Victoria saw her own bus pull up to the stop moments after Luke's roared away into the suburban traffic. With a sigh, she boarded the vehicle labeled with VIA on the front. The broad doors at the front had opened wide and seemed to engulf the young girl. She slumped down in a seat. She noted the bus was about half full but ti was the quickest route from her high school. “I sure hope today doesn’t get any weirder.” She muttered to herself.

“Oh, don’t say that.” A little old lady said in a clipped accent. Victoria looked at her and saw a grandmotherly old woman who couldn’t have been more than one hundred pounds wet and less than eighty years old.

“What?”She said without thinking.

“Don’t ever say things like it could never be worse, get weirder or anything like that.” She said with a smile that filled her face making her dark eyes squint. “The universe takes it as a challenge.” The old woman said sweetly. “Oh, this is my stop.”

Looking up Victoria recognized they were pulling into the Methodist hospital bus stop. “This is where I’m going too,” Victoria said as she stood up just as the bus came to a stop then offered the old woman her hand to help her up.

“Oh thank you, dearie.” The old woman stood the shuffled off the bus. Victoria sighed then followed behind her. She stopped after she got off the bus and moved to the side looking up at the squat brick and concrete edifice. She hated hospitals and always had. She turned toward the door of Texsan and found that the old woman was already gone.

She was fast. Victoria thought as she made her way into the lobby and toward the elevators. The halls smelled of cleaner, unwashed bodies and about a dozen different stale perfumes and underneath it all Victoria thought she detected the faint stench of death. She reluctantly qued up at the elevators behind a crowd of interns and nurses. She tried not to pay to much attention to them but found snippets of conversation that stuck out. “Did you see…It was so gross”

“I know and all that gunk that….” She waited for the next elevator as she felt herself turning green and growing nauseous. She shuddered.

Finally, she was in an elevator none of the other passengers seemed interested in conversing or sharing stories or snippets of strange bodily functions, puss or another excrement.

All too soon she found herself outside the door to her father's room. She pushed it open quietly so she wouldn’t disturb him not that she was likely to. As she opened the door she heard the machines as they made noise. Behind the curtain he lay in the bed hooked up to a ventilator. She sighed as she moved and took his hand. “Dad, I need you.” She said as she leaned down and lay her head on his arm and started to cry. “I don’t know if I can do this without you.: She said with a sniff. She started to talk as she lay there head on his arm desperately clutching his hand. She let the words tumble out of her like water from a waterfall, heedless as to who might hear.

There came a small scratching sound above her the sounds a rat's claws make on laminate. Scritch, scritch. She heard she looked around her eyes red and puffy from crying. “What? Who?” she said.

“Tssss” She heard from near the head of the bed. She strained her eyes and saw what looked to be a light shadow or nimbus of darkness around her father's head. “You, you can’t seeee me.” It hissed as she looked to the side quickly

“Who are you?”Victoria said angrily peering into the formless mass.

“I’m your doom if you don't’ leave young hunter.” The small tinny voice said in reply. “This is my prey and you will be too. Go.” The voice demanded.

At first, Victoria drew back afraid. Her father was the prey? Did that mean? “You attacked my father?” The young girl felt her self flush, felt her skin grow hot as anger flashed underneath the surface.

“You heard me, cretin, this one is mine and you will die too if you don't’ go away,” It hissed.

Victoria drew back then without thinking she lunged at the spot she had thought she heard to voice come from. She felt her hand graze something that was almost substantial to her. “Come here.” She growled in frustrated anger. She felt something lash out at her and saw the skin on the back of her hand tear. The pain came as a sudden shock to her as she cried out in pain. Instinctively she grasped the object small body before her and jerked it toward her. The creature was heavier than she thought and it began squealing. She looked up at her father and saw a gouge on his head blood running down his face. The creature smacked onto the ground and she began pummeling it with her left hand as she held it down with her right,

The fight was brief, violent and bloody. Victoria found herself in the floor gasping for breath her hands and forearms scratched and bloody. “What the hell is this.” She heard an older female say from behind her. The girl looked up at the nurse that was framed in the doorway. And pointed and started to blubber.

“I was sitting with my dad. And this thing popped up and attacked me.” She started to go into full blown hysterics as she pointed at the rat like corpse that lay on the ground in a pool of blood and fur.

The nurse came in and looked at it. The creature must have stretched three feet from tip to disgusting tail and weighed in over twenty pounds. The nurse poked it then rushed into the bathroom, Victoria heard a retching sound coming from inside the small room then the toilet flushed. After the nurse recovered things seemed to go quickly. Her mother was called for permission to provide services to her. “What about my dad.” She said insistently as they started to wheel her from the room down to the emergency room.

“He’s going to be alright child. You done killed that rat good.” The nurse said as she finished wrapping dressings around her arms in preparation to take her from the ward. “Your daddies going to be alright.” Victoria had insisted on watching as they checked him out. He was still in a coma, the scratches on his head were shallow. “Head wounds bleed a lot. No harm done.” The dark-skinned woman said with a smile. “Now you go one with Theresa and they will get you all taken care of. I just need to run a few tests.”

Instead of pleasing with the universe “why me.” Victoria started to think the old woman was right about challenging the universe, instead she tanked the nurses and asked to let her know what it was that had attacked them.

She was surprised when they rushed her through the ER. The staff tried to be gentle with the wash on her arms and hands. The physician she saw was a nurse practitioner. “Man this could be bad. They gointa run test, see if we need to give you rabies shots.”

“Shots?” The injured girl asked a touch of fear in her voice as she looked at the woman. She was tall, nearly six feet. Short reddish hair and a thick waist. He scrubs were rumpled as if they had been slept in.

“Maybe.” She said as she examined the gouges on her hands. “They said a rat did this?” She asked without really stopping to pay attention.

“Yeah, something like it. I don’t know it was big.” She said measuring it out with her hands. The Nurse practitioner ignored her as she expertly cleaned out the wounds then evaluated them. Another nurse would take pictures of the wounds as they went along finally bandaging the injuries.

“Now, I do need to give you a couple of shots. The first is for tetanus, the second is an antibiotic.” Victoria's mouth went dry then she closed her eyes and rolled up her sleeve with her bandaged hands. “Uh, no shots go in the other end.”She said with an evil chuckle.

Moments later she was released from the hospital. Sighing in relief she left for home, but wisely refrained from asking who her day could get any worse. Once she got home she could say goodbye to the worst birthday ever. All while considering the flashing notification block in her lower right vision.