Just after Luke’s bus had roared away into the San Antonio’s suburban traffic. The bus I needed for the hospital had pulled up I burst into a run and just barely made it onto the VIA bus. It had been a long day and just looking at the bus I could almost see it as some strange kind of monster. The windows its eyes and its broad doors a mouth that swallowed me as I got on.

I move about halfway back and slumped down into the hard unyielding seat. The bus was only about halfway full. “I sure hope today doesn’t get any weirder,” I muttered to myself.

“Oh, don’t say that.” A little old lady said in a clipped accent. I 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?” I asked without thinking.

“Don’t ever say things like; it could never be worse, get weirder, or anything like that.” The kindly old lady 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 in her grandmotherly voice. Before I could reply to her she spoke again. “Oh, this is my stop.” The old woman said then hopped to her feet spryly and was out the door of the bus before I could ask her what she meant. I sat back and found my mind going back to the blue screen I kept wanting to review it over and over to figure out what it was the message really meant. It all kept coming back to one question. Why me?

Looking up I recognized we were pulling into the Methodist hospital bus stop. I shuffled off the bus and sighed then followed behind a crowd of people going through the double doors. I stopped and moved to the side looking up at the squat brick and concrete edifice. I hated hospitals, I always had. I turned back toward the door of Texsan and found that the crowd was already gone.

I made my 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 I could have sworn I detected the faint stench of death. I reluctantly qued up at the elevators behind a crowd of interns and nurses, trying 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….” I Had to wait for the next elevator, just the thought of what they had been talking about had me turning green and nauseous. I shuddered.

Thankfully the other passengers didn’t seem to be interested in conversing or sharing stories or snippets of strange bodily functions, puss, or another excrement. I shuddered at the thought, then closed my eyes and took deep breaths. God, I hated hospitals.

As the elevator doors opened I was thinking to myself how much this has to prove I love my father. The whole place gave me the creeps all too soon I found myself outside of his door. The whole hospital was an institutional white. It was supposed to be psychologically neutral and convey a sense of sterility and cleanliness. One of those things I learned about after the first therapist, stupid fairy.

The hinges were well oiled, without a squeak the door opened. I knew it wouldn’t disturb him but I really wished it would. I knew he sat behind the curtain surrounded by machines that made all sorts of noises. When the curtain parted I saw him laying there under the white blanket, he had been intubated for the respirator. Sighing I took his hand. I found myself wanting to climb up into the bed and lay down with him like I had done when I was a kid.

He had always known what to say to make things right. I pulled a chair up next to the bed and put the side down, then lay my head down on the bed and his arm. Then I started to tell him everything. My dad was the kind of person that took everything in stride. My life becoming some kind of weird video game wouldn’t phase him in th least I bet. Well, it probably would but he would tell me something that wouldn’t make it seem like the end of the world. “Dad, I need you,” I said and clutched at his hand.

My dad had been hurt in some kind of accident on a job site. He was a foreman for a construction company. A couple of weeks ago something had happened, no one was quite sure what. All I had heard was he had gone to check up on a site they were demolishing and had radioed in for an ambulance then had lost contact with the dispatcher. Now here he was covered in small scratches and bites, unconscious.

A noise made itself known to me a scritch scratching like small clawed feet on laminate. I heard it again in the room it seemed to echo off the walls around me. First I looked around the room on the floor and other hard surfaces. Then I looked under the bed. I was kind of surprised I could see anything with how puffy and red my eyes were from crying. “Who’s there?” I asked.

“Tssss.” I heard a sound that almost sounds like evil laughter. It sounded like it was near the head of the bed. There appeared to be a shadow or nimbus of darkness around my father's head. “You, you can’t see me!” The voice hissed my eyes moved to the side and I saw the notification blinking in its slow way.

“Who are you?” I demanded angrily. My general reaction to being afraid was to get angry, one of the reasons I had been sent to meditation. That and my mom didn’t want me to learn martial arts. She was afraid I might get in a fight. Like when some creepy possible monster was hissing at me in a hospital over my father's unconscious body.

“I’m your doom young hunter. Leave me to feed.” The small tinny voice said in reply. “This is my prey now go. Or you will feed my young. Now go!” I roared.

I drew back afraid at first. My father, was this things, prey? “You attacked my father?” I asked as heat flashed across my skin and I grew angrier.

“You heard me. Cretin. This one is mine and you will die if you don’t go away!” it hissed.

I started to draw back in confusion, then I thought to myself; there is no way some shadowed shrimp is going to make me back off. Then without thinking I lunged at the spot I thought the voice had been coming from. My hand made contact with something that was almost substantial. “Get over here,” I growled in frustrated anger. I felt something lash out at me and saw the skin on the back of my hand tear there was blood splashed over the blanket.

The pain came as a sudden shock and it caused me to cry out. My other hand shot out and grasped the small fury body that was also highlighted in my own blood. I jerked it to me, it was heavier than I thought it could be, as my hand grasped it, it began to squeal. I slammed the thing down on the ground opening my palm as it hit. And crushing the small body on the linoleum floor. It lay still and I held it down with my left hand and then I started raining down blows on the stupid thing. It had hurt my father.

The fight was brief, violent, and bloody. I lay on the floor gasping for breath my hands and forearms scratched and bloody. “What the hell is this.” I heard an older female say from behind me. I 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.” I started to go into full blown hysterics as I 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. My mother was called for permission to provide services to me, the nurse, doctor, and office administrators were quite vehement about it. “What about my dad,” I said insistently as they started to wheel me from the room down to the emergency room.

“He’s going to be alright, child. You done killed that rat good.” Another nurse said as she cleaned the scratches around my arms in preparation to have an examination. “Your daddies going to be alright.” I had tried to insist on watching as they checked him out. He was still out cold, the scratches on his head were shallow. “Head wounds bleed a lot. No harm is done.” The dark-skinned woman said with a smile. “Now you go on with Theresa and they will get you all taken care of. I just need to run a few tests.”

I started to think about what the old woman on the bus had said and that she might have been right about challenging the universe. instead, I thanked the nurses and begged for them to tell me what it was that had attacked us.

I was surprised when they rushed me through the ER. The staff tried to be gentle with the wash on my arms and hands. The nurse practitioner though, really needed to work on her bedside manner. “Man this could be bad. They going to run tests, see if we need to give you rabies shots.”

“Shots?” I asked, I hated the touch of fear in my voice, as I 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 my 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.” I said measuring it out with my hands. The Nurse practitioner ignored me 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.” My mouth went dry then I closed my eyes and rolled up my sleeve with newly bandaged hands. “Uh, no shots go in the other end.” She said with an evil chuckle.

Moments later I was released from the hospital. “Oh, happy birthday!” she said as a final parting shot. “You should probably go home and get some rest.” Sighing in relief I left the hospital for home. Wisely, I refrained from asking how my day could get any worse.

Even as I was thinking it I was examining the flashing icon in my lower left-hand field of vision. Once I got home, I told myself and had the time I was going to look at the message again and figure out as much as I could about this system.