Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
WE WARNED YOU.
That text message hits everyone’s phones as I’m walking through the maternity ward, guided by an AI robot that requires my physical presence for an issue involving a confusing set of conflicting inputs.
I roll my eyes at the terrorist threat, confident that the ScaryDarkAlienVampires will head off any issues that the humans might try to drum up.
I know they aren’t infallible, I get that they are people and people are imperfect, but it’s beyond comprehension that they wouldn’t be able to deal with a small group of hacker terrorists trying to…
I don’t know, free humanity from the oppression of no longer being under the weight of wealth distribution?
I’m not sure what their problem with the current situation really is, and as long as they never win a single victory and steal this new way of life away, I don’t actually care.
I’ve never been in a hospital besides the work I’ve been doing for the past few days, and I haven’t ever been in a maternity ward, so all of my experience comes from the media, and we all know Hollywood is a terrible schoolhouse, but this is way more happy and peaceful than I expected considering how painful childbirth is.
I’ve been scrubbed down, and I’m wearing sterile coveralls and a mask, but the entire ward is weirdly open.
Everyone has their own rooms, if they want them, but they all start in a community room, where the midwives administer localized pain management and encourage the people having babies to make friends with each other.
It’s loud with chatter and laughter, and there’s a whole group of people in labor helping two women push their babies out.
Those two women are hyping each other up and holding hands as they push.
It’s disgusting. The birth, I mean. Not the community.
Apparently birth is really messy, who knew?
Not this gay man, that’s for damn sure. I’m going to have to make sure Bee understands that I will not be present for the birth of any of her future children whether she’s the one pushing or not.
I just don’t feel like that’s something I want to participate in even if this looks like a chill place to hang out.
The robot leads me to a room with a note on the door asking for staff not to knock.
The note gives me permission to enter, so I open the room, letting the robot in and following it.
In a bassinet next to the comfortable-looking bed, there’s a newborn fussing like it needs some attention, and on the bed is a woman with both of her arms full of two infants nursing simultaneously.
I have to stifle a laugh at the disparity between the size of her huge boobs and the babies tiny heads.
It’s probably not right to laugh about that when the mother in question looks utterly exhausted.
“Hello. I’m Ollie. I’m the janitor and the robot in charge of cleaning your room asked me to come here to speak with you.” I keep myself in the doorway so that the mother doesn’t feel like I’m intruding on her space.
The woman’s panda eyes hold a wariness that I find conflicting.
Am I the bad guy, or is she just wary because I’ve interrupted her feeding time?
I mean, I don’t care about her boobs being out, but she might be uncomfortable with a man being present while she’s taking care of her babies, and that matters.
“I told the robot not to bother with our rooms because I don’t want it disturbing my babies. We don’t need a cleaning, we need sleep,” she explains softly with a hard frown to communicate her displeasure.
The robot sends a message to my PDA, “Bio-chemical contamination detected. Bacterial contamination detected. Viral contamination detected. Atmospheric contamination detected. Threat level ten, relocation recommended.”
That’s a ten out of twelve, and I take the robot’s recommendations seriously.
“I understand your concerns, but this little worker bee is detecting contaminations in your room that threaten you and your babies’ health and safety. We have to relocate you to a clean room. I’ll page a nurse to come help you.”
The woman curses me under her breath. “We are fine in this room.”
One would expect a mother to hear that her babies are in danger and want to get them out of danger ASAP.
I’m not even parent material, but even I have my priorities in line about moving these babies with or without their mother’s consent.
I send an urgent message to the nursing station with a copy of the robot’s report and explain to the woman.
“No, you aren’t. You will either vacate on your own volition or you will be removed.
Either way, the babies are out of here.”
An unearthly growl erupts from her. It’s not a noise a human can make, and I involuntarily take a step back. “Leave,” she demands in a voice full of the sounds of grating bone. It pulls the same visceral reaction that nails on a chalkboard pulls out of me.
The baby in the bassinet wails just like a human baby would, and the something’s-not-right-about-her woman cringes away from the sound. The babies on her boobs are completely undisturbed. Actually?—
I look closer as I move to the bassinet. The babies on the woman’s chest aren’t even moving. They look like dolls. Realistic, disturbing dolls.
As I reach the bassinet, the wailing baby screams louder, and the woman practically throws herself off the bed, dropping the dolls and clutching her head. I grab the baby, yelling at the robot, “Get Lora!”
The baby’s scream quiets for long enough for the woman to straighten out of her crouch, growling again in that bone-grinding noise, and poising like she’s about to launch herself at me.
The baby screams again, and she bares her teeth at me as the bones under her skin start to shift. I back up, retreating to the door. Lora appears with a clap of thunder, and the woman shifts all her focus to Lora, launching herself at him.
“Run!” Lora yells at me, and I do as I’m told, running out with the baby and straight to a ScaryDarkAlienVampire nurse who carefully takes the baby from me and herds everyone in the ward away from the sounds of a fight.
I stare at the door, shaking with fear for all of us. “What the fuck is happening?” I ask the nurse.
The nurse presses their lips together in a straight line. “Don’t panic the birthing parents,” they instruct me quietly.
I snap my mouth closed and look around. The other people don’t look like they heard my question, which is good.
The nurse is right. We definitely don’t want to panic the people giving birth.
The next ten minutes pass with enough tension to give me a hernia just standing here.
The screeching, fight noises and crashing from the room continue until they come to a sudden stop.
I wait precisely two point five seconds before I jerk toward the room to check on Lora.
The nurse’s hand shoots out and stops me in my tracks, and I’m about to give them a what-for when my PDA pops up with a message from my robot. “Return to Lora.”
I show the nurse, they let me go, and I run to the room, barging into a disaster that will need both cleaning and fixing.
The woman is dead or faking it with a long metal spear pinning her to the wall.
She doesn’t really look all that human right now.
It looks like she shape-shifted, but it’s hard to explain.
It's like her bones shifted, but not like the shape of them did, just the underlying structure. It’s gruesome, to be honest, and I don’t think anyone really wants to know what would cause that kind of mutilation.
Lora rattles, pulling me out of my stare off with the womanish-thing on the wall. He’s on his knees, panting heavily, and bleeding from more places that I can count at the glance.
I run to him, stopping just short of touching him. “Do you need blood?” I demand, ready to give it all to him, if that’s what he needs.
“Take me to your domicile,” he rasps, spitting blood with every word.
“We’re literally at a hospital,” I say while doing as I’m told and using my teleportation device to take us both to my apartment.
Lora and I land in my living room, and he grabs my waist. “I ask for a donation, but then I will go into my until I heal. May I inhabit your closet for the duration of my ?”
“You are too big for me to move to my closet,” I remind him.
“I will move,” he rasps, coughing a glob of blood up onto my uniform.
I help him as much as possible to his feet and he limps to my bedroom closet, where he falls back to his knees and gets comfortable. He indicates he’s ready for my donation, so I carefully straddle his hips, squatting instead of sitting so that I don’t exacerbate any of his wounds.
“My gratitude,” Lora whispers, pulling me close. “Do you have nanites?” he asks from a breath away from my neck.
“Of course,” I assure him, since one of my jobs as a janitor is biological decontamination that requires microscopic nanites, and I’m required to carry medical nanites with me while in a hospital for emergent situations even though I’m not medical staff.
Lora rattles in approval and sets his mouth against my neck.
His vampiric fangs descend with a snap, biting into my jugular with amazing precision.
The worry and fear for Lora holds back the arousal that I got from this last time, but it’s still stupidly pleasurable rather than painful. Lora’s saliva could be bottled up…
A wave of lightheadedness hits me suddenly, but when I try to pull back from Lora, he holds me tighter.
“Baby, I’m beginning to feel…” I taper off as my vision starts to cloud around the edges.
Lora rattles possessively, crushing me to his chest for a few fraught seconds before all at once he goes completely limp, falling back to the floor in a lump, eyes wide open with a film like a nictitating membrane over them, mouth slack, fangs still hanging out of his mouth a good two inches.
I carefully pull out a sticky bandage thing with nanites instead of gauze and fumble with getting it unwrapped as I seep blood from my vein.
I eventually manage to get the nanites unwrapped and onto my puncture wounds, and then I give in to the faint I’ve been breathing through, falling onto Lora’s huge, hard body.