A tall, thin, blond woman was lying on the operating table. Two pints of blood had been transfused into her already. A nurse had just attached a third pint of whole blood to a catheter that fed into a large blood vessel in her thigh.

She had been hit by a car. A policeman had explained the accident to the ER staff, and the nurse told Dr. Schweinkopf the details.

Witnesses told the police that the woman wearing a jogging suit had run at full speed out into morning rush hour traffic. It was the act of a crazy person. She caused a series of collisions as cars braked and slid into one another. She might have been fleeing something or somebody. She had made it across three lanes of a major street, but then got hit by a Japanese sports car going at least fifty miles per hour. She had no identification on her. The police wanted to talk to her if possible.

The doctor could see that she had suffered ma*sive injuries. She had a deep gash in the center of her face right next to her nose. He looked at the set of x-rays. Her left collarbone and upper left arm bone, the humerus, were shattered. She had six broken ribs. Scariest of all, she had two fractured cervical vertebrae. Her right leg was broken. She had dozens of cuts on her arm and shoulder, some still had little pieces of windshield gla*s stuck in them. Oddly, her cuts were hardly bleeding.

The doctor checked her vital signs. Her vital signs had stabilized, but the chart of her vital signs when she was admitted to the ER was disturbing. Her body temperature and blood pressure had been impossibly low. The doctor was irritated; obviously the blood pressure monitoring device had not been working correctly. Nobody could have blood pressure that low and still be alive.

He looked at her cranial x-rays. There was also a ma*sive wound to the back of her head. Something had pierced the back of the woman’s skull and entered her brain quite deeply. From the looks of the wound to her face, it seemed as if something might have completed transfixed the womans’ head. But that was impossible. Such a wound would have killed any person.

A neurosurgeon was on his way to the hospital. The woman should be dead, but she was still breathing and her heart was puming at over thirty beats per minute. Soon the doctor would have a colleague available to verify the medical miracle that lay on the operating table in front of him. There was no possible explanation for her survival from such terrible injuries.

He checked the lab’s a**lysis of the blood that had been taken from her when she was admitted. There were no drugs of alcohol. Then he saw it – the key to the mystery. The woman’s blood had a super-abundance of free pluripotent stem cells.

Dr. Schweinkopf had recently read about the phenomenon of free floating stem cells in a medical journal. The journal had reported that free floating stem cells occurred in the blood of persons afflicted by third stage vampirism.

He had turned away from the patient to read the blood report. He heard a rustling noise behind him, and spun quickly around.

The blond woman was sitting up on the operating table, her eyes were open, and she was looking at him.