the beast in the bone
A Novel
Blair James Lindsay
“Unlike other forms of psychological disorders, the core issue in trauma is reality.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk
Copyright © 2019 Blair James Lindsay
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher. You must not circulate this book in any format.
This is a work of fiction. Certain institutions, agencies, and public offices are mentioned, but the characters involved are wholly imaginary. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. The opinions expressed are those of the characters and should not be confused with the author’s.
This book is dedicated to all those out there struggling with the memories and trauma of what can’t be unseen.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
Forty-Five
Forty-Six
Forty-Seven
Forty-Eight
Forty-Nine
Fifty
Fifty-One
Fifty-Two
Fifty-Three
Fifty-Four
Fifty-Five
Fifty-Six
Fifty-Seven
Fifty-Eight
Fifty-Nine
Sixty
Sixty-One
Sixty-Two
Sixty-Three
Sixty-Four
Sixty-Five
Sixty-Six
Sixty-Seven
Sixty-Eight
Sixty-Nine
Seventy
Seventy-One
Seventy-Two
Seventy-Three
Seventy-Four
Seventy-Five
Seventy-Six
Seventy-Seven
Seventy-Eight
Seventy-Nine
Eighty
Eighty-One
Eighty-Two
Eighty-Three
Eighty-Four
Eighty-Five
Eighty-Six
Eighty-Seven
Eighty-Eight
Eighty-Nine
Ninety
About the Author
A Note on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
Acknowledgements
I’ve worked in EMS since 1981. So, anyone might read this and quite naturally wonder which of the characters, if any, are drawn real life experiences. There are none. Working in prehospital care, I was privileged to meet a lot of amazing people—and a very few who were far less so—but none of them are represented directly in this book.
So… to the actual acknowledgements.
Dr. David Hodgins at the University of Calgary was kind enough to spend a couple of hours talking to me about how fentanyl and other addictions are treated in Alberta. Dave Sweet, a detective with the Calgary Police Service Homicide Unit, answered a number of questions regarding police procedures. Annelies Schleiter and Marc Boutet helped me get a picture of what current day EMS looks like, though I have fudged some details of vehicle designations etc. Any errors are mine, not theirs.
Going back to the beginning of my career, I’d like to thank the people who taught me the most about what being a Paramedic meant. Mike Dingle, Butch Davy, Pat Crumley, Gerald Edwards, Marc Wassill and Gary Lock. When I was just beginning my journey into Paramedicine and Firefighting, these were the people who encouraged me to always keep learning and to keep the patient’s needs forever in the forefront of my mind. These aren’t the only people I owe a dept to, of course. There were many volunteer firefighters with whom I worked alongside in my early years and who always inspired me. People who gave up sleep, work and family to respond to emergencies at all hours of the day or night. There are too many to mention individually, but I was doubly lucky for knowing such great people in my formative years.
Later on, in 1998, the aforementioned Gary Lock convinced me to come teach at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in the various Paramedic and Respiratory Therapy programs. As I write this, it is my 20th year teaching, and I’ve loved every moment.
Lastly but most importantly, my family.
I grew up hardly realizing what wonderful and remarkable and loving people my parents were till Paramedicine began taking me into the homes of strangers and I realized how truly lucky I was. I grew up in a house full of love and will be forever grateful for it.
Thank you to my sister Diane, who has been with me through thick and thin. Thank you to my son, David, whose smile has always brightened my day. Thank you to Chelsea, who has always encouraged and believed in me.
One
October 25, 2003
Edmonton, Alberta
It was a cold night, the kind that brought out only the hungriest of predators. Ruthless, merciless things. The worst of them ran on two legs and the most dangerous hunted the young.
The girl walked like a fawn separated from the herd, arms wrapped tight around herself, looking left and right among the lengthening shadows of the high-rise buildings from under her brow with a guarded expression on her face. There was no panic there —not yet—but some sure measure of fear lurked there. Anyone might have read it in the way she walked.
The men watching her certainly did.
They paced her in their van, crawling through the traffic, pulling over when they were momentarily unsure of their prey’s trajectory.
Her jeans were thin and her jacket, unfastened in practised teenage bravado, blew about her in gusts of wind shot thick with winter’s chill. The Beyoncé song wafting from her headphones was a thin buttress against the cold, the music a salve against the fear that should have prodded her to a faster pace.
But that was not why the men chose her.
Many of those she passed took a second glance at the pretty teen with blonde hair surging out from beneath her toque in long waves, immaculate and well cared for like the rest of her. A girl who took pride in her appearance.
But that was not why the men chose her.
Her purse was a soft leather whose deep magenta was expertly coordinated with jet-black jeans and blue suede ankle boots. There would be money in the bag. Back then people still carried cash.
But that was not why the men chose her.
They chose her because she was clearly prey. Wounded in her discomfiture and disorientation. Fearful of engaging with the crowd. Lost in an age before GPS locators and Google Maps.
Two blocks later, when the sky was a few shades darker and the girl turned onto a boulevard deserted except for one or two homeless men, it was time. All things came in time for predators patient enough to wait for t
hat perfect moment.
When it came and the girl—the luckless fawn—was truly alone, the men moved in. Ravenous by then. Anticipating the taste.
Beasts of prey.
Two
16 years later – 0245 hrs August 9
Highway 70, West of Sunnynook, Alberta
It had been a long shift—a little heartbreak, a lot of vomit, altogether too much blood—and Ash Keller was dying for a hit, could almost feel the fentanyl sliding down her throat. Wanted it, like a long-lost lover.
She guided the speeding ambulance down the darkened country road, thinking only of that sweet moment of fulfillment. The narcotic on her tongue oozing into her blood, seeping across cellular membranes into her central nervous system. The glow, the soft heat of it in her brain. The chill sensation of Cool Smooth overtaking her, the memories of the evening fading as the drug inoculated her against the inevitable nightmares that would otherwise haunt her sleep.
But that taste, that steadiness, that Cool Smooth feeling… She wouldn’t have that for at least an hour. Paramedic unit Two Alpha Forty-Four was ramming the roads back to Drumheller—“Left-armpit, Alberta,” she told people if they asked where she worked—the ambulance headlights fading into the rural blackness around them as if she and her partner, Jonas Morrison, asleep in the passenger seat, were explorers encapsulated in some deep-sea submersible.
The need had been escalating in her all night, that longing for the numbness that calmed her heartbeat and drove the memories of death away. And the three pills she had wrapped in the plastic bag in her right shirt pocket felt like a second heart now, beating hard against her chest.
During her twelve-hour shift, she had held an old woman’s hand while breaking the news to her that her husband had died in his sleep. Then she and Jonas had attended a three-vehicle accident with two fatalities, one of which was a five-year-old child, his neck broken when a truck running a stop sign plowed into his side of the car. Head lolling on a broken neck, his half-lidded eyes stared in death’s empty puzzlement at Keller when she’d climbed into the rear seat to assess him.
An hour later, she’d dodged vomit from a renal colic patient while juggling morphine and ketorolac syringes, then ended the night with a call to a farmhouse where too much beer—or perhaps not nearly enough—had led to an incident of domestic violence. That was the generic description, anyway—the one that would form the title of the police report. What actually happened involved a two-hundred-pound man, both his fists, and a woman less than half his size.
Dispatch had described this last call to them as an accident, this being the way the caller—the wife—would likely have portrayed it. But Keller had rules, and one of them was “After midnight, no one bleeds by accident,” so she’d demanded RCMP respond as well.
The dead five-year-old earlier in the night had spiked the need for a hit, certainly. But this call had nailed it into her hard. Seeing the thin woman—her eye black and her lip bleeding—huddled on the sofa with her two crying toddlers—neither much older than the dead boy Keller had seen earlier. Then the woman weeping uncontrollably as Keller examined her, her whole life spilling out. Lost job. Cancer. Nowhere else to go.
The beer must’ve been singing loud and recklessly in the husband because he’d decided he wasn’t done swinging fists. But the attending RCMP, a tall cop named Hardy who Keller knew from a dozen highway crashes and other such impromptu emergency services social events, batted the man aside and cuffed him before he even knew what was happening.
Said husband was now tucked in the back of the RCMP cruiser, a couple of bruises of his own blooming on his face.
Hardy was a good cop. He’d listened patiently to all the things the woman couldn’t do and then managed to tease out of her that she had a sister in Calgary she was too ashamed to call. In the end she refused to go to hospital, but when Keller got on the phone to the sister, the woman promised to come straight there and take her anyway.
It was the kind of compromise that happened often in emergency services; the kind that was no one’s first choice but that everyone had to live with because there was simply no better option.
Keller would have been glad to take the woman into hospital herself, but she was almost equally glad—as the husband in the back of the cop car kept suggesting—to fuck right off.
Fucking right off meant she and Jonas could get back to Drumheller all the sooner. She had dodged most of the vomit from the renal colic patient, but she could still smell it on her shirt.
So, Drumheller. Shower. Fresh clothes. Shift change.
And oh yeah, the fentanyl burning the metaphorical hole in her shirt pocket.
Delicious, nutritious, low-calorie breakfast of champions.
She kept her foot pressed hard on the accelerator, ripping through the unchanging night landscape. At one point, she sensed movement to her left and looked over at a barn owl paralleling them, wings beating hard as it sailed above the rusty barbed wire fence to the left of their ambulance. A thing of magic in the blackness, there and gone.
She turned back to the road and—Holy fuck—there was something in the road, right in front of them. A white blur, coming up fast. Her first fleeting thought was that it was a deer or coyote, struck by another vehicle and already dead.
“Jesus Christ!” She slammed her foot against the brake and the ambulance swerved and skidded to a halt in a cloud of dust.
Not a deer, not a coyote. A girl, lying unconscious and unshod, all blood and skin and tangled clothing.
“Jesus,” she said again.
“What the fuck?” Jonas yelled sleepily. Keller was attending that night, so truth be told Jonas ought to have been driving, but she’d offered to take them home from their last run. He had seemed grateful, and when he agreed, Keller was too.
Jonas was a decent partner, a good Primary Care Paramedic, well able to anticipate her demands while running even the most complex of calls. But driving was not his forte. “By that, I mean you’re shit at it,” she had told him once. Jonas was perennially inattentive, had lousy anticipation, and piss-poor reflexes. Despite Keller’s romance with fentanyl, she liked life and felt that the less often Jonas was in command of a ton of ambulance going 120 kilometres per hour, the more likely she was to continue enjoying it.
Jonas, she was sure, would’ve hit the girl.
She took deep breaths as she stared at the motionless figure sprawled semi-prone on the gravel in front of them, her heart beating hard as she flipped on the emergency lights. “Jonas. Pedestrian accident. Call it in.”
She stepped out of the ambulance into the penetrating flash of red and white light. The summer evening was chill and she shivered, but she abandoned the thought of retrieving her coat and approached the unconscious girl.
She was in her early teens, dark hair in a pageboy cut, blood staining her jeans and the rough gravel road around her. Pain was etched on her face and her dark eyes stared pleadingly at the flashing lights.
“Please…”
Her voice was so weak Keller barely heard it. Closer, she saw that the girl was bleeding from a thumb-sized black hole halfway down her left thigh.
Bullet wound.
She turned to Jonas as he stepped out of the ambulance, his mouth a wide O as he took in the injured girl.
“Jonas, did you—”
A sharp crack split the night air and Jonas’s head rocked back as if he were a surfer hit by a rogue wave. In Mexico, Keller had seen it happen just like that, a surfer’s body arcing like a whip cracking before he fell.
But there would be no next wave for Jonas. He hit the ground hard, choking and gurgling, his body not yet knowing it was dead, his sightless eyes staring up at Keller’s. The bullet had bisected his skull and blood was pouring from the entry wound just above his right ear. The exit wound in the back of his head was much larger, and a soupy mixture of blood and brain was oozing from it onto the road, steam rising from the jellied mass.
“No no no…” Keller stumbled back, gropin
g for the ambulance door.
Radio. Backup.
But before she could climb in, thunder exploded in her skull as something struck her left temple.
She collapsed like a swatted fly, lighting arcs of pain shooting through her head, her nervous system stunned and her vision blurry.
Through the loud hum in her ears, she heard heavy breathing above her and had the sense of a shadowy figure bending over her, bringing with it a sour smell of sweat that sparked a surge of nausea in her belly.
She groped her way onto her knees, thoughts fuzzy and indistinct, and tried to regain her feet. But her limbs were slow and clumsy, and the pain in her head intensified as she rose. When she touched her temple, her fingers came away bloody, the scent of her own gore tangy and metallic in her nose. More blood was washing over her shoulder, leaving a strange cool/hot sensation on her skin.
Call it in.
Jonas hadn’t, had he? He’d been dead asleep when she slammed on the brakes, and he’d looked bewildered when he stepped out of the ambulance. So…
Call it in.
But she was slow… confused.
Am I shot too?
“Not all gunshot victims are initially aware of it.” She recalled this axiom distinctly from an overly warm classroom a decade prior, delivered in a stilted voice by a bored instructor. But the thought had stayed with her, incredible in its demonstration of the vagaries of the human mind. Dying people didn’t always know they were dying.
Am I one of them?
Almost on her feet now, she fumbled for the radio at her hip. Crazy dizziness threatened her balance like one of those Mexican waves and blood spilled over her forehead and into her eyes, shading the flashing lights of the ambulance a blurry crimson, a rave party for the damned.
She could feel her head injury now, feel her thoughts coming apart like a broken machine beneath her skull. Ever after, she would remain ashamed of the one thought that chugged on as cogs flew apart in the damaged engine of her mind, invulnerable to fear or blood or concern, for others or herself.
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