Extreme Medical Services: Medical Care On The Fringes Of Humanity (17 page)

   
“You can’t just go around biting women and killing them. We’ll have to report this to our superiors,” Dean said, defiantly. He wasn’t sure what they could do about it but he was sure this was not the first time it had happened.

   
“Ah, the baby bear has some fangs after all,” James sneered. “Do not dabble in things you do not understand, Dean, my boy. This is not merely some Siren you’re tangling with.”

   
Dean stopped in the street next to the other ambulance and looked at Brynne. “You told HIM about it?”
   

   
“No, I didn’t, but he asked because word gets around in the Unusual community,” Brynne said. “Rudolf probably told him when he got back from his trip. Look, we’ve got to get the stretcher and get her to the hospital.” She turned to James. “This discussion is not over, James. This is not fifteenth century France. You cannot go around biting anyone you feel like, whether there was some arrangement or not.”

   
“We’ll see, little one,” James said. “We’ll see.” He turned and walked into the crowd, disappearing from view.

   
Dean opened the doors to the rear of the ambulance and reached in to unlock the stretcher undercarriage from its position in the back of the unit. Brynne watched the crowd where James had disappeared a moment more then turned and helped Dean lower the wheels to the ground. Dean looked at her across the stretcher. “He’s dangerous, Brynne,” Dean said. “I don’t know what you see in him. Does he have some sort of control over you?”
 

   
“Drop it Dean,” she snapped. “Focus on the job at hand. I’m a big girl and I can handle James. You get the stretcher out. I’m going over to draw up some garlic extract from our emergency kit. We’re going to have to find a time to get that dose into her without Ray and Dave suspecting anything or seeing what we’re doing.”

   
Dean closed his mouth but knew he wasn’t going to drop the topic. There was something going on here he didn’t understand and his partner was deep in the middle of it. He unloaded the stretcher and was turning it around as Brynne returned. She was holding a capped syringe, which she carefully put in the cargo pocket of her duty pants. Dean pondered what he could do about James as the two of them rolled the stretcher back to the girl and the other two paramedics. The girl still had a pulse when they returned but Ray was still bagging her so she still needed assistance breathing. Dave was attaching another bag of saline to the IV tubing. The first bag was empty. He pumped the blood pressure cuff up again to continue infusing more fluid. Dean and Brynne lowered the stretcher and moved it up to the girl’s side.

   
“Here, Dave,” Brynne said. “Let me get that. You help Ray and Dean get her ready to be moved to the stretcher.” The other medic handed her the IV bag and turned to start prepping the patient. Dean stepped between he and Brynne to block the view as she pulled the loaded syringe from her cargo pocket. She uncapped it, screwed the syringe hub onto a port in the IV tubing and quickly pushed the dose of garlic extract into the patient. The crowd wouldn’t think anything unusual was going on. They would just see a paramedic giving a drug to a patient.

   
Once that was done, they carefully lifted the girl onto the stretcher along with the heart monitor, oxygen tank and IV bag. They then cleared the way through the crowd as Dave and Ray rolled her back to their ambulance. Dean opened the rear doors of ambulance 792 and then helped Dave load the stretcher after Ray climbed inside ahead of it, still operating the bag valve mask.

   
“Do you want one of us to ride along in case she goes into arrest again?” Brynne offered.

   
Dave shook his head. “We’re only two blocks from ECMC here. Why don’t you just follow us there.” He shut the rear doors as Ray was getting himself situated in the back of the unit. “I’ll signal you to pull over and help if we need you to.” He turned and climbed into the cab’s driver’s seat.

   
Dean and Brynne watched them leave the scene. The crowd dispersed now that there was nothing else to see. Dean climbed into the passenger side of their unit, stripping off his gloves while Brynne climbed up behind the wheel. She pulled out and started to follow the other unit to the hospital. They rode in silence. Dean started to speak but she stopped him with a held up hand.
 

   
“Put us back in service,” she said curtly. “We’ll talk about this back at the station. Let’s help them get into the hospital and situated first.”

   
Dean contacted dispatch and notified them that they were clearing the scene and heading back to Elk City Medical Center.

   
The drive back to the station was quiet. Brynne looked like she was ready to kill someone and Dean wanted to make sure that he didn’t get in the way when she blew up. James had all but admitted to biting and nearly killing that woman and then he acted like it was no big deal. He was taken back to his conversation with Freddy, the zombie chef, about James and wondered if he needed to follow-up on his instincts and contact Mike about this. He thought that Brynne was in over her head and that James was bad news. The events that occurred tonight just backed up that assumption.

   
He was still thinking about it when they arrived back at their station. As they got out and restocked the ambulance, he noticed again that Brynne wore a turtleneck despite the weather. Was she just cold-blooded or was she letting James drink from her? Was that what was making her so angry, or maybe afraid? She didn’t seem the type to scare easily, but after seeing that girl close up maybe she saw herself. Maybe she could see the danger she was in by dating someone like James.

   
They went back into the squad room to do their patient reports from the two calls. They sat down at their computer workstations and started to work. Finally, Dean couldn’t take the silence anymore. “Brynne,” he said as he leaned back in the desk chair. “We have to talk about what happened back there with that girl and James. Shouldn’t we call the police or headquarters or something? That girl was almost murdered. She still might die.”

   
“We don’t have any evidence of wrongdoing on anyone’s part.” She said after a bit. “James’ statements to us were casual enough to be considered harmless by a court of law. It would be our word against his. He’s been doing this for too long to get caught that way.”

   
“But you think he did it?” Dean confirmed. “He bit that girl.”

   
“Yes,” she said, gritting her teeth. “I think he did it. He knows how I feel about it and he did it anyway.”

   
“Oh, thank God,” Dean said. “I was sure you were letting him bite you, too.” Then he saw her self-consciously put her hand to her collar. “Wait a minute, you are, aren’t you? You’re letting him feed off you?”

   
“That’s none of your business, Dean,” Brynne snapped. “What I do in my free time with other people is not a workplace concern. Period.”

   
“Don’t give me that,” Dean said, raising his voice. “I saw that girl. She almost died … hell, she could be dead now. That could have been you. You can’t let James put you in that kind of danger. You have to stop and break this off with him. You don’t want to end up that way, do you?”

   
Brynne paused and took a breath. Then she turned to look directly at him. “Dean,” she said quietly. “There is more here going on than you know. That girl wanted to be bitten. She wanted to be bitten and then die so that she could have a chance to come back as a vamp. That’s what James was talking about. The arrangement he alluded to had to do with her paying some sort of tribute to be turned. The fact that he did it is something he told me he wouldn’t do anymore. He told me he wasn’t that kind of vampire anymore.”

   
“Clearly he was lying,” Dean said. “He seemed almost proud of it. In any case, something happened with the plan. She ended up in the alley.”

   
“Something must have gone wrong,” Brynne said. “Maybe she changed her mind and tried to get away. I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

   
“Brynne,” Dean said softly. “We have to tell someone. Something has to be done.”
 

   
“James knows they screwed up,” Brynne said. “There must be an explanation. Why else would he have stuck around, right? I have to talk to him about it and get his side of the story. Maybe he was forced into it and didn’t want to admit it in front of you. Let me have a couple of days to sort this out and find out what happened. Then, if there is not a better answer, I’ll make the call myself. Okay?”

   
“I don’t know, Brynne,” Dean said. “There has to be some sort of report made tonight. We have our charts to turn in. Headquarters dispatched us to that call for a reason. They have to know that there is some connection to our work here at Station U. If we don’t turn in a report, we’ll have some explaining to do. I just got this job. I don’t want to lose it over a missing report or falsified records.”

   
“You will not lose your job,” Brynne said. “I’m your preceptor, so it is on me to make sure that the proper paperwork gets filed. Let me deal with this. There has to be some explanation. I’ll get it and report it to headquarters. Okay?”

   
“If you say so, Boss,” Dean said. “If you say so.” He really didn’t know what else to say to her. She was in charge, and that was that. She could make the call. The problem was, he wasn’t sure she was making the right call. When he was in school, he was told that there would be occasions that he would not agree with other providers’ calls in the field, but he had always assumed that would be a medical issue. This was something else altogether. This was attempted murder, or maybe an assisted suicide. He was not sure. Either way, he couldn’t be a party to a cover up of something like that. Still, he guessed he owed her something in the way of thanks. She’d bailed him out of that Lydia situation, and she was his supervisor. He decided he would write up his own version of the night’s events and keep it on hand in case he needed to turn something in later on.

   
“Will she live?” Dean asked. He knew they had gotten a return of spontaneous circulation, but that didn’t mean that she wouldn’t die in a day or so from organ failure.
 

   
“I don’t know, Dean,” Brynne replied. “Maybe. She’s young, so she has that going for her. The intensive care unit at City is excellent for post-cardiac arrest care. They will have implemented therapeutic hypothermia as soon as she arrived. That gives her the best chance of getting out neurologically intact. I texted the nurse at the ER, Carol, of the dose of garlic extract we gave in the field and our suspicions. She’ll make sure that girl gets the care she needs.”

   
“If she doesn’t live, will she - change?” Dean asked. “I mean, she was bitten, we know that. Does the garlic extract work every time?”

   
“That may be something of a gray area,” she said. “Technically we brought her back, so she didn’t die from the bite itself. I’m sure they’ll give her whole blood at the hospital. That might hold off the change when coupled with the garlic dose. I’m just not sure. I’ll know more when I talk with James. He has a lot of questions to answer, and I’ll get a firm answer on that one, too.”

   
“I guess he has the tall, brooding type going for him?” Dean asked.

   
“Are you asking what I see in him?” Brynne challenged. “Why would I, dedicated to saving lives, see someone who is so opposite to that goal?”

   
“Look, Brynne …”
 

   
“He’s not a monster, Dean.” She said firmly. “He’s just a man. He’s older than usual, sure, but when you get to know him, he’s just like any other guy.”

   
“Except he’s a vampire,” Dean said. “And he might have almost killed that girl.”

   
“I’m not sure he sees it that way. If she had successfully changed, would she have been dead? To him, he was doing her a favor.”

   
“I’m sure drug dealers look at it the same way,” Dean said.

   
Brynne sighed. “I don’t think that’s fair. He was making her stronger, forever young. She’d never get sick or die in a normal way.”

   
“She’ll also never get to see the sun again,” Dean said. “She would be a predator, who could end up believing she could feed unchecked on humans without regard to their lives. You already said that James is, how did you put it, ‘old-fashioned?’ Maybe she was going to be an old-fashioned vampire, too.”

   
They were silent for a few minutes. Then Dean spoke very quietly. “You don’t want that type of life, too, do you?”

   
“I think that’s none of your business, Probie.” She replied. “I think we’ve talked enough about this subject. Why don’t you go out and check the inventory in the drug dispenser and make a list of what we’re likely to need soon? You can forward that list to the lieutenant since you feel like you have a need to talk to headquarters.”

   
Dean’s shoulders slumped. He felt like his partner was in trouble here, but he was at a loss to figure out a way around it. He’d agreed to give her some time to investigate the situation with the girl this evening. In the meantime, he was sure that he should have sent that email off to Mike a few weeks ago after Freddy warned him about James.
 

He got up and walked out towards the ambulance bay, grabbing the inventory clipboard off the hook by the door on his way. He decided to spend the rest of the shift doing some busy work so he didn’t have to be around Brynne. There was nothing else to say that hadn’t already been said. Anything else would just lead to an argument. One thing he didn’t want to do was shut down their avenue of communication over this. He still had a lot to learn from her and he hoped she would still feel comfortable talking to him about this situation in the future. In the meantime, he pulled out his smartphone and shot an email off to Mike asking to meet for breakfast after work that morning. Maybe he would have some insights.