Jenny

"I'M scared."

"Me too."

"I wet my pants again."

"How about we sing a song?" Jenny asked the children.

She was also pretty frazzled. Since Lanz left, there hadn't been any other monsters trying to attack them, but a few minutes ago a pack of them had run down the hallway. A large pack, maybe thirty or forty. Jenny knew that on an average day there were over a hundred and fifty patients in the hospital. If you figured maybe eighty people on staff, plus a few dozen visitors, there could be almost three hundred of those things roaming around.

While Jenny had no desire to draw their attention, some quiet singing was probably less harmful than four young boys wailing uncontrollably.

"Does everyone know Old MacDonald?" she asked.

The boys nodded.

"Okay, we'll start with chicks. And let's use our indoor voices. Are you all ready? Old MacDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-Ohhhh. And on his farm he had some chicks..."

The kids fell in with the E-I-Os. Jenny kept a strained smile on her face and sang through the cluck-clucks, and the moo-moos with the cow, and the oink-oinks with the pig, and just as she began the fourth verse she forgot what the next animal was. A horse? A duck? A dog?

"...and on that farm he had a dog, E-I-E-I-Ohhhh. With a--"

"SCCRRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!"

Jenny whipped around and stared, open-mouthed, at the creature at the door.

Lanz had returned.

He was cramming himself into the door's broken window. But rather than getting stuck this time, his whole body slid through, flopping onto the floor of the closet.

The children screamed in horror. Jenny didn't think, she reacted. In preparation for an attack, she'd filled every syringe on the crash cart, ten in all.

She was going to stop the fucker's heart.

She grabbed the first two needles, one in each hand, gripping them in her fists with her thumbs on the plungers. Succinylcholine, a powerful paralytic. Etomidate, an anesthetic. Both went into Lanz's back, and as Jenny injected him she noticed, with a combination of horror and revulsion, that he was missing his left arm. Two clamps dangled from the fleshy stump, their stainless steel handles clack-clacking against the tile floor.

Lanz screeched again, his remaining hand locking around Jenny's ankle. She left the needles sticking in his back and reached behind her, managing to snag two more just as he yanked Jenny off her feet.

Fighting the urge to pull away, Jenny sat forward, stabbing him with two more overdoses. Lidocaine and diazapam.

Lanz opened his horrible mouth, his teeth locking onto Jenny's foot, beginning to chew. She tugged her foot away, pulling free of her shoe, and then scrambled back toward the children.

She'd injected Lanz with enough drugs to put a track team into a coma. But that didn't seem to matter. Spitting out her gym shoe, Lanz began to slither toward her, eyes wide, mouth wide, his talons outstretched and his massacred face shuddering in what looked like ecstasy.