Unsure what was going on or what they’d find, Damian raced after them.
Chapter 10
Andi knew an oxygenation alarm meant one of two things: a patient was scratching themselves and messing up the sensor, or they were decompensating—possibly dying. She reached the bedside a half second after Austin, who for once seemed totally stunned. He was mesmerized by the screen’s report of dropping numbers, turning white as a sheet.
She whirled and pounded her fists on his chest. “Get it together! Where’s your ambu bag? And your O2 tank?”
Her violence startled him to activity. He cursed and ran off for the crash cart he’d apparently put away. Andi looked around. If this house was as magic as she thought, couldn’t it just conjure things up? The cat ran in and looked at her expectantly—as did Damian.
“What’s going on?” he asked, his concern written all over his face. She ignored him.
“Suction?” she asked aloud, and heard something large land behind her. She turned and found an entire suction set up—canister, tubing, and all—and heard its portable generator start to whine. This house! She grabbed the end of the tube and stuck it into the patient’s mouth, hoping that if there was something in there blocking his throat, it’d suck it out. His saturation was in the seventies. If Austin didn’t hurry up….
At that moment, Austin raced in, shoving the cart ahead of him. He laced the oxygen tubing between the portable tank and the ambu bag that they’d start to use to breathe for the patient—if it worked. “Catch!” he said, throwing the ambu bag at her after it was attached.
She tossed the suction aside—it hadn’t seemed to help—and she put the mouthpiece around the patient’s mouth, jerking his chin up to clear his airway, and started squeezing. He was getting 100% oxygen now. If he was going to get better, now was the time to do it—and if this didn’t work… Andi looked back at Austin. “When’s the last time you intubated anybody?”
“Been a while,” he admitted, ripping through the crash cart drawers for the intubation kit.
“Grab the defibrillator pads while you’re there,” she told him. The patient’s oxygenation saturation was at 60% now—soon, the cells of his heart would start freaking out about not getting enough air.
Damian shoved forward. “What’s going on?” he demanded.
“You sure you’re not a doctor?” Andi said, as sarcastically as possible. “Get out of the way,” she said, shoving at his hips with her own. He danced aside, and she yanked off the sheet she’d placed over the patient’s freshly-dressed chest in between squeezing the ambu bag.
His heart rate shot up, setting a different monitor blaring.
“Pads! Pads! Pads!” she shouted as Austin reached over to slap them on.
And then Damian grabbed her wrist.“Get back.”
She twisted to look at him in annoyance. “I am breathing for him. Until Austin hurries his ass up—”
He grabbed her shoulders and picked her up to set her behind him. “Fucking stop doing that!” she yelled and punched his arms. Everyone’s ability to pick her up any time they wanted to was entirely unfair.
But Austin was stepping away as well, his hands reaching behind him for a holstered gun she hadn’t clocked earlier.
“What?” she asked again, more quietly, stepping out from behind Damian where he’d placed her.
The men were watching something underneath the dressing on the patient’s chest surge—like a wandering hand.
“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” Austin said. “Reinforcements!” he shouted to the room at large, although Andi had no idea what or who was listening.
“Back! Back! Back!” Damian said, and she knew from his gestures he meant her. Grimalkin’s ears flattened as he joined their line, hissing at the bed.
Andi swallowed. What…on…Earth… She realized then that the phrase Unearthly was right.
The dressing peeled aside and a small hand—a goddamned hand, although it had talons on the ends of each finger—reached out.
Another well-armed stranger ran into the room, as what was in the man’s stomach pulled itself out, bracing itself against his pelvis as it wriggled free.
Why aren’t you shooting? she wanted to scream—because what she was watching was so improbable it was bending her mind. The child-sized creature was all the shades of blue, covered in mucus; its face was missing eyes, and she could count its teeth at twenty feet. But below it, their friend was still—somehow—alive, or so the monitor claimed.
“Take it when you’ve got it,” Damian commanded as a dark-skinned man came in. He was wearing an armature across both shoulders to brace a silver weapon, and he had a sight-piece folded out in front of one eye.
“Charging!”
There was a high-pitched whine, and Austin looked warily at his comrade. “If you so much as singe a hair on my brother, Jamison,” he warned, his voice low.
The man with the gun nodded. “Understood. Firing!”
For a long second, nothing happened. And then what she could only describe as a beam of blindingly red light flashed out of the gun—turning it for a moment into almost a light saber—and it clipped the creature.
The monster screamed and jumped up to the ceiling, revealing a long tail behind it—how was it possible that entire thing was inside her patient?—then it started skittering toward them like a spider, making horrible sounds. She dropped down, covering her ears and shrieking as the thing’s mouth opened and a tongue as long as its tail dropped out, lashing toward the man with the weapon. Austin started emptying his handgun into it, while Damian shouted, “Jamison!” and bringing out a gun of his own.
“Charging!” the other man shouted back, and again that high-pitched whine. Andi fell to her knees—all the better to hide from whatever the fuck was happening, anything to get away from her rising sense of terror.
And then the patient’s monitor began beeping ominously. A small geyser of red started shooting out of the hole the monster’d left behind—a severed artery. The monster was swiping at them, swinging from the ceiling like some demented spider-creature, leaping from bookcase to bookcase—its tail and tongue swirling around it. They tried to take shots without hitting one another in the enclosed space, waiting for the laser beam weapon to charge, and then it ran across the ceiling into a hall.
“Goddammit!” Damian cursed.
“Stay human!” Austin shouted. The three of them chased after it, followed closely by the cat.
“Grimalkin!” Damian shouted, but his castle’s avatar was already on it, rearranging the house’s alignment so the hallway they were in connected with an empty garage—an almost smooth cube of a place, with no furniture to hide behind. The lurker ran in—dodging shots from Austin’s gun—snaking up and down the wall. Damian lined up beside Jamison, ready to protect the man from the monster as he readied his weapon. “Why’s it taking so long?” Damian demanded.
“I’m charged, but I’ve gotta wait for the barrel to cool down so the metal won’t deform.”