NOT OUR KIND

by Graham Watkins

Realizing that the small black man he encounters in the hospital emergency room is physically very unusual, Dr. Ben Hurst finds himself both curious and to a degree sympathetic to the man’s plight, and he takes steps to prevent the man from being taken to jail by the policeman who has arrested him on vague charges. But he is too busy, too distracted, to pursue the matter very far. At the same time, his girlfriend, psychiatrist Dr. Beth Peterson, is dealing with an enigma of her own, a patient from Chiapas, Mexico, an Indian who does not speak either English or Spanish very well but who is convinced that he has seen a “spook,” as he calls it, at the hospital and must be allowed to kill it before it can escape. It does not take the pair long to realize that the two patients are connected, that the “spook” the Indian wants to kill is the small black man.

But such mysteries are driven from their minds completely when one of their closest friends, a nurse at the same hospital, is attacked and severely injured. She is brought to the ER in critical condition, a large puncture wound in her abdomen and such extreme loss of blood that no one can understand why she isn’t already dead. Ben tries to save her but he fails, she dies on the table.

But even as they return to work and mourn their friend, they cannot know how profoundly the strange connection between the Indian and the small black man will affect their lives in the days to come…