Mr. Fields snored—the snoring wasn't as loud as the yelling had been, but it was nonetheless impressive. Dayne grinned and glanced up at the monitor to check his heart rate. The green line that belonged to him wiggled across the screen in a perfect sinus rhythm, the heartbeat as normal as her own. The machine recorded him at eighteen breaths per minute, and she chuckled, marking down the number. She could double-check that from anywhere in the unit, simply by counting the number of times in a minute that she heard a musical whistle followed by a phlegmy rumble and punctuated with one sharp, short snort. Mr. Fields was to snoring what Paganini had been to the violin, or Rachmaninoff to the piano.
She looked up from the desk to study him through the glass. He looked fine, and quite content; he was curled on his side and sleeping soundly. She noted his condition, then frowned. When she'd looked up, she'd seen something—or rather, several somethings—that her mind hadn't registered at first.
She'd seen a quick flash of something that was the most astonishing shade of blue—and she had noted movement at the foot of Mr. Fields' bed. She looked up again, slowly.
She frowned. Whatever had been blue was gone. However, the movement that had caught her attention remained quite visible. It appeared that someone was popping popcorn under Mr. Fields' blanket. Portions of the blanket at the foot of the bed bounced up and dropped down. Up and down. Up and down. Nothing came loose, because not even an act of Congress was going to get that blanket off the bed . . . but something was trying very hard.
Mary Deiner was charting next to her. Dayne nudged her with an elbow, and when Mary looked up, Dayne nodded in the direction of Fields' room.
Mary looked, and her mouth fell open and her eyes went round. "What in the world . . . ?"
"I don't know. I'm going to find out, though. Want to come with me?"
Mary nodded.
Both nurses dropped to a squat and used first the nursing station, then the half-wall below the glass in Mr. Fields' room for cover as they crept forward; they peeked through the glass into the room and watched, unmoving, as a little creature no more than two inches high, as transparent as if it had been molded of clear gelatin, scooted out from beneath the bedspread and dropped to the floor. Another of the little bouncing popcorn lumps stopped bouncing and wriggled to the edge of the bed, then slid out into view.
"He wasn't crazy," Dayne whispered.
"Or we are," Mary suggested.
"I want to catch one."
"Well, you're crazy, anyway," Mary told her. "The jury is still out on me."
"Help me—we have to see what they are."
"No we don't. We can just ignore them, and maybe they'll go away."
Dayne made a face at Mary. "I'm going to catch one."
"Fine. I'll be here to call for help if you run into trouble." The other two ICU nurses had stopped in front of the nurses' station and were staring at Dayne and Mary. One started to say something, but Mary put a finger to her lips and shook her head. They shrugged and quietly moved into the nurses' station to watch monitors and to chart.
Dayne crouched just behind the doorframe and held her breath and listened.
An entire conference of the little gelatin-men was going on no more than two feet away from her on the other side of the wall—three out of every four words were hair-raising profanity, and she was the subject of their ire. It became obvious that they didn't think much of her trick with the sheets.
She was willing to bet they were going to think a lot less of what she planned to do next.
She jumped around the corner, landing in the middle of the confab and grabbing two; something crunched under her left knee, and suddenly it was wet and sticky, and she realized some of the tiny monsters had been closer than she thought. The two she captured shrieked like miniature banshees, and the rest, excluding the one ground into her uniform—she guessed there had been fifteen or so in all—blinked out of existence.
She held both of the little monsters by the scruffs of their necks and stared at them . . . and through them. They didn't feel at all the way she'd expected—she was reminded of the time she'd picked up a blue indigo snake as a child, expecting it to be slimy, and found instead that it was cool and dry and very firm and even pleasant to the touch.
The two little monsters were almost hot to the touch, and their skin was as hard and dry as a beetle carapace, with the same feeling of brittleness. Dayne had expected the little monsters to look almost identical, and was startled that except for the fact both were clear, they could easily have belonged to completely different species. One had a long tail and curling horns and a flat face. Spikes grew from the second monster's back; it was tailless and had a long-muzzled, reptilian face with two shorter spikes growing out of the tip of its nose. Both creatures had one head, two arms, two legs, tiny feet and tiny claw-tipped hands; both were unbelievably ugly, and both screamed imprecations at her at the tops of their lungs. They didn't bite or scratch, however—they just yelled. She held them firmly but gently, and looked down at the stain on her knee where the third little monster had been. She felt badly about that.
"Hush," she told both screamers. They didn't obey.
She started to head out of the room, holding her squirming prizes in front of her, when a light flickered in the air and grew into a tiny shimmering ball. She stopped, the tiny monsters shut up, and all three of them watched as a piece of paper grew inside the little ball of light. Then the light died and the paper hung unsupported in midair.
Dayne carefully transferred the monster in her right hand to her left, and with her free hand took the paper.
Hell's Accounting Department Invoice
North Carolina Division of Bodies
Wastage and Destruction Sector
"We'll Have Our Pound Of Flesh"
INVOICE NO: 518KT34972-00000000014A
Bill To: Customer Status:
Dayne Kuttner oü New Customer
Earth Region 17945-8492-253 o Regular Client
Sisters of Hope Hospital o Account on Established Credit
Charlotte, North Carolina
Tracking Data: Invoice date: Invoice Processor:
15 BJRT H.D.14/346/97084 Ulkbilge
Customer Number:
NC1487245
UNIT
QTY DESCRIPTION PRICE AMOUNT
1 Gremlin 3rd Class, body, wasted and $43.25 $43.25
nonrecyclable—broken during
unwarranted attack
1 Replacement body, Gremlin 3rd Class $43.25 $43.25
1 Punitive damages for squishing one of $462.81 $462.81
God's little creatures
SUBTOTAL $549.31
SALES TAX $33.02
SHIPPING & HANDLING $18.00
TOTAL DUE $600.33
Cash or Hell-Card Only.
Bill due upon receipt—no grace period offered.
If you have any questions concerning this invoice, drop by our offices in Charlotte, Raleigh, Fayetteville, or our home office in Hell.
Pay promptly—interest is compounded daily on all overdue accounts.
Failure or refusal to pay is sufficient cause to change account status from new customer to regular client. For regular clients, we are always happy to open a Hell-Card ("Play Now, Pay Later") account.
Thank You for Your Business!
"Hell billed me?" she whispered.
The squished gremlin continued to stain the knee of her uniform, but another one appeared right in the spot where she'd landed. It swore at her, shook a tiny fist in her direction, and vanished into nothingness. She stood there for a moment, relieved that she hadn't actually killed the little creature, but at the same time furious about the bill. When at last she turned to go to the nurses' station, she caught another glimpse of that mysterious blue flash. When she turned to look, of course, nothing was there.
But something had been. She was certain of it.
At the nurses' station, Louise said, "Recovery just called with your pacemaker—he's been out of OR for an hour, but they said they're going to keep him for another hour. He isn't stabilizing the way they want." Dayne nodded. She put the bill from Hell down on the nurses' station and, with both howling, cursing gremlins still clutched firmly in one hand, she paged Dr. Batskold.
When he called, she was brusque. "I found out what Mr. Fields' problem was. I need you to come to ICU right away."
"I'm doing my charts in Medical Records. Can it wait?"
"No."
She heard an exasperated sigh, then she heard Dr. Batskold mutter, "They can never handle anything by themselves." One of the other doctors was evidently in the room, catching up on charts, too.
Dayne smiled grimly. She'd caught the little devils, but she wasn't going to try to figure out how to get rid of them. For another doctor she might have made the effort . . . but not for Batskold. For once, she regretted that she wasn't working the night shift; this would have been just thing to wake him up over at three A.M.
For that matter, she was more than a little curious to see how Dr. Batskold was going to include gremlins in his diagnosis. She'd bet Gremlin Infestation wasn't a discharge diagnosis that Medicare, Medicaid, or Blue Cross/Blue Shield would be willing to pay for.
Batskold made it to the unit fast enough; Dayne uncharitably thought that he was probably hoping for another code, so that he could be the mighty hero fending off Death again.
She said, "Fields wasn't hallucinating."
"Don't say that you called me up here to tell me that. He was hallucinating. He claimed he was seeing little clear men—"
Dayne held up the gremlins, which had stopped screaming and were trying to wriggle free, and said, "I caught two of them. There were quite a few more."
Batskold backed up and stared at the creatures in her hands and paled. "Jesus," he whispered, "what are they?"
"Gremlins. From Hell."
His eyes narrowed. "Are they real, or is this some prank?"
"They're real, all right."
He held out a hand. "Let me see."
Dayne shrugged, and handed one to him. "Hang on to it."
"Let me see the other one, too."
She handed him the second gremlin as well.
"God, they're ugly." He held both of them right up to his face. One of them peed on him, a thin stream of clear water.
He yelled and smashed it onto the nurses' station, where it crunched, then slammed the other one down beside it. Wiping his hands on his pants, he said, "Little bastards."
Dayne yelped, "Don't smash them! They're expensive—"
He pointed a finger at her and glared. "You mind your own business. It's all your fault the damned things are here."
New gremlins, identical to the old ones, reappeared next to their smashed bodies. Dr. Batskold glanced down, yelped and smashed them again. Dayne turned and walked away. She'd tried to tell him, but he wasn't listening to her any better than he ever did.
Certainly no more than five minutes later, as she was helping Mary pull one of her people up in bed, Batskold fell silent.
"Keep your arms crossed over your chest, Mrs. Williams," Dayne told the patient. "You don't have to help us."
"A tiny little thing like you isn't going to be able to move me." Mrs. Williams was pushing the two hundred fifty pound mark, and most times, she would have been right.
Dayne shrugged, though. "I lift weights," she said. "I'm a lot stronger than I look." She and Mary grabbed the draw sheet and counted to three—on three, they turned and stepped, and Mrs. Williams found herself again up at the top of the bed, where she belonged.
Mary looked toward the nurses' station. "It's awfully quiet out—"
"Nine hundred and fifty-eight thousand dollars?!" Dr. Batskold bellowed. "I'm not going to pay that! Jeeeee-zus Christ!" Dayne peeked out to find him standing right where he'd been before, back when he'd been busy smashing gremlins. He held a sheet of paper in his hand that looked a lot like the one she'd received, but with more sheets appended. A ring of gremlins stood around his feet, staring up at him. His face was red, his usually fashionable gray hair stuck out in all directions, and his eyes were about to bulge from his face.
Dayne shook her head. "Dr. Batskold just got his bill." She tried hard not to smile, but the corners of her mouth twitched up in spite of her intentions. She turned her back to the window so that he wouldn't see her laughing if he looked her way.
Mary said, "He's leaving." An instant later, she added, "Oh, my God. The gremlins are going with him."
Dayne couldn't resist. She turned to take a peek, and sure enough, Dr. Batskold, stomping furiously out of the ICU, was followed by a glistening train of gremlins that ranged from an inch to four or five inches tall—all of which trailed after him, mimicking every move he made.
All she could think was that gremlins couldn't have happened to a more deserving person.