Page 2 of Widow

The machines suddenly began beeping like crazy as the woman thrashed on the exam table, trying to break free. She went from having non-existent vitals to sending the machines haywire with erratic readings.

There was an increase in activity as security and more personnel rushed into the trauma room.There wasn't much I could do with a neck wound.

I was led to an empty exam room in a daze of disbelief. I had only been attacked once before, knocked on my ass by a man higher than a kite. That was child's play compared to a bite to the neck.

The bite was deep and left me feeling dizzy. Human bite wounds were the worst. I'd be lucky if I didn't get an infection.

The door opened, and one of the on-call residents came in, looking pale. I couldn't blame him. What we had all just witnessed in that trauma room was a once-in-a-career type of situation.

He snapped on a pair of gloves and took over holding the gauze to my neck. A nurse joined him, and he removed the dressing. His inhale of breath was loud enough to make me flinch.

"Jesus, Lia."

"How bad is it, Roni? No need to sugarcoat it. Will I be stuck wearing turtlenecks for the rest of my life?" I let out a pained laugh and gripped the edge of the exam table.

I hated turtlenecks.

My neck was throbbing, more than it should be from a bite to the neck. It almost felt like there was a foreign object inside of it.

"It looks like... Teresa, have a look at this." He was wiping my neck with an antiseptic wipe. His lips were drawn tightly in a line. "Doesn't it look like..."

Teresa looked around his arm, and her eyes widened before settling on me. She opened a few cabinets and dug around. She returned with a mirror and held it up so I could see for myself.

My breath caught in my throat. Now that the area was clean, it was evident it wasn't a bite from a mouth. My heart rate went through the roof, and I'm sure if I was hooked to monitors, I would have been tachycardic.

"What the actual fuck?" I reached up and probed the area that looked an awful lot like two wounds from fangs.

My hands were shaking as I lowered them to my lap and let them clean the puncture holes and cover them in gauze. Teresa left the room to grab me a new scrub top since mine had blood and fluids from wound care on it.

"You'll need to take antibiotics. Once we get the chem panel back, we'll know if there are any diseases we need to worry about." Roni took his gloves off. "Are you feeling okay?"

I nodded. I was more shocked than anything. It wasn't unheard of that people filed their teeth to resemble those of vampires. Los Angeles was a crazy city. There was never a dull moment in the ER.

It's why I chose to become an emergency room doctor.

The door opened, and Teresa returned with a blue scrub top clutched in her hand. Teresa was tough as nails, so her demeanor didn't ease the dread that had slowly crept into my body.

"The patient has died." She dropped the top on the table next to me. She took my hand. "They figured out what she was saying. Repeating, actually."

I gripped her hand. I didn't like the way this evening had taken an unexpectedly morbid turn. One minute I was about to sink my teeth into deliciousness; the next, a charred woman was sinking her fangs into my neck.

Now I knew how the ham sandwich felt.

The room was silent, besides the faint sounds of the bustling ER on the other side of the closed exam room door. I felt like I was outside my body, looking down at the three of us. The rest of the room blurred, and the only thing I could see was us.

"She kept repeating, 'find her, find her'." She cleared her throat. "Then she let out a loud screech, and a large spider crawled from her mouth. It moved so fast we couldn't kill it."

My eyes went wide, and I brought my hand to my neck.

"The other doctors think she was on something. Possibly burned herself doing drugs. That a spider crawled into her mouth while she was crawling in that parking lot." Teresa was thinking out loud. It wasn't helping. At. All.

Whatever had happened in that trauma room wasn't natural. I had a bite that looked an awful lot like a spider bite on the side of my neck, a spider had crawled from a woman's mouth, and now that woman was dead.

Little did I know it was much more than just a bite.

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