by Jamie Davis
“That’s bad, Brynne. Where’d you get it?”
“It’s posted all over social media,” she answered. “People are sharing it and following it up with links to the werewolf video. You heard about that?”
Dean nodded. He had taken some time to look it up online when he got back to his apartment. It was grainy and dark due to the low light level at night, but he recognized the transformation of the werewolf in the distance, although it could be explained away as a hoax with special effects.
“I saw it last night when I got back to my apartment,” Dean said. “I didn’t recognize the individual, but it appeared real enough.”
“It was Desmond Levann,” Brynne said. “He’s a member of Rudy’s pack. James is furious, both that he was so careless in where he shifted, and that Rudy’s pack was out hunting at all.”
“Yeah, but it’s easy to call it a cheap knock-off horror video,” Dean said. “It’s terrible visual quality, and the whole thing could have been faked. That's what I would think if I didn't know better. I saw a local news item on the TV that made fun of it.”
“I saw that, too,” Brynne said. “But it’s a basic violation of the rules for members of the pack to change without first carefully checking to make sure no one is watching. He didn’t do that. Now with this photo making the social media rounds it’s only a matter of time before someone makes the wrong statement at the wrong time, and someone starts to connect the dots. James texted the link to me after a reporter called his office for a comment on his being called a monster online.”
“I’ll bet he loved that,” Dean quipped.
“He didn’t respond,” Brynne said. “I’m sure he pawned it off on his assistant, Celeste. She gets paid a lot to handle such annoyances. The problem is that this photo, plus the werewolf video, equals trouble if anything else public happens. The chief just sent us an announcement that we are to do everything possible to ensure our patients’ privacy while in the public eye. It’s not like we weren’t doing that already. You’ll need to acknowledge receipt in your email inbox, by the way. It’s an official Station announcement in the system.”
Dean crossed over to the other computer workstation and sat down to log in. He saw the email from the Chief. He quickly scanned the email. It was just what Brynne said it was. He sent a receipt reply back and then looked through his other emails. He stopped when he saw one subject heading and who had sent it. Mike Farver sent him an email with the subject “We Need To Talk.” He opened the email. Mike simply asked to meet again at the diner one night after his shift this week. Mike called it his last chance to do the right thing before it was too late. Dean wondered what that meant. Mike was still working at the academy teaching, but the chief and other leaders were aware that he had possible ties to The Cause.
“Brynne,” he said. “Mike Farver emailed me.” He turned to look her way as she swiveled around in her chair behind him. “He wants to talk with me ‘before it’s too late.’ What should I do?”
“I don’t know, Dean,” she replied. She spun around to face him. “Part of me says you should go so you can learn what he’s up to. But another part worries that this could be a way to set you up for a fall in some way.” Brynne pursed her lips in thought for a few minutes before proceeding. “Let me talk to James and email the Chief. They may want to do something to watch you so nothing happens.”
“He wants an answer by one o’clock this afternoon,” Dean said. “Could they have a timetable?” He thought some more and said, “I’ll wait to see what the Chief says, but I’m inclined to say yes. This can’t go on the way it is. We need to stop The Cause from trying to get in the way of our programs helping the Unusual population. Ashley worries that some of our patients will stop calling for help if they see themselves as potential targets. Now, with this outing of their leadership on social media, it’s only going to get worse. Maybe we can get ahead of it if I meet with Mike. He might let something slip about their plans.”
“Ashley’s right,” Brynne said. “Our ambulance call volume is off by about twenty-five percent and headquarters thinks it’s due to the attacks on people associated with us at Station U.” She thought for a moment more and then nodded. “I’ll tell the Chief that I recommend you meet with Mike, but I’ll go with you. I haven’t talked with my old partner in a while. Maybe I can talk some reason into him. I should have suspected he would be part of this, but I honestly never thought he’d take his personal issues and go this far.”
“I thought he was sent to the academy because he was such a good paramedic and instructor,” Dean said.
“He is a good paramedic, Dean,” Brynne said. “Or he was. Mike was chosen for the original Station U crews because he was so good at his job. The problem started when he became way too overprotective of me after I started dating a vampire. He couldn’t get past my choice to date James. I think he had always seen me as a daughter figure. He didn’t approve of my choice in boyfriends.”
“He’s not necessarily alone in that thought, Brynne,” Dean reminded her.
“That’s not the point,” she said. “You’ve gotten over it, mostly. Maybe he still has those parental feelings for me. It may make him more open to telling us something during the meeting at the diner. That’s why I’m coming along. Well that, and to keep you from doing or saying anything stupid.”
“Okay,” Dean said turning back to his screen. “I’m going to email him back and let him know that I’m coming to meet him today after our shift. I won’t tell him about you coming. Maybe the surprise will help.”
There wasn’t time for the conversation to continue because right after he sent the email reply to Mike, the first call of the day alerted on the overhead speakers starting with the musical tones that alerted their station’s radio system. The dispatcher’s voice followed the tones.
“Medical Box U-821, chest pain, 1235 Telegraph Road.” The male dispatcher’s voice said.
Dean and Brynne grabbed their jackets and headed out to the ambulance bay to respond to the chest pain patient. There’d be time to formulate a plan for the upcoming conversation with Mike later in the shift, Dean thought, as they drove out of the station and onto the streets of Elk City.
* * *
———
* * *
Their chest pain call turned out to be an elderly Rakshasi - a Hindu spirit in human form, who looked like she had a heart attack. Although known as man-eater demons in the lore, she seemed nice enough from what he could see. The heart monitor showed an abnormal waveform called ST-Elevation, and the woman’s symptoms of chest pain, shortness of breath, and profuse sweating all pointed to a heart attack even if the heart monitor hadn’t showed it. Dean knew that only about half of all heart attacks showed up right away on the heart monitor.
He started the blood work in the portable iStat device in the back of the ambulance while Brynne started them on the way to the hospital. He suspected that her labs were going to show high enzyme levels that signified heart damage based on what he was seeing. He continued treating her with oxygen and additional nitroglycerin to ease the chest pain. He was watching her cardiac activity on the heart monitor and ran another diagnostic strip to see if the ST-elevation had progressed and gotten worse. He was looking at it when an alert sounded, and his eyes darted to the monitor. The uneven rhythm of ventricular fibrillation showed on the screen, and that meant she had slipped into cardiac arrest. He briefly checked her for responsiveness then immediately attached the defibrillator pads to his patient’s chest, then charged the heart monitor to deliver a shock.
“Brynne,” he called up to the front of the ambulance. “I’ve got a cardiac arrest. Initiating code procedures.”
The monitor finished charging up, and he made sure he wasn’t touching the patient, then pressed the shock button to deliver the stored charge to the Rakshasi’s heart. Her chest heaved with the sudden contraction of the chest muscles fueled by the electric charge. Dean waited a few seconds for Brynne to finish pulling over the ambul
ance before he could safely stand up and start CPR. He began with compressions and opted to do a full two hundred compressions over two minutes since she had just been breathing, and her lungs were still full of oxygenated air. Brynne climbed in the back with him as he continued the compressions.
“One shock delivered,” Dean said, already out of breath from the exertion. “I’m on the first set of compressions following the shock.”
He watched as Brynne grabbed the drug bag from its shelf and started gathering the meds for a cardiac arrest. He was nearly finished his first two hundred compressions when the woman’s hand moved, and her eyes fluttered open. He stopped and looked to see that she was breathing. As he stopped compressions, the heart monitor showed that the heart rhythm had returned to sinus tachycardia, a rapid heart rate but not one that was lethal and needed a shock. The initial shock of her lethal heart rhythm had worked and reset her heart’s organized contractions.
“I thought I’d lost you there for a minute,” he said to the patient as he pressed the button to check her blood pressure and run another diagnostic strip. Brynne drew up some meds to be given and hopefully stop her from going into the fibrillation rhythm again.
“Ow, my chest,” the woman said, putting her hand to her breast bone. “It hurts. What happened?”
“Your heart stopped, and I had to start CPR and shock you,” he watched as Brynne pushed the anti-arrhythmia drug into the IV tubing that lead to the patient’s arm. Then his partner clapped him on the back in support of his good work and left the back of the ambulance to head back up front and continue the drive to the hospital.
“Did we stop?” the woman asked.
“Yes,” Dean said. “There’s no way for me to do effective CPR bouncing around in the back of a moving ambulance. It’s not all that safe either. Our protocol has the driver stop and come back to help with CPR. Now that you’re back awake and talking again, we can finish our drive.”
“Well, I guess I should thank you,” the Rakshasi said. “I wasn’t going to call you. I was afraid it would identify me to those awful humans who are hurting us. But the pain was so bad, I couldn’t wait any longer for it to get better.”
“You did the right thing,” Dean said. “Chest pain and trouble breathing are two things you don’t want to fool around with. They aren’t likely to get better on their own and often are signs of serious trouble. You rest right now. I’ve got you, and we’re almost to the hospital.” Dean continued monitoring her closely, but the lethal arrhythmia did not return. He was glad. It could just as easily gone the other way and she would have died.
He was still thinking about how close a thing it was, even after they had dropped her off with the critical cardiac care team in the emergency room. He and Brynne were wiping down the cot as they always did between patients when Brynne looked up at something behind him and said, “Jeeze, Ashley, you look like hell.”
Dean turned around and saw Ashley coming towards them. She still looked pale and her eyes had a sunken appearance. She had clearly not taken his advice to stay home and take another day off.
“Ash,” Dean said. “I thought you were going to stay home and take it easy.”
“You thought that, Dean. I never said it,” Ashley replied. “I always planned on coming in. The rest of the nurses are short-staffed most of the time as it is. They don’t need me calling out. It’s not like I’m infectious.”
Brynne snorted, “I’m not disagreeing with you, Ashley, but you look awful. You should have taken lover boy’s advice. What’s wrong with you if you’re not sick?”
Ashley briefly explained what had happened on their trip to the lake two days ago. Brynne’s eyes grew wide at the description of the girl’s injuries and even wider when Dean chimed in and described what Ashley had done to halt the spreading infection.
“Damn, Ashley,” Brynne said. “I knew you Eldara were powerful, but that must’ve been pretty impressive.”
“It’s not without a price, as you can see,” Ashley said with a wan smile.
“We had to carry her back to the cabin, and she stayed in bed for the whole first day afterward,” Dean told his partner. “I was really worried about her. She says she’ll eventually regain her strength, but I don’t want her to go around doing things like that regularly.”
“He doesn’t need to worry about me, Brynne,” Ashley said. “I can take care of myself. I just can’t draw on my power without paying a price, albeit a temporary one. All Unusual powers comes with a price. I’ll be fine.”
“If you say so, Ashley,” Brynne said. “Still, maybe you should take it easy a little longer.”
“I’ve taken to doing routine tasks like drawing blood and doing triage for the day. That will keep me from the most strenuous work,” Ashley said. “Another two or three days and I’ll be as good as new.”
Dean pulled her to him in a brief hug and gave her a peck on the cheek. “We’ve got to get back in service, but I’m glad you came out to see us. I’ll come by later after work and check on you. We have a meeting after work, but I’ll only be an hour or so late.”
“A meeting?” Ashley asked.
Brynne spoke up. “Just a work thing. It’s going to be boring but hopefully not too long.”
Dean shot her a glance about the lie but said nothing. He gave Ashley another hug and then the two paramedics rolled their stretcher back out to the ambulance. When they got outside, Brynne spoke up.
“She didn’t need to be worrying about the meeting with Mike,” she said. “She wasn’t going to talk us out of it anyway. You can tell her about it later if we learn anything interesting. Otherwise, she never needs to know.”
“Look at you being all top secret and stuff,” Dean said as he loaded the cot into the back of the ambulance and slid it into place.
“It’s all about the ‘need to know’ my friend,” Brynne said. “Come on, let’s grab a snack on the way back to the station, my treat.”
22
The rest of the shift was uneventful with only a few other routine ambulance calls. The two paramedics were able to spend some time talking about their plan to confront the former Station U paramedic, Mike Farver. They knew, based on Dean’s earlier conversations with Mike, that he was somehow involved with The Cause and the attacks on Unusuals in the Elk City area. They didn’t have any proof other than their suspicions. But based on those suspicions, he might even know where Zach was, which would help the police put a stop to the attacks.
When Bill and Lynne returned to take over that evening, Brynne followed Dean over to Hank’s Diner, near the station, to confront Mike. Dean saw Mike’s marked fire department SUV parked in the parking lot when he pulled in, and he got a tight feeling in his gut at the upcoming conversation with his former mentor. Mike had embodied everything that a paramedic was supposed to be as Dean’s one-time instructor, and Dean had strived to meet his approval when in the academy and afterward at Station U. The discovery that he was somehow connected with The Cause had been a huge letdown to the new paramedic, and he was still struggling with that realization.
Dean parked in a slot that had an open parking space next to it, and Brynne pulled her Nissan sedan in next to his pickup. Dean got out and waited for her to emerge from her car, then walked up to the diner entrance next to her. As he did, he realized she was his new mentor. That sudden realization helped him reconcile some of his feelings about confronting Mike there.
The two of them entered the diner, and Dean saw Mike seated at a booth at the rear. He also saw the surprise register in Mike’s eyes when he saw Brynne was with Dean. The two paramedics walked back to the booth and sat down across from Mike, Dean sliding into the booth first.
“Hello, Brynne,” Mike said. “It’s been a while.” He glanced at Dean but didn’t say anything, turning his gaze back to his former protege and partner.
“Yes, it has,” Brynne responded. “You know, Mike, I thought that you were through all of this drama about our patients at Station U when you moved to the
Academy.”
“You thought I’d forget they existed simply because the Chief moved me to the Academy?” Mike asked. “If anything, it made me more aware of the danger we faced. The danger that you faced.”
“So you’re still mad about me choosing James against your wishes, is that it?” Brynne asked. “You have to let this father-figure, over-protective streak go, Mike. It’s time.”
“How could I, when you were in danger every time I let you go home to that blood-sucker,” Mike hissed. “Then, after I got moved to the Academy, I started getting pictures sent to me of the two of you together on dates. They came from an anonymous contact who also feared for your safety. I knew I had to act. Luckily my new friend had other contacts and plans to help me out. He just needed my help to get the ball rolling.”
“So you’re not involved with this alone?” Dean asked. “You have somebody you’re working with, doing these horrible things?”
Mike looked at Dean, and Dean felt very small, like a child who had spoken up during a grown-up conversation. The elder paramedic said nothing to him and turned his attention back to Brynne.
“I’m not alone in my concerns about these creatures living among us, Brynne. I was fine in the beginning when they were just seeking medical treatment, but when I realized the true dangers, the dangers they posed to you and impressionable people like you, I could sit by no longer.”
“I’m not a child, Mike,” Brynne snapped. “I can make my own choices and decisions, and live my own life. I don’t need or want your help.”
“Like I said,” Mike replied. “I’m past that now. You’re beyond saving. You’re gonna end up one of them, and there’s nothing I can do about that. I have to worry about the safety of the rest of us.” He turned and looked at Dean. “This is your last chance, kid. You can get out of this and save yourself. I know you’ve gotten mixed up with one of them, too, but it’s not too late. Has that Eldara nurse got you so far under her spell that you can’t leave?”