the doorway behind her, making her jump. She whirled round and found herself face to face with the man from the flat.
‘I…’ she said, but nothing more came out.
‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ the man replied, moving out of the shadows. He was huge, his broad shoulders blocking out the light from the corridor beyond. He dressed in dark tones, his jacket fitting well over what looked a well-built frame. His close-cut brown hair matched his eyes. A crooked nose, as though broken at some distant point in the past. Almost impossibly pale skin, even in the warm glow of Cain’s bedside lamp. The whole thing coalesced into an almost unfeasible level of handsomeness that Lucy cursed herself for noticing, under the circumstances.
‘Who are you?’ she asked, her voice full of the fear creeping up her neck.
‘A friend,’ was all he offered as he moved toward the bed. For a moment Lucy thought he was crossing toward her, but he moved to the other side, giving her a clear path to the door if she needed it; a subtle but deliberate act.
‘Friend to who?’ she asked.
‘To him,’ he replied, gesturing to Cain, but not looking down at him. He held Lucy’s gaze; she found it hard to break free of it.
‘What happened to him?’ she asked, picking up the chart at the end of the bed to give herself something else to look at.
‘I’m sure you’ve worked it out for yourself,’ he replied, the tiniest hint of a smirk crossing his face.
Of course she had. As he stood there before her, she had no question as to what he was, even if she couldn’t bring herself to admit it.
‘Right,’ she said sarcastically. ‘That would make you…’
He smirked, shifting his weight from one foot to the other and leaning against the wall. ‘We’re not overly fond of the term, but we never have settled on another.’
‘What should I call you, then?’
‘Adam.’
She didn’t know what to say to that. This was too surreal. ‘Okay, say you are what you say, and last night was what I think. What’s going to happen to him?’
His smirk disappeared. ‘That depends,’ he offered.
‘On what?’
‘On whether he can fight off the infection. They’ve given him a transfusion and pumped his stomach. It may be enough.’
She stared at him for a moment. His eyes were on Cain. He looked sadder than she thought possible to look. ‘And if not?’
He looked back down at Cain again. ‘If it takes him, it will not be a good way to die. Those left for the infection to kill them rather than receiving a quick death suffer fevers, convulsions, and worse. Four days.’
They stood in silence for a moment, staring at the man in the bed. He looked perfectly healthy, aside from the coma. There were no signs he was about to die and become a…
No. This man spoke of infection, and infections could be cured. If she spoke to the attending doctors, she might help them fight this.
‘Is there a cure?’ she asked.
‘No.’
She felt his eyes burrowing into her, imagined them trained on her neck, right up to the moment she no longer felt them.
She looked up and found him gone. The room felt diminished by his absence, somehow.
Staring at Cain for a moment, her stomach swirled — anger, frustration, fear, all mixed with a little bile.
She left, mumbling a goodbye to Brian the receptionist, weaving numbly through the corridors until she found herself back outside in the frosty night air. She climbed back into the cab.
‘No calls for an hour,’ Adrian said cheerily. ‘This carries on much longer, we could go grab an ice cream from Tesco.’
She offered him a weak smile in response. He looked as though he wanted to ask after their patient, but something held him back. ‘How was he?’ he asked.
‘Unit fifteen, come in,’ the radio squawked, sparing Lucy from having to answer.
He sighed. ‘No ice cream for us.’