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I needed a distraction. I whipped out my phone, opening it up to the notes I had been working on for my article in the New England Journal of Medicine.
“Upon admission to the ED, the average prevalence of bacteriological sepsis across all four cohorts indicate that…”
I couldn’t begin to guess how long I sat there, typing away in my phone like a mad woman. Cold, clinical data was my friend. A problem to solve. Work to be done.
I didn’t notice that my coffee had grown cold.
I didn’t notice that the drizzle had shifted over to snow.
What I did notice was the sound of a revving engine and skidding tires. My head shot up. It was a sound I’d heard before, only this one wasn’t accompanied by the usual mournful howl of ambulance sirens.
A Lincoln Town Car swerved into view.
The blood drained from my face, replaced by a cold numbness. A buzz of electric dread when I saw what it was. My phone fell from my hand.
Distant screams. Smoke. Pain.
A flash of black, a specter from my past.
The Lincoln Town Car skidded around the corner, racing towards the ED’s entrance. It hopped a curb, rear end fishtailing through the slush before righting its course.
I took a couple steps back. My coffee lay forgotten on the sidewalk, dribbling its contents in a puddle around my shoes. Primal panic took ahold of me. I nearly turned and ran, but the sudden press of the hospital’s brick wall against my back was grounding. I reached my hand back, clutching at the brick’s ragged edges like a lifeline.My past is not my present. My nightmares are not my reality. I’m bigger than them. I’m stronger than them.
They do not define me.
They do not own me.
I pulled my head out of the nightmare and back into the game.
“Let’s get some transport here!” I shouted over my shoulder for a gurney—it wasn’t my first dump-and-run, and these cases were usually some of the worst. Nothing about this was going to be good.
The passenger door opened before the Town Car slammed to a stop. I was already pulling on the spare pair of gloves I kept in my pocket when a tall redhead spilled out of the driver’s seat and ripped open the rear door, motioning for the orderlies with the gurney to hustle up. The look on the man’s face and the crimson staining his hands as he white-knuckled the doorframe confirmed my suspicion about what I was about to find.
I shouldered the redhead out of the way. Two more men were crammed in the back of the Town Car. One was ashen, laying curled up on the seat while the other pressed both hands to his chest. There was blood everywhere.
Redhead grabbed the wounded man’s ankles. “Connor—get his shoulders!”
The other man didn’t even look up. “I’ve got to keep pressure on this.”
“Hold on a minute.” I was already crawling into the back. “Let me though, boys.”
I crouched down next to the bench seat. Up close, the injured man looked even younger— he was practically a kid. Eyes glassy, pale as death and gasping ineffectively up at the roof in a way that I didn’t like one bit. His mouth worked, desperately trying to force words past the blood in his mouth as his grip tightened on the other man’s wrist.
“Mole…T-Tr…” whatever the kid was trying to say dissolved into a coughing fit.
“Easy, lad—don’t try to talk.”
I pushed at the man’s hands. I didn’t have time for deathbed dramatics, and neither did this kid. “Move.”
I kept pressure on the wound with one hand while ripping open the hole in the kid’s tee shirt. The other man glaring at me, his look one part challenge and one part warning. He had reluctantly moved his hands, but they were still anchored to the kid, one squeezing his shoulder while the other soothed through the kid’s hair in a surprisingly tender gesture despite the streaks of blood it left behind.
The heat of his glare felt positively molten. I ignored it—in that moment, I could care less about anyone who wasn’t currently leaking all over the upholstery. Murder-glare could threaten me all he wanted, but my focus was consumed by the young man dying in the back seat of the Lincoln Town Car.
The wound was bad. A neat round hole just above the kid’s left nipple, about three inches from his sternum. Bullet wound. Looked like it came in at an angle. Definitely hit a lung.
I rolled the kid over as I heard the rapid response team pull up beside the car. Shit—no exit wound. “I need a kit,” I hollered to the crew.
The orderly balked. “Shouldn’t we transport first?”
