Why a Wolf Cries by Julie Steimle (interesting books to read .TXT) 📕

“Emergency contact?” the EMT asked, digging through the wallet, saying it to him, possibly to keep him conscious still.

“Call the number on the card with the Seven,” Rick murmured.

But they did not seem to hear him. No one replied to him at least.

“There are three contact numbers here in his wallet,” someone new said.

Rick tried to recall the three numbers. One was Henry, back in Middleton Village. The other was his father. The last was his friend Andrew Cartwright. Any one of them would do.

“Get a nurse to call them.”

“Get his blood tested and typed. He needs blood ASAP.”

The conversations were now jumbling. His head was feeling light. He was starting to lose consciousness again. Rick moaned.

“We’ve got a card here listing his allergies.”

“Good. What are they? And is he an organ donor?”

“He can’t be. His ID says he has a blood disease, rare type.”

“What type?”

“It has some unfamiliar name with O. Antigen DEA 1.1 positive? Do you know it?”

“What’s this?” The doctor lifted out the white card with the golden 7 on it. The words written there said: Contact in an Emergency.

The phone number and website number were there, easy to read.

Rick blinked out again, yet overheard the rest in a distant echo as his ears were now ringing.

“Should we do this one instead?”

“Just choose one until we can get somebody.”

“Ok.”

They pushed Rick through doors, immediately putting him through blood tests. Already they were setting him up for saline solution.

“What is this? No silver? Is this for real?” Finally, they got to the allergies.

“Apparently. This is on his emergency health contact card in his wallet, right next to his ID.”

“No garlic. No honey. No silver or silver derivatives.”

“Any others?”

“Aconite.” The man laughed “But that’s a poisonous plant.”

“I guess extremely poisonous for him.

“Alright.”

“Excuse me,” a new voice spoke up. “Did you say he had allergies to garlic, honey, and silver—and aconite?”

“Yes.”

“Does he have a blood condition?”

“Yes.”

“Toxic?”

“The tests haven’t come back yet. They can’t find the phlebotomist. What? What do you assume?”

“Uh, have you ever heard of partial lycanthropic toxemia?”

“Partial what?”

“Lycanthropic toxemia.”

“Are you saying he’s got lycanthrope? As in werewolfism?”

“So you have heard of it.”

The doctor huffed. “Get out. I don’t why you think it’s funny to say such things at time like this. This man was mauled.”

“Actually,” someone interjected. “The report says he was in a car accident.”

“No way.” The doctor gasped incredulously. “Look at these. This is clearly an animal attack—by the looks of it, cougar. Look at the space and between the gashes, and the length of them. He was nearly peeled like a banana. He’s lucky to be alive.”

“Well, this man was found in auto wreck,” the other doctor said. “Unless he was keeping a cougar in the back seat, I dare say, this was some wreck.”

“Or a set up,” the lycanthrope believer interjected.

“Get out Wade.”

Rick blearily realized now that he was actually laying on his belly as they were cleaning up his wounds to stich him back together. The pain was also less.

“Where’s the phlebotomist? We need that blood.”

“Uh… Doctor? Another phlebotomist was here and did the work. But you gotta see this. His blood? It’s insane.”

“What?”

“A visiting phlebotomist who volunteered to help out thinks our patient can take O blood, but his own blood is not healthy. I’ve never seen anything like it.”  

“Damn…” The doctor’s breathing grew heavy, sounding blown away by whatever it was he was seeing. “How is this possible?”

“I don’t know. But the volunteer phlebotomist said his leukocytes and antigens are not quite… human.”

“Is that volunteer a phlebotomist or lab tech?”

“More than, I think.”

“Does he have a parasite?” someone else said.

“I don’t know what it is. But perhaps he is a carrier of something. His card did say his blood was toxic and to be treated with extreme caution.”

“Alright. Let’s finish cleaning him and stitch him up. Get some O blood. Let’s hope his body does not reject it. And someone call his father’s number. It says here they are an exact match in blood type.”

“We’ve been trying, but we can’t get hold of him. He doesn’t pick up.”

He was probably hunting, Rick thought. It felt like night now—or near to it. He couldn’t move to transform for the life of him anyway. Rick decided it was a blessing. The last thing they needed was to have wolf suddenly on the operating table.

As they gave him more sedative for surgery, Rick came in and out of consciousness. He overheard pieces of the conversations between them as they stitched up his back.

Someone said, “Where are our phlebotomists?”

“Our main one has gone home sick. The new hires are off shift.”

“What? Well, who drew his blood? And who is dealing with this man’s blood toxicology?”

“His name is Bruchenhaus. He’s a licensed doctor from…”

Rick slipped out of consciousness again wondering… Was Audry’s father a phlebotomist or her brother?

Chapter Eight

Doug had never seen blood like it. The hospital was franticly looking for their phlebotomists, but could not get one when needed the most. Their main one had eaten something off and gotten sick earlier that day. And the last thing the hospital needed was a sick phlebotomist handling the blood. They had other technicians, of course, but they were all busy when the doctors called for the blood of an accident victim to be drawn, tested and typed. And since he had actually drawn Maris’s blood due to the lack of available hands, the nurses decided to use him for this one as well.

They were, in fact, ‘thrilled’ that Maris’s mother was a nurse and her father was ‘phlebotomist’—at least initially they were sarcastically thrilled. No one liked their toes getting stepped upon in their territory. However, their sarcasm died when they needed him—especially when they realized he was actually a skilled doctor who focused on lab work yet merely started in phlebotomy. It was just a family joke when they said he was a phlebotomist, mostly to keep him humble.

Doug wanted to get a better look at the victim. He barely had a peek at the guy who had been lying on the gurney at the time when he drew the blood. But now Doug had to see who was carrying this extremely peculiar, toxic blood and was somehow still walking the earth. But unfortunately, after surgery, the patient had been taken to a quarantine unit, as he rightly should be. But that made the patient off limits.

The funny thing was, no one would say who the patient was. They just called him ‘the car accident’—though others were calling him Mr. Frankenstein. He had lots of other scars, apparently.

It was late. Most people had gone home to bed. Evening staff was on. Visiting hours were over, but Jean was not leaving Maris’s side. And Doug could not leave them. So, being available, the hospital decided to use Doug around the establishment long after he had volunteered. They were short hands, including in the lab, they said. Someone in the lab had also gotten sick, they explained.

As others were napping and there was a lull in the work, Doug inched toward the quarantined room where the peculiar patient was resting from his operation. He just wanted a peek. That’s all. He had to see who this man was.

“Ah, Mr. Bruchenhaus. There you are,” said a doctor as he was just five feet from the room.

Doug quickly turned, forcing a blush from his face. “Hello Doctor.” He embarrassingly forgot the man’s name. “Uh, do you need anything?”

“Actually, I was looking for you.” The doctor smiled with lines of exhaustion. He was a middle-aged man, the sort who would have gone home by now. Younger ones were now running the ER. He smiled at Doug and said, “We’ve been having a small debate here about our mystery patient, and someone reminded me that you were the tech who drew the blood. Am I correct?”

Doug nodded.

“You also helped in the lab, am I not mistaken?”

“Yes.” Doug felt a little nervous. He didn’t ‘help’ in the lab. He did the work. The lab tech was in the bathroom at the time.

“Would you mind looking at that blood again?” The doctor adjusted his glasses, but Doug noticed a keen interest in the doctor’s eyes. They too must have found that patient out of the ordinary.

He nodded.

“Actually…” Doug said as he led the way back toward the lab. “I was interested myself. I’ve never seen blood like that in a human before.”

“Yes…” the doctor replied as he took care with his words. “I heard you made that sort of remark. Uh, you make it sound like he’s an alien from another planet.”

Laughing, Doug shook his head. “Ah, no. I’m sorry. My sister is an animal rescue worker, and I’ve seen blood samples from animals she has cared for once. And… Well, his blood reminded me of the samples from different canine species.”

“Canine?” The doctor drew a breath.

“Yeah,” nodding, Doug replied as they entered the lab where there were other doctors, a two nurses, and lab techs already inside. Or rather—one lab technician who wanted to go home. She was tired and it had been a long day. She was making the case that no one needed her, and she smiled at Doug as if she expected him to take over in the lab once she was gone.

All the doctors turned and smiled at Doug as if he were their resident celebrity. And damn, that’s when he realized he had been spotted.

“Dr. Brokehouse. Would you please perform another blood test on our patient?” said one.

Hearing them use his nom de plume, Doug leaned back. “Can he even spare blood?”

They exchanged looks and shook heads.

“No, but we researched your work Dr. Brokehouse, and we were fascinated on your study of blood pathology—”

“Shhhh!” Doug peeked around, especially out the door. “Even my wife does not know about that. It’s why I use a penname.”

“Does your sister know?” asked one doctor.

Doug nodded blushing. “Yes. I included her in some of my research. It has taken a long time for me to do that study. She got me samples from the wild.”

“From wild animals, you mean,” one doctor interjected. Apparently they all had read his work. They each had the look of someone who wanted autographs.

Nodding, Doug sighed. “Yes. I was comparing blood samples of various species. I wanted to study the evolution of blood and of blood diseases.”

“Can we ask your motivation?”

Shrugging, Doug did not think it mattered that much. “In my work in becoming a lab tech, I noticed rare cases of blood types among human beings which did not fit the AB O paradigm. All my superiors said to ignore them as they did not fit the Overton window. However, I did not think it ethical to ignore outliers. Rather, I wanted to know why those outliers existed. So, basically, I wanted to research the outliers. Was it contamination, or was it more than that?”

“Which has made you one of the foremost experts in blood pathology.”

Doug vigorously shook his head, truly feeling embarrassed. “I would not say that.”

But one doctor smiled. “No. But we will. I’ve read