Stinking, gray smoke issued from the spot where I applied the electrode, and the man on the stretcher grabbed me by the throat. Just that fast, my head swam on the verge of unconscisousness as the man’s clawlike fingers dug into my neck and tightend against my carotid artery.
John dropped the IV he was prepping, grabbed the man’s thick arm and pulled hard in an attempt to remove his hand from my throat. The injured man was strong for his size, and John had to rise from the bench seat, brace one boot against the stretcher and pull to make the man’s arm budge. Blackness crept into the edge of my vision just before the man’s hand slid from my throat.
The man had long fingernails, and they raked down the right side of my neck as John pulled the man’s hand away. Four fresh, superficial scratches began to ooze blood and stain the collar of my uniform shirt.
John jerked the man’s left hand down in the next instant. I lost my balance and pitched forward across the stretcher. I reached out to keep from falling across the man, and my left hand came down on the siderail on John’s side of the stretcher. In that brief second, my shirt sleeve rode up and left my exposed upper arm inches from the man’s mouth. In a frenized flash, the man jerked up and sank his teeth into my left tricep. I swore as a wave of brief, intense pain shot down my arm.
I snatched my arm out of his mouth and regained my balance. I pulled back my short sleeve and examined the damage. The imprint of the man’s teeth was etched into my arm, and I watched as blood began to seep from the spots where his canine teeth had been.
“He bit me!” I said to John, who continued to struggle with the wildeyed man.
John didn’t look up. “Get the soft restraints,” he barked, almost out of breath. “We’ve got to tie him down before he hurts himself.”
I turned, squated and opened a low compartment to the side of the monitor shelf. “Don’t we need to call med control and ask for permission to restrain him?” I asked, glancing over my shoulder.
“To hell with that,” John said. “Radio’s busted anyway.”
We seldom have to use soft restraints on the ambulance and for that reason the small plastic bags that contained them had worked their way to the back of the dark compartment, well behind the myriad bits of other equipment and gear that we used more often. More by feel than by sight, I found them, pulled them out and slid the thick, plastic compartment door closed.
The next few minutes were a chaotic blur, but somehow between the two of us, John and I got the man into the restraints. We were both out of breath when we finished, and we paused for a few seconds to get our wind back. John, a smoker, looked like he’d just run a marathon, but I was sure that I looked the worse for wear. He wasn’t the one bleeding.
The man on the stretcher fought uselessly against the restraints, and it was in that moment of brief rest that I took a good, long look at the man. Under the bright flourescent lights of the ambulance, I could see that he was a strange looking man. The dominant feature of his face was thick, black eyebrows that met over the bridge of his nose. He also had low-set ears that gave him the aspect of a dog. I was already well acquanted with his curved fingernails, and from where I stood I was struck by the putrid smell of his breath.
“Break’s over,” John said as he began to calmly reassemble his IV set. “You need to clean those scratches and that bite. Look in that cabinet. There are some four by fours in there and some rubbing alcohol. That’ll have to do until we get to the ER.”
Before I could turn to open the compartment, the deep, long howl of a coyotoe sounded from just outside the ambulance. Gooseflesh popped out on my forearms, and I pretended not to notice that John had jumped at the sound. “That was close,” he said.
As if in reaction to the howl, the man on the stretcher grew calm and ceased to struggle against his restraints. In the ensuing seconds, he made the only statement that John and I heard him mutter during our entire encounter with him.
“You’ve…. got… to… let… me… go…” he said, his voice rough and deep, almost like a growl, like someone who might be very sick.
I immediately thought about what this might mean in regard to the fresh bite on my uppper arm. “Sir, do you have any health…”
Before I could say “problems,” the man resumed his struggle against the restraints. “Sir, you’ve got to calm down,” John said. “You’ve been in an accident, and you might further injure yourself if you don’t calm down and be still.”
John might as well have been talking to the wall because the man was in no mood to listen. I watched as his abdominal muscles flexed hard as he tried to sit up against the restraints. It was then that one of the soft restraint straps did give slightly with a small sound like ripping velcro. John and I exchanged a glance and only had a second to consider what it meant when the alarm on the heart monitor began to sound as the man’s vitals began to spike out of control.
The man went limp as John and I studied the monitor’s small screen. “He’s crashing,” John said, turning back to his IV set-up.
John began to start the IV, and I read off the man’s vitals. “Heart rate’s 150 beats per minute,” I said. “Looks like sinus tachycardia. Last diastolic BP’s 116. Pulse ox is good at 98 percent.”
“All right, let’s go,” John said. “Get up front and get us to the hospital.”
I nodded and headed for the side door. “Hey!” John called.
I turned and saw him stick an 18-gauge needle into a large purple vein that ran down the length of the man’s left forearm. “Look out for that coyote,” he said with a grin. “And keep trying the radio.”
I’d forgotten about the animal responsible for that howl only minutes before. I pulled off my plastic gloves, dropped them into the garbage can beside the bench seat and opened the side door. I stepped outside and closed the door. If anything was out here, it would probably get me before I could get back inside. I jogged around to the driver’s side, pulled the door open and hopped in.
It was nice to be back behind the wheel and headed to the hospital. The fog was as thick as ever, but that was no big deal. I switched off the emergency flashers and turned on the big overhead strobe lights. As I put the truck in drive, I heard John’s muffled voice. A small window, about one-foot square, separated the cab from the back of the truck. I reached over my shoulder and slid the window open on its track.
“What did you say?” I yelled back through the hole.
“Get back hear,” he yelled. “Something’s wrong.” There was an unusual hint of strain in John’s voice. Like most paramedics, John was unflappable, conditioned to hide his feelings behind a blank mask that came from years of dealing with the worst kind of emergencies.
I put the ambulance back in park. “What’s wrong?”
“Just get back here,” he yelled. “I need you back here. Hurry!”
I grabbed a pair of medium plastic gloves from a small cardboard box in the center console and opened my door. I jumped out and ran to the rear double doors. I pulled the handle, but the door stuck as it sometimes will on humid nights. I swore under my breath, got a better grip on the handle and pulled again. The right half of the double doors swung open, and I was shocked by the scene that met my eyes.
The man who’d been on the stretcher was nowhere in sight. In his place was a large gray wolf. Its back legs were on the stretcher and its front paws held John down against the bench seat. John was still alive, but he struggled weakly against the powerful animal that had its muzzle buried in his throat. Before I could react, the beast turned its head and looked at me. Fresh blood – John’s blood – dripped from its snarling black lips, and I watched as drops of crimson fell to the plastic mat of the ambulance floor.
The beast seemed to grin and then arched its back before unleashing a long, unnerving howl. As if in response, from somewhere close behind me, there came an answering howl from some unseen creature shrouded in the thick fog.
(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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