Prologue
This is suicide.
But the thought has been lost to me as I prick the flesh of this woman’s forearm and slip a catheter into her vein. She needs fluids, and her feet elevated, and immediate transport to the emergency department of the closest trauma center in the city. It doesn’t matter, though, because we are the first on the scene, and there are quite a few more patients just like her, all lying around dying slowly. Or quickly. I mean, really, I don’t know, I haven’t seen all of them. Just her, in her thirties, skinny, brunette. I think brunette because there is blood. A halo of it around her skull, sticking her hair all together in that ugly way after a shower, though, in this case, it’s a shower that’s clotting up into gelatinous goo. I’d like to think it’s holding everything together under that hair. Generally speaking, I guess I don’t know what to think.
I lift her feet up and scoot her a little, as little as I can, to prop them up against the low-lying wall cordoning off the quad. I keep my head low, near her torso, to shade me from whatever fragments might come flying, and use my flush syringe to push more saline into her bloodstream.
It’s my partner’s fault for running off without his personal jump bag, a small backpack where extra supplies are kept; but, with all the equipment he was carrying, there was hardly room for it next to his machismo. The fucker has a flak jacket and subsequently thinks he is invincible. I have a small bag full of fluids and needles and a strong desire to die.
Well, I certainly couldn’t call this a will to live.
“You’re going to be all right,” is what I have been saying for about three minutes straight. The gunfire isn’t close, so, really, I am not worried. Not really, I tell myself. I just need to focus on this patient and maybe if I feel confident, move on to the next. Though, my partner has been triaging like he’s in a war zone.
I guess he is.
She doesn’t say anything, just keeps breathing, which is important. So I don’t say anything anymore either, and keep pushing in the fluids, clamping off the line, pulling more from the bag into the syringe, releasing, and pushing all over again. It’s tedious and slow, and I feel so stupid every second that passes, but I can’t hang the bag anywhere higher than my shoulder, and I can’t lift my shoulder any higher than the wall we’re crouching behind. It’s two feet, maybe thirty inches. My back is aching.
The sirens don’t seem to ever quiet. They seem the same distance apart as they always were. They aren’t mine; I shut those off before my idiot of a cab-mate jumped out and ran into danger. We shouldn’t have even been close enough for him to do so, but the police in this city are a little backed-up, and there wasn’t a perimeter to speak of. It didn’t help that dispatch heard the story wrong, or got the story wrong, or felt homicidal this morning. And, honestly, I might be homicidal too, if I had their job.
Instead, I have mine, and I’ve decided I’d like to lose it today.
The sounds around us change, just slightly, and I strain to hear the absence of gunfire. Maybe the shooter has moved far enough away that the cacophony of emergency response is hiding their tracks. Or maybe they are dead. That would be a turn for the better. I am not going to risk peeking out to check, so I’ll just stay here and ache while I break the law and hope my patient is doing better.
“What the fuck are you doing?!” My brain, apparently angry, cries.
Holding my breath, pushing in fluids, closing my eyes, drawing up fluids.
“What in the fuck are you thinking?!”
I realize that isn’t the sound my brain makes tuned in on adrenaline. It’s the sound my superior makes when he is turned up to furious. My commanding officer is standing next to me, hands on hips, face the ruddy color of Oklahoma dirt. He’s probably hot to the touch.
“I was—” I start, but I don’t get far because his hand is wrapping around my elbow. With one sharp tug, he pulls me upright, sending a bolt of pain down my spine.
“You were handing off this patient to the closest paramedic, and then you were going to sit in my truck and wait for me there.”
As I stand, the ache spreads from my back to the area behind my knees. I wince, but I stay quiet and look around for someone to whom I can hand this bag of fluids. McGee is there, looking pretty stupid and lost, but he’s smart enough to recognize my needs and grabs the saline from me.
“I’ve got her,” he says, but he doesn’t look me in the eye. Because he knows; they all know. All twenty of them finally released to rescue the victims of the latest psychopath on campus. White shirts, blue and gold patches, a whole fleet of lifesaving emergency medics deployed to this sea of blood, their lower-trained partners trailing behind with cots and equipment.
Our commanding officer doesn’t mind meeting my eyes. He doesn’t mind staring me down; doesn’t mind showing how he really feels about me. He thinks I am some sort of Vulcan-Human hybrid but without the kind heart of Spock, or the brain. I finally let out that breath, a defeated sigh, and make my way out of the quad.
Back on the street that I came from, my truck is still flashing all of its lights, parked first in a line of many. I managed not to block egress—this is the only right thing I have done all day.
Over my shoulder, the scene is organized chaos, but you wouldn’t know. There is no sign of my partner or his flak jacket, and a big part of me hopes he got himself shot today.
I don’t have any feelings for him.
***
“What the fuck were you thinking?”
I have already been asked this, many more times than I bothered to count. I haven’t answered it once. I did so many things wrong today; outright breaking the law for one. I put an I.V. in a woman’s arm to help with all her bleeding—that halo of clotted blood. No one will tell me if she lived.
“What were you thinking?” My commander reiterates with a steely calm that has undoubtedly taken him years in the field to perfect. I could answer with the same calculated tone, an excellent impression, but I am wary, my habit tending toward digging myself deeper.
“The news media was all over that scene by the time I got there. Do you know if you were seen? If you were caught on camera? If you’re going to be making the evening news tonight?” He lets out an exasperated sigh. “I can’t let this one slide, Carlyle. This thing could be devastating. The whole department could be sued for your actions. You could be sued. And we can’t cover your ass on this! You were way out of line!” There is a steadily growing redness overcoming his face. His steel is warming to a scorching melting point.
“Are you going to tell me what you were thinking?” He hollers—it’s a threat more than a question. I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t, just acting, and it is going to get me fired. It could have gotten me killed. Or, worse, I could have missed the vein.
We’re back, the two of us—my captain and me—at headquarters, safely tucked into his tiny, white office. This is easily the most claustrophobic situation of my life. His whole presence fills the room with disdain and vanity.
I had waited out the bulk of the active shooter ordeal from inside his white supervisor’s SUV, watching the scene outside unfold as minutes ticked by. I counted each one, along with seven different ways my partner could have perished in the time I waited for the boss to return, each hypothetical death so much worse than the last. He eventually trounced back on the heels of the captain, not even a scrape on his arrogant hide. I couldn’t blame him for my actions, but I hated him anyway. I’d ran after him and ended up pumping some strange chick with isotonic solution. He’d turned me into a cancer, because how could I not act? Although to be honest, the malignancy started years ago—a resentment building at my lack of education—of being unable to afford an education. That creeping feeling that my brain has been wasting away, all these years, just melting into oblivion with every hour of ambulance-driving and vitals-taking I tacked on to my life. So, here I sit, learning from the captain just how carcinogenic I have become. A self-important EMT-basic—just twelve weeks of training to obtain that title—drowning in the world of well-trained paramedics. I acted on my arrogance and overreached the blue-and-white of my official Nationally Registered Emergency Medical Technician patch. The lack of gold a blatant, legitimate symbol on my shoulder of the knowledge I did not have. A white patch—the color of blank spaces and child-like understanding of life and death. I feel as if this is how they all see me, shrouded in my white patch. I can’t handle the gravity of the situation I ran into, only be crushed under it.
The boss sits quietly for a while, doing that thing that bosses do. The thing where they look sympathetic and act like it is so hard to fire someone. Like, if they could, they wouldn’t send you packing, they’re on your side. But, the orders are coming down from higher up, his hands are tied.
It’s bullshit, and we both know it, but it’s written somewhere in the rules of being the boss that he must do this thing. This false thing that never makes anyone feel better. This thing that still ends with someone getting fired.
His face is twisted into a hard grimace that he must break to speak. While he cracks his facade, I try to muster up something. Some feeling of fear or regret or confidence, but I don’t think there is one left in me. Everything in my brain seems encased in bubble-wrap. No matter how violently my thoughts bounce around, my conscious is numb.
“I’m suspending you without pay,” he says. That, too, seems protectively wrapped, because I have no reaction.
“There will be an investigation,” he continues, “following that, we will discuss your future with the company.” He leans back in his chair, and the conversation is over.
I nod. Then I stand. As if I am dreaming, I find myself in the locker room before I realize I’ve walked there. I pull off the uniform and slip into my civilian clothes. As I am shoving the balled-up, soiled uniform in an old grocery bag, I realize I’ve been covered in blood this whole time. It seeped through my uniform button-down and into the fabric of my undershirt. So, I pull that off too, and slip my jacket over my sports bra, zipping it closed.
I fill my bag with anything I want from my locker for the next two weeks, or however long while they “investigate” my actions. My stethoscope goes into the bag last, and before I throw the strap over my shoulder, I look at the Littmann and think about the first time I heard a heart beating.
This is all I have in the world, I think. Everything in this bag. Because this stethoscope and the locker sundries are what I have left of my job, and my job is my life.
Maybe I didn’t die today, but I’m definitely suicidal.
