CHAPTER FOURTEEN

 

 

Bobbi Franklin left the siren running as she and her partner leapt from their ambulance, hefted the patient out of the ditch and on to a gurney. Bobbie dug in the man's pockets, looking for any form of ID, while Damien secured straps around the man's wrists and ankles. "One crazy fucker, ready to go."

The patient thrashed as they bumped and rattled the gurney into the back of the ambulance, spitting white foam across his cheeks, but Bobbi hadn't met a man yet strong enough to break the thick, padded leather straps they kept for the real hardasses. Strong, though. Maybe old army? He wasn't carrying a wallet, which left Bobbi leaning in close, shouting, "Sir! Sir! What's your name? Do you know your name?"

No reply. Nothing intelligible, at least. A drug case, most likely. Whatever combination of amphetamines and coke the big city bastards were shipping in to Rustwood was tearing through the middle class districts and the slums alike. Then again, it seemed like more and more of Rustwood got quietly reclassified as 'slum' each year. Someone kept an ever-growing list of local streets pinned to the corkboard in the St Jeremiah's staffroom. Underneath they'd written, take a gun.

But this guy wasn't from the Heights, or Malus Avenue. The call had come in fifteen minutes after Bobbi arrived on shift, some guy having a screaming fit in a ditch halfway up the mountain. They'd arrived to find a dark-eyed, buzzcut man throwing fists at the air, shrieking, cursing.

Eyes, he said. Too many eyes. They'd stolen his voice.

Damien won scissors-paper-rock, so that left Bobbi in the back with the madman while Damien drove. She mopped the patient's brow and hooked up an IV - likely dehydrated if he'd gotten lost in the woods. He was filthy, mud-slicked, blood drying around his lips. Bobbi didn't know whether that was his or someone else's. His eyes were wide and terrified and his teeth clenched hard enough to crush bone. When they first found the guy kicking and spitting by the side of the road Bobbi thought he was having a fit, and had nearly lost a finger while probing for airway obstructions.

"Sir! Your name? Do you remember?"

A low gasp. His eyes rolled. Then - "Sam. Samwise."

"Good, good! And your last name?"

"Hunt. It was..." The patient's eyes fixed on hers, and she recoiled at the sudden clarity there. None of the blurred vision and dilated pupils that she'd expected. Only fury.

"It was in my head," he growled. "In my head! It had too many eyes!"

Bobbi jerked back, pitching against the wall as the ambulance took a too-fast turn. "Jesus, Damien! Keep it on the road!"

"Sorry!"

"Sorry won't do much when they're picking us all out of the gutter!"

A cackle from the front. "I'm the best driver on shift, and you know it."

"I want to get home alive, Damien."

"What, to your little girl?"

Not her girl. Her niece by blood, but Bobbi's sister was an intermittent mother at best and outright neglectful at worst, so little Jacinta was spending most of her time in Bobbi's spare room. She hadn't planned on becoming an adoptive single mother at the age of thirty, but then again, who got to plan anything these days? All you could do was ride the wave.

And Jacinta did have the sweetest smile, those few occasions when she smiled. So yeah, Bobbi wanted to get home, even if only for a few hours.

That smile would be reward enough.

Damien didn't slow as he took the next corner. Seemed to Bobbi like he wanted to get back to the emergency room and dump the patient on the steps. Bobbi had checked the roster and sure, Damien had already worked eighty hours in the last six days, but who the fuck didn't? Eighty hours was light. Some weeks she barely left the ER. Camped out on benches, curled beneath desks in the remote corners of St Jeremiah's, begging for an hour, just one hour without someone shaking her awake, shouting about a stabbing in the west end, an overdose beneath the ferris wheel, a body with no face abandoned by the Pentacost River...

But what was the point in grumbling? Nobody had held a gun to her head and told her to be a paramedic. She knew the hours when she took the contract. And the hours put a roof over Jacinta's head, so it was worth it, in the end.

All she could do was try to keep dumb bastards like this Samwise alive.

Hunt jerked against the straps once more, then went quiet. Bobbi took the opportunity to swab the inside of his forearm and hang an IV bag from the ceiling of the swaying ambulance. The needle slipped as she tried to find a vein, scoring a thin line of red across Hunt's skin.

Bobbie realised she was sweating. First time she'd missed a vein in months. She stared at the point of the needle, the light glistening at the point, almost like diamonds beading, waiting to fall. The point was glittering, hypnotizing, swaying back and forth in cadence with the ambulance like a cobra emerging from a basket.

She wondered what it would be like, jamming that needle into her own flesh. So thin. Would she even feel it?

What about if she jammed it into her cheek? Her tongue?

Her eye?

A screech of brakes. The ambulance jolted to a stop, and Bobbi grabbed at the ridged handles inside the ambulance to keep herself from smashing through the divider between her and the cabin. The needle fell from her hand, skittering across the floor. "Damien, keep it in your pants!"

"Sorry! Lady just ran out into the middle of the road."

"Collision?"

"Nah, she kept on running." A high squeaking echoed through the ambulance as Damien rolled his window down. "Hey, lady! You okay?"

No reply. Only footsteps, circling the ambulance. Bobbi went to the back doors and peered out through the grill-covered windows. An old, bent-backed woman in a fur-lined coat stamped about in the rain, kicking through puddles, ranting at the air.

Bobbi's brow furrowed. "Should we stop?"

"Don't have space for two."

Cold but essential math. Jumping out to help the elderly, no matter how lost or confused they might be, when they had a man out of his mind already strapped down? They weren't superheroes. There was only so much they could do.

Like insert an IV.

She had a fresh needle out of the packet and into Hunt's arm within thirty seconds. No idea where the other needle had gone, and maybe that was for the best. No idea where those weird thoughts had come from, either. Needles in eyes? Bizarre shit. Then again, most folk admitted to suicidal ideation from time to time. Fleeting thoughts about what it'd be like to step off the pavement in front of a bus, or to clamber over the railing of an eighth-story balcony.

Didn't mean anything. Not really. Especially not after a thirty hour shift.

They passed through the city centre and headed up Worthington Hill, taking the winding switchback toward St Jeremiah's. The rain had eased but the roads were slippery. The Jeremiah's team hadn't lost an ambulance yet, but there were three or four crashes each season on the slim roads. Usually drunken drivers sliding sideways off the hairpin turns, ending upside-down amongst the pines.

Most lived. Some weren't found for days.

As the ambulance rocked and tipped, Bobbie got a bad feeling in her gut, the sort she usually got after her morning cup of coffee. All her medical training told her to give it up, that it was either the caffeine or lactose punching her intestines inside out, but she'd tried to quit twice and spent the whole day bedridden by migraines. So, coffee it was, one before breakfast and one with lunch.

This feeling was the same. A sour, heavy squirming just below her stomach. Hell of a time to have to hit the bathroom. She grit her teeth and thumped on the partition. "How long?"

"Three minutes! Dispatch says there's something happening at the ER. Patient gone loco, slowing everything down."

"Great." She grimaced and gripped tight to the nearest handle, bracing against every swing and crash of the ambulance.

The tubing in the patient's arm winked in the light.

Such a simple thing, to insert a needle in another person's flesh. Painless, if you did it right. Harder to put one into your own arm. You'd have to look close, watch the moment when the point pressed against flesh, the dimple growing, growing, until finally skin gave way and the steel slid through.

Points against skin. That reminded her of the white crow. She'd been young, five or six, alone in her back yard one evening while her parents scrapped inside. They usually did, after her father got a six-pack of malt inside him. Not that Mom was much better - spiteful at best, violent at worst, always with a belt at hand if Bobbi said something out of turn.

Her father never hit her. He didn't even scream at her. All his anger was reserved for Mom - and, on occasion, Bobbi's sister. Which was why Bobbi found it easiest to insulate herself, to creep out the back door and into the rain, where sound was dulled and she could pretend to be anywhere else.

The white crow had come out of the sunset. She saw it in silhouette, a wide spread of wings growing wider, and then it was on top of her, cawing, grasping. She screamed, skidded back on the wet grass, and as she landed on her ass in the dirt the crow settled on her forearm and folded its wings, staring at her quizzically with pink-rimmed eyes.

Her panic faded as the crow clucked. She'd never seen a white crow in person before, only on nature documentaries, but it was simple enough to recognise the silhouette of its beak, its amiable curiosity. It held still as she ran one finger along its back. Feathers ruffled in the wind. Its talons, each a pale blade, tightened on her bare forearm. A needle-curve biting deep enough to draw tiny pricks of blood.

And then, in a rush of wings, it was gone.

The crow was a million years past, but she couldn't forget the jabs of pain as it dug into her skin. She'd been transfixed then, watching it cut into her out of reflex. The gleam of red against ivory.

The slow exhalation, the release of tension as the talon went deep. And what was a needle but a talon of steel? Sinking all the way to the bone.

The-

"Bobbi! We're here!"

Bobbi blinked. The ambulance had stopped rocking - a glance out the window told her they were at the ER. She was pressed into the corner of the ambulance, hands clenched tight.

She opened her left hand. Folded neatly into the crease of her palm was the missing needle.

"The fuck?" she whispered, as the rear doors slammed open. Damien was already climbing up into the ambulance, folding out the gurney's wheels. "I didn't-"

"You gonna help? Wake up, Bobbi!"

She jumped to attention, the gurney cold in her hands, the patient bumping out the back of the ambulance and into the rain. Overhead, the blank concrete edifice of St Jeremiah's glowered, orange fluorescents burning behind canvas curtain. All except for the third floor, where the windows were always dark.

Bobbi wondered about that floor, sometimes. Infectious diseases, some said. Outside her expertise, but that didn't stop her curiosity.

The patient was muttering again. "Get me out," he hissed. "Before it comes back!"

"Deep breaths, buddy." The gurney rattled and jolted across the lot. The concrete had been smooth once, years before, but it seemed like every year brought a new crack, a fresh upheaval. A couple decades and the whole mountain would shrug and send the hospital tumbling down its slopes.

About time, too. The place was a wart on the otherwise beautiful, untouched hillside. All of Rustwood - the valleys, the switchback paths, the ice-blue veins of the Pentacost River and all its offshoots - would be so perfect without the homes, the electric lights, the stone hewn from the earth. The scars left across the landscape.

Humans were poison. Wherever they went, they left ugly gashes. Better if they all left. Died, even. Allowed the world to rebuild, throw off the chains and cuffs, bore through concrete with rain and roots and patience.

And where better to start than here?

"Bobbi?"

"Yeah?"

"That girl of yours. What're you getting her for Christmas?"

"A needle," she whispered.

"What?"

But her attention wasn't on Damien, or the patient, or the way the gurney bounced.

It was on the talon of steel, still tucked inside the curve of her palm.