Bite Shift

10

It began with my intestines; that feeling that comes when your bowels are being twisted and knotted. Something was blocking them or ripping at my insides. I dropped to my knees and curled around the hand that tried to protect the precious organs in my abdomen. I couldn't take it, it had to stop. Something was trying to tear its way out of me. I couldn't move or breath.

GET UP, KATE! I was screaming in my head to move. I knew I had to move but, the pain was paralyzing. I would have laid there all day, crying and moaning, if the skin on my back didn't start to scream in agony.

I'm on fire. Someone is burning my back; branding me with a hot poker.

The sharp stabs of pain in my stomach were muted by the fire ants marching across my back. I tried to clear my thoughts with images of my daughters and the momentary relief of the brain fog brought the information I needed.

Get out of the sun, Kate. It is burning you. Your back is in the sunlight.

Every vampire I had ever seen in a movie slammed into my consciousness instantaneously. I was certain I would burst into flames soon and all of this would be for nothing. I tested my strength with one hand on the wood of the porch and did a push up. The second hand repeated the motion. Once on all fours, I started to crawl. Every movement made the man in my small intestine rip at my gut walls harder and harder. Every muscle shook. It was taking too long. I had to speed up.

God damn it, Kate, move!!

The thought pushed me and my hands and knees worked as fast as they could. I screamed out loud as I crossed the doorway and slammed the door behind me. The fire on my back eased and the pain in my stomach returned with a vengeance. The terrible realization that the pain was spreading descended on me. Agony slid up my throat and gagged me but, that pain was nothing compared to what was happening in my feet. I looked down and expected to see them sitting in boiling water; expected bright red or purple toes. Instead, I saw white. My feet were the color of a freshly bleached sheet. That was the assessment piece I needed to put it all together.

My tissues are dying.

Every piece of my inside body was dying. The abdominal pain was a necrotic bowel. Every patient I had seen, who felt a part of their intestine die from an obstruction, or some other issue, had described the extreme agony. Unfortunately, I was losing my entire gastrointestinal system at once, because I was dying. My toes were no longer getting oxygen because my vessels were done pushing blood, because I was dying. I frantically placed my hand over my chest, then put two fingers on my jugular vein.

Nothing. My heart stopped...... not figuratively. It actually stopped beating.

What if Rhys was wrong? What if he is insane and I am not changing... I am dying?

The spirally downward thinking was abruptly ended before it could continue. The screams rose up my aching throat and out of my mouth. The knife in my heart twisted and I shot up to my hands and knees again just in time for the scream in my mouth to be replaced by vomit. I watched gallons of sludge rush out of me and onto the carpet. The emesis was bright red at first. You didn't have to be a nurse to recognize the blood all over the beautiful carpet. It wasn't long before the bright red stream pouring out of me turned black. If you'd seen the color, you'd ask if I had drunk WD-40 anytime soon but a nurse could tell you what it was. It was rotten tissue; a dead organ or two.

No one can survive without organs. I have to call 911.

Rhys's voice slammed into my brain and interrupted my thoughts. Remember your daughters.

Tears streamed down my face as the fetid tide slowed and stopped its mad dash to get out of me. I crawled towards the bedroom, trying to get away from the site of my dead anatomy on the same carpet that I had just admired hours ago. I made it to the hallway before my legs locked up and I dropped, face first to the floor. My left cheek rested on the soft carpet and I stared at the white hallway baseboard. My legs felt like someone had poured cement into each one and left me to become the statue they had wanted for their garden. A coldness spread from my feet and out to each finger. As I lost feeling in my lower limbs, the cement poured itself from shoulder to hand. I was frozen in place.