The ambulance’s dashboard digital clock said that it was five minutes after three in the morning. My partner, John, and I were on our way back to Claiborne from Mobile. We’d taken a latenight transfer to the ICU at Port City Infirmary and were now on our way back to the base.
There was a full moon out, but we could barely see it through the layer of thick fog that covered the road and surrounding woods. Despite the conditions, we’d jumped at the chance to go to Mobile because we knew that it would eat up three or four hours of our shift. We imagined the crews back in Claiborne running their tails off on 911 calls. Nights with a full moon are like that.
I tried unsuccessfully to stiffle a yawn, and it didn’t escaped John’s notice. “If you get sleepy, just say so,” he said. “We can swap seats, and I’ll drive.”
In the unwritten rules of EMS, it was my job to drive us all the way home if possible. John was a paramedic, and he ran the truck. I was just a basic, the low man on the totem pole, which meant that I did what he told me to do and drove us everywhere we went.
“Nah, I’m good,” I said. “You just sit over there and count the deer in the ditches.”
“I’m going to count sheep instead,” he said. He stretched, drew his jacket in around him, nestled down into his seat and closed his eyes. A few minutes later, I heard him snoring.
The foggy miles clicked by as the ambulance hummed over the road at 70 miles per hour. I’d driven this route many times before and felt that the ambulance could almost drive itself back to Claiborne. I glanced away from the road for a second to turn on the radio when everything went sideways.
I caught a glimpse of movement in the ditch on the right side of the road before something darted into the path of the ambulance. I slammed on the brakes, and the thing struck the side of the truck. The force of the collision snapped off the radio antanea and sent a web of cracks across the windshield.
The wheels squaled over the pavement, and I fought the steering wheel to keep the heavy ambulance on the road. When we came to a stop the acrid smell of rubber filled our nostrils.
“What the hell was that?” John asked excitedly, still half asleep.
My heart pounded in my ears and every drop of saliva in my mouth had vanished. “I think I hit a deer,” I said.
John rubbed his shoulder where he’d been thrown against the seatbelt. “How far back do you reckon?” he asked.
“A few hundred feet,” I guessed. “I was doing about 70.”
John reached into the compartment beside his door, pulled out a large flashlight and clicked it on. “Let’s check the damage,” he said.
I got my flashlight and joined John on his side of the truck. There was a large dent in the fender as well as a fair amount of hair and blood from where the animal struck with the vehicle.
“Go check the radio,” John said.
I reached inside the cab, pulled the mike from its clip on the center console and pressed the transmit button. “EMS 7 to 911 for radio check,” I said. I released the transmit button and listened, but there was no answer.
John pulled his walkie-talkie radio off of his belt and keyed it up. “EMS 7 to Claiborne 911, radio check.” Again, there was only silence.
“We’re too deep in the woods and too far from a repeater for this weak thing to work,” he said.
John shivered in the chill damp of the fog and produced his cellphone. “Check your phone and see if you’ve got any bars,” he said. His phone’s tiny screen illuminated his face in pale blue.
“I’ve got nothing,” I said. “Zero bars.”
John snapped his phone shut. “You want to go back and see how big it was? It might still be in the road.”
“Yeah, I guess.” I reached inside the cab and turned on the emergency flashers.
John began going through his jump bag, and I knew what he was looking for. “I might need it to put him out of his misery,” he said. He pulled the slide back on the .40-caliber handgun that he wasn’t supposed to have on the ambulance. “Let’s go.”
We walked back down the road through the thick fog. The moonlight and our flashlights did little to hold back the misty darkness. Pines loomed over us on both sides of the road, and the long howl of a nearby coyote mixed with the sighs of the windblown treetops.
A football field’s length from the ambulance, we saw the outline of something in the road. At first, we thought it was a deer, but as we drew closer, we saw that it was something else altogether.
“That’s a man,” John said. He jammed his gun into the waistband of his pants and covered it with his jacket. “Come on.”
We ran to the man and saw that he was naked. “Stand there and give me some light,” John said.
He knelt by the man and shook him by the shoulder. “Sir, sir,” he repeated. “Can you hear me?”
There was no answer from the man, who was lying on his side, his face obscured in shadow. John grabbed him by the wrist and felt for a pulse. “It’s faint,” he said. He then leaned in close with his ear near the man’s cheek. “He’s breathing,” he said.
We could see that the man was a bloody mess. He was covered in dirt, bits of wet grass and a lot of blood. He had a deep gash on the side of his head, probably from where he struck the side of the ambulance.
“This guy’s lucky to be alive,” John said. “You probably weren’t going as fast as you thought. He must have just glanced off the side of the truck. Run and drive it back, so that we’ll have more light.”
I ran back to the ambulance, jumped inside the cab and executed a three-point turn. On the way back, I made several unsuccessful attempts to raise 911 on the radio.
I stopped about 20 feet from John, hopped out and ran to the back of the ambulance. I opened the double doors and pulled the stretcher out.
“Grab a backboard and a CID,” John yelled. “We need to package this guy.”
I got the equipment out of a side compartment, tossed it all on top of the stretcher and rolled it all to a spot near the body.
“Did you try the radio again?” John asked.
Yeah, but no one answered,” I said.
“That figures,” he said. “This guy is a candidate for MedFlight, but we’ve got no way to call them. They probably wouldn’t fly in this fog anyway.”
I knelt at the man’s shoulders, placed both hands on the side of his head and held his neck straight. We then rolled him onto the backboard and secured him in place. In one smooth motion, we lifted the backboard and moved the unconscious man to the stretcher. I unfolded a white sheet and placed it over him, leaving his face uncovered, while John buckled him down.
A moment later, we slid the stretcher into the back of the ambulance and climbed in behind him. “Go ahead and put him on the monitor,” John said as he began to assess the man for broken bones. A minute later, I had the blood pressure cuff on the man’s right arm and the pulse-ox sensor on his left index finger.
John shook his head. “It’s a miracle,” he said. “I don’t think he’s broken anything major. Most of this blood’s from the laceration on his head.”
“At least we’ve got that going for us,” I said as I began to attach the circular, sticky electrodes to the end of the four colored wires that led to the heart monitor. I pulled the sheet down off the man’s chest and removed the small covers from the bottom of the electrodes, exposing the adhesive and the small amount of silver nitrate under each pad.
Salt, pepper, ketchup, lettuce, I thought to myself as a reminder of the order that the white, black, red and green wires were to be attached to the man’s torso. When I applied the white electrode to his chest, just below his right shoulder, the unexpected happened.
The man’s eyes snappped open, and he let out a loud, unnerving yowl. John looked up from where he was preparing an IV in time to see the man begin to thrash around. Stinking, gray smoke began to issue from the spot where I’d applied the electrode, and the man grabbed me by the throat in a claw-like grip. Just that fast, my head swam on the edge of unconscisousness as the man’s fingers tightend.
(All rights reserved. This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.)
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