Cities of the Red Night

'Why is he naked?' he snapped at the attendants.

'He was like that when they picked him up, Doctor.'

'Well, they might have put something on him....' He turned back to the attendants. 'What are you standing there for? Get out! And you, Nurse, what are you gawking at? Order a bed in isolation.'

His temper was always evil when he ran over like this, but right after a shot he could be nice in a dead, fishy way. The doctor turned back to the boy on the bed. His duty as a physician was clear—Hippocrates pointing sternly to the sheet. 'Well, I suppose I have to look at the little naked beast.' He folded the sheet down to the boy's knees. The boy had an erection. The genitals and areas adjacent were bright red like a red bikini.

The doctor leaped back as he would from a striking snake, but he was too late. A gob of semen hit the back of his hand right on the skinned knuckles. He wiped it off with an exclamation of disgust. He recalled later that he felt a slight tingling sensation which he didn't notice at the time, being that disgusted with the human body—he wondered why he had chosen the medical profession. And this dirty child was delaying his fix. 'You filthy little beast!' he snapped. The boy sniggered. The doctor pulled the sheet up to the boy's chin.

He was washing his hands when the nurse came in with a stretcher table and an orderly to take the boy to isolation. The doctor sniffed. 'My God, what's that smell? ... I don't know what this is, Nurse, but it's rather disgusting. He seems to be in some state of sexual delirium. He also seems to be giving off a horrible odor. Order the broad spectrum ... cortisone, of course—it may be an allergic condition red-haired animals are especially liable to—and the usual antibiotics....If the sexual condition continues, do not hesitate to administer morphine.' The doctor gasped and clasped a handkerchief in front of his mouth and nose. 'Get it out of here!' (He always referred to a patient as 'the disease.') 'Do you have a typhoid bed in isolation?' he asked.

'Not now we don't.'

'Well it can't stay here.'

He had barely settled in bed after his fix when the phone rang. It was the super. 'Seems we have an epidemic on our hands, Pierson. All staff report back to the hospital immediately.'

Could it be that dirty little boy? he thought as he dressed and picked up his satchel and walked to the hospital. He saw there was a police line around the entrance.

'Oh, yes, Doctor, Right over there for your mask.'

'I'll help you put it on, Doctor.' A brisk young girl in some sort of uniform rubber her tits against him in a most offensive manner. And before she got the mask on, he smelled it and he knew: it was that dirty little boy.

Inside was a scene from Dante: stretchers side by side in the corridors, sperm all over the sheets, the walls and the floor.

'Be careful, Doctor.' A garrulous old nurse caught his arm in time. 'Just put one foot solidly in front of the other, Doctor, that's right....It's terrible, Doctor, the older patients are dying like flies.'

'I don't want to hear any generalities, Nurse ... take me to my ward.'

'Well, Doctor, you can take the northeast wing if you want—right here.'

Every sort of copulation was going on in front of him, every disgusting thing they could think of. Some of them had pillow-cases and towels wrapped around each other's necks in some kind of awful contest. As these crazed patients seemed in danger of strangulation (and here the doctor almost slipped in shit), he ordered attendants to restrain them, but no attendants were available. 'We'll start with morphine and a curare derivative, Nurse.'

'Sorry, Doctor, the morphine stocks are exhausted on the older patients. They go into the most awful spasms at the end, Doctor.'

The doctor turned pale