Gods and Monsters

IV

St Bartholomew's Hospital, London

The rhythmic beeping of the life support was really starting to annoy Peggy. The doctors claimed they had never seen anything like this before. Despite losing a lot of blood, Nick should have been responding well to the treatment the hospital provided. He was hooked up to a million and one machines, and being pumped with as many drugs as possible, but his condition was not improving. If anything, it was getting worse. Peggy had always hated hospitals. She was thankful she hadn't had to visit them too many times. They all had that horrible chemical smell which made her feel sick. In her eyes, this was the last place you would want to die.

Peggy stood outside the room like she had been asked, praying to a God she didn't believe in. Dr Darby gently tapped Peggy on the shoulder. Her blonde hair had been neatly tied up, and her overalls replaced by a more professional lab coat. Her full lips were now unhidden by the surgical mask she had been wearing, and despite the grey-blue colour of her eyes, they still appeared pronounced and vibrant. She looked clean and pretty. You wouldn't have guessed that this was a person who cut up dead bodies for a living.

"Hello Detective, how are you doing?" her voice was sympathetic as she looked through the glass at Nick, checking all the important medical notes which Peggy didn't really understand.

"Peachy," Peggy replied sarcastically. She quickly realised how rude she sounded and corrected herself, "I guess I'm doing about as well as expected; it's not exactly every day your partner gets bitten by a dead woman."

"We're doing our best to work out exactly what happened. We got the CCTV back and our theory was correct. The video shows a woman, Marilyn Clinton, entering the train at 6:58 am. Almost instantly she collapses on the floor, vomiting up bile and eventually blood. By 7:01 am, she's 'dead'," Dr Darby said, making little air quotation marks with her hands.

"What do you mean, 'dead'?" Peggy replied with her own visual punctuation.

"What I mean is that after another passenger laid his jacket over her, you can see the body begin to twitch. One of the passengers became curious, approached the body, pulled back the jacket, and she leapt up at him."

"And then she moves onto the others? God, this case is so fucked up," Peggy took a deep breath, trying to compose herself. "So if she took everyone out, what took her down?"

"Marilyn could obviously only focus on one passenger at a time. A number of passengers tried different methods of stopping her: assaulting her with anything from water bottles to umbrellas. They had little effect at the time, but they eventually took their toll and a few minutes after they were all dead, she collapsed due to exhaustion."

"So what caused her and the other passengers to wake up after being seemingly dead?"

"Well, it's difficult to say. From what we can tell, there was something in her body that killed her before 'reanimating' her with this increased strength and endurance, not to mention the bloodlust."

"What's this I 'ear about bloodlust?" Mike said as he entered the room.

"Dr Darby was just explaining that whatever was in Marilyn Clinton both killed, then reanimated her, just with some added side effects," Peggy replied.

"So the bodies were really dead when we arrived?"

"Yes, when we analysed the victims, we could quickly tell that they were most certainly dead. Whatever infected these passengers, reanimated them with greater endurance, although with a lower level of cognitive function," Dr Darby explained.

"So we need to work out where this infection came from and whether anyone else has been infected. If they have, we need to stop them before it becomes an epidemic. Check her place of work, I'll get some uniforms to speak to her friends — see if anyone knows anything," Peggy instructed. If this wasn't stopped quickly, it could be a city-wide catastrophe.