Another scream, pained this time. Bloodcurdling.

I leaned forward and ran like hell. Once I was through the hospital’s doors, I didn’t have to go much further. The sight that greeted me was so startling, so wrong, that I stopped dead in my tracks and stared for a fraction of a second. Long enough for my jaw to drop. For my stomach to turn.

A little girl, maybe six or seven, straddled the patient in the cot in the middle row, three beds in. It was a teenage boy with a cast on his right leg. A cast that seemed to have made it impossible for him to escape from the wraithlike child tearing into his neck and chest with her bloodstained fingernails. She was making an unearthly noise, a snarl mixed with a whine and a growl that no human vocal chords should ever have been capable of producing. A few patients huddled in the corners, and those who were more mobile stumbled toward the exit, panic blazing in their eyes. Several littered the floor and beds around the little girl’s current victim, spattered and smeared with blood. Apparently they’d tried to help. They’d failed.

I heard footsteps pounding the pavement behind me, knocking me out of my momentary horrified stupor. I leapt over the first cot, then hurtled the next, body slamming into the little girl. She flew back several feet, landing askew on the next cot over. Luckily, it was empty. The one beyond it, not so much, and that patient, though untouched by the rabid child, didn’t look like she’d be up and moving on her own any time soon. It was too late for the boy, he was bleeding out as I stood there, but if I could stop the little girl from hurting anyone else—from infecting anyone else, as sure of a death as tearing out their throats with those clawlike fingers—it wouldn’t be a complete fail in my book.

The girl scrabbled around until she was crouched on the cot on feet and hands. Blood was smeared all over her nightgown and clumped in her dirty blonde hair. Her eyes were so bloodshot it looked as though all the blood vessels in her eyeballs had burst. Maybe they had. I didn’t know the nitty-gritty of the disease’s symptoms.

The girl pulled back her lips, revealing a mishmash of adult and kid teeth, along with a couple gaps where her baby teeth were missing. She made that sound again, that bone-chilling, whiny snarl.

A shiver crawled up my spine.

And then she lunged at me.

I was so shocked by how quickly she could move that my deflection of her attack was slower than it should’ve been. But she was a sick little girl and she couldn’t possibly be this strong and how could I bring myself to hurt—

Her jagged fingernails caught on my cheek, gouging the side of my face in stops and starts. She grabbed a chunk of my hair in her impossibly strong grip and yanked my head to the side, exposing my neck. For the kill.