Late nights in the emergency room are usually the most stressful. Though they are slow, when something happens it is often the most drastic or strange. This night was no exception, as Dr. Lisa Barron looked over the quiet emergency room and felt a sense of sudden urgency. A faraway sound, growing closer - ambulance sirens. And voices raised in the lobby. She gulped down her coffee and hurried out of the break room to the triage room, where one of the duty nurses was bringing in a young girl. The girl lay on her stomach, bloody gashes deep in her upper back where the nurse had cut away her concert T-shirt, the lettering unreadable, not that Dr. Barron kept up with what rock group young people were listening to these days. She was more of a country music fan anyway.

The nurse shook his head disbelievingly, and held up a bloodstained poster toward Dr. Barron for her to look at. "This was stapled to her back," he said. His short sandy hair was starting to recede from his forehead, and he wore a paper mask over his trim beard. His badge said his name was Mark Chernofski, RN. The poster that he held looked to be out of someone's color inkjet printer, about twelve inches by twenty in size. It had an old west look, like a country album cover, Dr. Barron thought it might be one. "Wanted," it said, "Dead or undead." Then it had a picture of a good-looking white-haired man, his expression caught in an unattractive grimace. At the bottom it said "Disarmed, Undangerous" and then "For crimes against inhumanity."

Dr. Barron shook her head. She quickly treated the wounds, cleaning and disinfecting them then adding quick stitches so they would heal without scars. She gave the girl a prescription for painkillers and an antibiotic, and asked her when her last tetanus shot had been. When the girl did not know, she gave her the shot immediately. Staples?

To their dismay, several other patients turned up with the same poster stapled to them. Dr. Barron felt her anger growing at whoever was pulling this cruel stunt. She spoke to the police officer stationed in the hospital, and found out that several complaints had been filed about these posters as well. People spoke of being attacked by individuals, gangs, or not seeing their attackers, and finding themselves stapled to these posters. "If this is a publicity stunt for some new album..." she fumed aloud.

Chernofski shook his head. "I don't think so," he said. "It seems more like ... well... gang stuff? Maybe a dare?" There was something horrific about the whole situation, he thought. The strangeness of it, the disregard for the victims, the darker-than-black yet unsophisticated humor, the eerie look of the man in the picture, the fear in his violet eyes. Chernofski rolled one of the posters up and put it in his locker, for safe-keeping.

By an hour after dawn, the attacks seemed to have stopped. The police had been questioning every victim, but they had so many different descriptions of the attackers that they were completely stymied. Dr. Barron collapsed on a cot gratefully, exhausted. When she woke up, she promised herself as she slipped into sleep, she would do something about this. Then dreams slipped over her and she went gratefully into unconsciousness.