Alfie

God, none of this is important, and I need to get this out, I need to.

There are only snatches now where I'm awake enough to speak, and I think it's only going to get worse, so...

And in approximately four days, when my supply of this blood runs out, I'm going to either die or become something else.

I'm getting ahead of myself.

I need to start at the beginning so you understand what happened.

And the beginning, for me, was the people with the torn out throats.

The first one I saw was the girl on the gurney.

The Girl on the Gurney came in at half ten on a Saturday night.

Saturday night's a bad time to get hurt because everyone's getting hurt on a Saturday night.

That night, there was this guy down the hall with a rake in his foot.

A woman who had cracked her head open on the curb.

Two lads getting their lips stitched in triage.

Of the too few people who were actually working that night, only three of us knew the hospital well.

Me, Tracy and Hayley, the junior doctor.

When the girl on the gurney came in, I was on hour 16 of a 12-hour shift with lead bones and eyes so wide, I was beginning to wonder if I'd ever be able to get them to shut again.

I barely thought anything of it.

The ragged gash on her neck was unusual, but not surprising.

I didn't have the energy for surprise.

When we transferred her over from the ambulance gurney onto another, she was cold to the touch, limbs loose, head lolling over the wad of gauze taped to her neck.

Terry, the ambulance guy I've known for years, told me they thought it was a mugging, that she'd been drinking out with her friends and got separated from them, and when they found her, her throat was torn out and she was barely conscious.