Shotgun Sorceress

Chapter twenty-two

Fever

I awoke with a start in the hellement; Cooper’s doppelganger was gone. How long had I been in there? There was no way to tell. I rolled out of bed and opened the red portal door.

When I came to in the restraint chair, I immediately knew something was wrong. My vision was blurry. My head was throbbing. Fever chills were washing through me. I tasted bile in the back of my throat, and my guts were in an uproar.

Pal? I thought. Pal, are you here?

“Oh, thank goodness you’re back. You had me worried sick,” he replied. “You were gone all night.”

I feel like crap. Can you untie me, please? I blinked my eyes to try to clear my vision; Pal came into focus, hovering beside me.

“Certainly.” Pal undid the straps binding my head and jaws, then released my arms and freed my legs.

I pulled out my mouthpiece and got up slowly, my stiff joints and strained muscles bitching at me with every inch. My stomach was cramping, acidic. The floor felt like it was tilted at a weird angle. The furniture seemed to be undulating, and suddenly I realized I was seeing small, indistinct creatures scuttling in the periphery of my vision.

“I’m seeing the fey,” I slurred.

“Oh dear.” Pal put a clawed paw to my forehead. “You’re burning up.”

I sat back down on the chair. “I thought the hepatitis wouldn’t set in for weeks.”

“This doesn’t look like hepatitis to me. Admittedly I am not especially familiar with the disease, but you don’t seem to be jaundiced. A different blood-borne infection that the Warlock’s fetish couldn’t detect is the likely culprit.”

“Where are the guys?”

“The Warlock and Cooper came back about an hour after you went into your hellement—Cooper was apparently given a clean bill of health by the doctor—but an airman came to get them soon after. Evidently they were needed to help repel an attack by the meat puppets. Unfortunately I have no idea when they are likely to return.”

“Well, damn.” I licked my lips; my tongue felt like it was covered in paste. I could see the fey more clearly now: the weird little creatures were all over the place. A vermilion-feathered starfish was napping on my knee. “Could you grab me a bottle of water?”

“Certainly.” Pal turned away to get into my backpack.

One of the kittens mewed, attracting my attention. In my fevered vision, it no longer looked much like a kitten: it was a rangy creature of utter blackness with huge mirrorlike eyes and a gaping mouth of long, curving teeth. Its head reminded me more of a deep-sea angler-fish than anything truly feline.

I watched, horrified, as it pounced on a fey that looked like a fleshy daisy with tentacle legs. The “kitten” devoured the fey in two savage bites.

“Hey, Pal?” My voice shook.

“Yes?” He handed me the water bottle.

“I just found out what Sara’s kitties eat—they’re fey predators.”

“Oh dear. Well, given their reaction to the exorcism magic, we can be certain that they’re some type of devil.”

I looked around the room. “Also we’re apparently surrounded by paradimensional cat poop.”

“I must say I’m pleased that I do not share your enhanced vision.” He put his paw against my forehead again as I took a long drink from the bottle. “I think you should go see the doctor.”

“No argument here.”

Pal helped me up out of the restraint chair, and I leaned on him as we made our way down the hall to the elevators. It was probably five in the morning, and the dorm lobby was utterly quiet. A new girl was napping in the chair behind the counter. Once we got outside, the heat made me queasier and dizzy and I tripped on the curb in the early morning darkness. Pal caught me, sang himself a bit bigger, and carried me the rest of the way to the clinic.

The broad entry hall of the Student Health Center was completely lined with military cots on which meat puppets lay blindfolded and earplugged, their arms and legs tied down. IV drips carrying nutrition and drugs were taped into every arm, and catheter bags hung beneath the cots. At the end of the hall, I saw Sara sitting in a folding chair beside one puppet, holding his hand, her eyes wet with tears.

A petite young woman in green scrubs goggled at Pal and came hurrying over. Her name tag read Arleen Barnes, RN. “Can I help you?”

Pal, put me down.

“I’m sick, got some kind of fever,” I told the nurse as Pal gently set me on the floor. I nodded toward Sara. “What’s that about?”

She followed my gaze, and her face fell. “Oh. Yes. That’s Sara’s husband, Bob. He was taken from us about six months ago, and she hasn’t been right since.”

“So you’re just keeping all these bodies alive in the hopes you can get their souls back somehow?”

Nurse Barnes nodded. “Yes. That’s our job, and we’re doing it the very best we can.” She pulled a digital ear thermometer out of her breast pocket.

“Why the blindfolds and earplugs?” I asked. “Are they sensitive to light and sound?”

“No. We found out the hard way that Miko can use them to spy on us.” The nurse looked uncomfortable at the thought. “Lean down a little so I can get your temperature.”

I did as she asked. The tip of the thermometer was cold and uncomfortable in my ear canal.

“Goodness, you do have a fever,” she said. “It’s 103.5. Come with me, we need to get your temperature down.”

Pal sang himself mastiff-size, and he supported me as I followed the nurse back to a cramped beige examining room that was absolutely filled with mushroomlike fey with tiny butterfly wings. At the nurse’s request, I sat down on the vinyl-upholstered exam table. There wasn’t a sheet of paper covering it; I supposed they’d run out some time ago.

The nurse took hold of my hands, frowning at the angry red marks the straps had left on my wrists. “What’s this all about?”

“I … had a seizure. My friends tied me down to keep me from hurting myself.” I got the feeling that the nurse was already plenty freaked out by Pal, and she didn’t need to know that I was possessed by a devil.

“Do you have seizures often?” She held open my eyelids one by one and shined a penlight in my eyes. “And what’s this thing?” She frowned at my ocularis.

“It’s a makeshift artificial eye,” I replied.

“Did you start getting the seizures after you lost your eye?”

“Yes.” It wasn’t a lie.

She turned away to furiously write notes on a clipboard, looking up only to ask for my name and Social Security number, both of which I gave her.

“What about your rash?” she asked, pen poised above the clipboard.

“Rash?” I looked down at my arms, and sure enough, my skin was covered in itchy-looking red bumps. “Wow. I didn’t even see that. This is new.”

“Have you been exposed to the blood of one of the Taken?” she asked.

I guessed that the medical personnel had been discouraged from using terms like “zombie” to describe Miko’s puppets. “Yes, a couple of them bled all over me yesterday. And … I’ve been recently exposed to hepatitis, but I don’t know if I’ve actually got the disease yet or not.”

The nurse hmmed and wrote more notes. “Well, a lot of people around here have that as well. Dr. Ottaway should be up by now … let me go see if she can take a look at you.” She set the clipboard down, went to a nearby cupboard, and pulled down a big bottle of ibuprofen 800s.

“Do you have any bleeding problems? Are you allergic to Advil or aspirin or tetracycline antibiotics? And are you pregnant?” she asked.

“Nope, nope, and nope.”

“Good.” She filled a paper cup with water from the tiny sink, and handed me one of the ibuprofen horse pills and the cup. “Take this … it should help bring your fever down. We’ll give you more to take back to the dorm with you.”

“Thanks.” I swallowed the medicine.

The nurse left, and a few minutes later she returned with a tired but pleasant-looking woman in a long white doctor’s coat. Her thick graying brown hair was parted in the middle and pulled back from her face; the style reminded me of Frida Kahlo, but wasn’t as severe. I guessed the doctor was just a few years older than Cooper.

She gave a start when she saw Pal crouched attentively on the floor beside me. “Holy smokes, what’s that thing?”

“This is Pal,” I replied. “He’s cool.”

“But what is he?”

I racked my fever-addled brain for a believable response. “He’s a … spider weasel … bear … from … Japan. They’re the hot new pets there these days.”

It had finally occurred to me that although he was a spider in general form and a ferret in coloration, there was something distinctly bearish about his teeth, broad skull, and the texture of his fur.

“I’ll have to take your word for that.” She straightened up, seemed to recover her professional demeanor, and stuck out her hand. “I’m Christine Ottaway, M.D. And you are”—she glanced at the clipboard—“Jessie Shimmer?”

I took her hand and shook it. Her grip was strong, and she had a guitar player’s calluses on her fingertips. “Yes. Thanks for seeing me on such short notice.”

“Honey, it’s all short notice around here.” She laughed. “I’m lucky if I get a solid five hours of shut-eye. But let’s not make this about me. So. You’ve got a pretty bad fever, and a rash, and you’ve had some blood contamination. Any new headaches and body pains? Upset stomach?”

I nodded. “All that, yeah.”

She stepped up beside the table and started feeling the lymph nodes in my neck and under my jaw. “You’ve definitely got some swelling in here.”

She pulled a wooden tongue depressor and a penlight out of her breast pocket. “Open your mouth, stick your tongue out, and say ‘Aaah.’ ”

I did as she asked.

“Okay, you can close now.” She turned away and tossed the depressor into the trash. “I think, my dear, that you’ve got the local superbug: Ehrlichia mutans.”

I suddenly felt a bit queasier. “What’s that?”

“It’s a bacterium in the family Anaplasmataceae.” She went to the sanitizer dispenser on the wall, pumped some clear alcohol gel into her palm, and vigorously rubbed her hands together. “Normally it’s transmitted by tick bites, and normally symptoms don’t develop until a few weeks after exposure, but things aren’t exactly normal around here, are they? Our local mutation is a speedy little bugger. It mostly causes the flulike, rashy ick you’re feeling now, but I’ve been seeing it destroy some people’s kidneys. To my regret we haven’t had much luck at keeping people alive on dialysis around here, so aggressive treatment from the start is our best option. Knock it out before it knocks you out.”

I nodded. “Sounds good to me.”

Dr. Ottaway turned to the nurse. “Please bring me a bottle of doxycycline, the usual strength, and a bottle of ibuprofen 200s.”

The nurse left to fetch the antibiotic, and the doctor pulled a small notepad out of one of her front coat pockets and started writing down some directions. “I’m going to give you a bottle of hundred-milligram doxycycline tablets. I want you to go straight to the cafeteria, have some food, and take three of the doxy pills. You’ve already had eight hundred milligrams of ibuprofen, and you’re likely to make yourself sick if you take all this on an empty stomach. And then tonight when you get ready for bed, I want you to take two more doxy pills, and then one in the morning and one at night until the bottle’s empty. I’m also going to give you a bottle of ibuprofen, but do not take more for at least eight hours … after that, take two every four to six hours as you need them for fever.”

She paused. “Also, try to stay out of the sun as much as possible—both these drugs can make your skin burn very easily. Do you understand everything I’ve told you?”

I nodded. “I think so.”

“Good.” She tore the instructions off her notepad and handed them to me. “If you see any blood in your urine, come back in here immediately.”

“I will. Thank you.”

Nurse Barnes returned with my medication in a small brown paper bag, and the good doctor bade me good-bye and sent me on my way.