by Jamie Davis
“Yeah, Gibbie’s right,” Dean added. “Just try and keep them on the line while we head that way. What’s the address?”
Dean listened as she passed along the street address while Gibbie turned and headed to the harbor district. He entered the address into his phone’s navigation app and started giving Gibbie directions based on the instructions he was getting but Gibbie just waved his hand in the air.
“I know the place, Dean. It’s a skeevy vamp hangout for some of the most undesirable members of our community. Stay close to me when we get there, just in case.” The vampire driver looked up in the mirror at their third partner. “You, too, Marian. These guys don’t like lycans and other shifters much.”
Dean felt the van lurch a little when Gibbie accelerated as they got on the cross-town freeway and headed off toward their first call as responders in the night.
13
The white van slid slowly down the street. Dean looked out the passenger window at the abandoned industrial buildings on his side of the road. They were mirrored by similar buildings on the other side. The multi-story brick structures were looming on either side of them in the darkness. The van slowed to a stop, and Gibbie slid the gear lever into park.
“That’s the building right there,” Gibbie said, pointing to the left.
Dean looked at the building on the corner. The flickering streetlight showed the painted bricks spelling out “Sherwood Distillery” on the side of the building’s second floor. There was a giant smokestack standing to the rear of the lot, disappearing into the cloudy night sky’s darkness.
“Okay, we need to be careful,” Dean said. “Just like I taught you guys in our class. Scene safety comes first. Pay attention to where we are and your surroundings. If you see something, say something. We’re each other’s eyes and ears on the street.” He unbuckled his seat belt and climbed out. Marian slid open the door on the side.
“Hand me the med bag. You carry the trauma bag and give Gibbie the heart monitor,” Dean said. He took the bag she gave him and then led the three of them across the street and up the broad steps to the main doors. He reached out and tried them. They were unlocked. He heard Gibbie talking with Wim over the phone behind him asking for directions to the patient.
“Wim says they are on the third floor, towards the back,” Gibbie relayed. “She says to watch out because the floor is falling through in the middle of the room. Stay along the walls.”
“Great, no power, so no elevator and no lights, and we take the stairs,” Dean said. “Okay, Marian, there are two Mag Light flashlights in the side pocket of that bag you’re carrying. Hand me one and you shine the other one. I know you two can see in this darkness, but I am going to be nearly blind up there. Remember that.”
The werewolf girl handed him a long-handled, black metal flashlight. He turned it on and started inside. There was a long hallway ahead of him with trash strewn across the floor. He looked to his left and saw an open stairwell door. He beckoned to the others and started upstairs, watching his footing carefully as the wooden stairs creaked under his weight with each step.
He heard Gibbie stumble behind him and the vampire whimpered a little bit. “Take your time, guys. Watch your footing.”
“I just hate places like this. They give me the heebie-jeebies,’’ Gibbie said.
Marian snorted, “What do you have to be afraid of? You’re already dead. This place is awesome. You could have the most awesome rave here.”
“I’ve always been afraid of the dark, okay.
Dean stopped and turned around, playing the light on Gibbie. “You’re a vampire. Can’t you see in the dark?”
“It’s just shadowy, creepy places. I know I can see in the dark, but I know the darkness is still there.”
Dean saw that Gibbie was terrified. He glanced at Marian and back to Gibbie.
“Let Gibbie hold the other flashlight, Marian. I need you up here with me so you can use your superior sense of smell to help us find our patient.” He waited while she handed off the flashlight and came forward to join him. “Just make sure we aren’t surprised by anything while we are here. You are going to be our situational awareness. Got it?”
“Got it, boss,” Marian said. She had a big grin on her face as she moved to the front of the group. She started scanning the darkness ahead and behind them like a trained bodyguard.
The three responders continued up the stairs, taking their time and making sure of each step. It took precious minutes, but they finally reached the third-floor landing. The doorway to their right opened onto a spacious and open warehouse floor with columns spaced across it supporting the ceiling. The floor was littered with crates and broken furniture. Dean shined his flashlight around the room, but the light failed to illuminate the furthest corners of the huge room. He turned and looked at Marian.
“See or sense anything, Marian?”
The pink-haired teen drew in a deep breath through her nose and closed her eyes for a moment as if considering the scents she was taking in. Her eyes opened, and she pointed to the right, across the room. “There,” she said, the excitement coloring her voice. “I smell vampire and human over there.”
Dean entered the room and shined his light in the direction indicated by his teen colleague. He could almost see the far wall. There was an extensive bank of windows there. Then a bit of movement at the edge of the light caught his eye.
“Hello, I’m a paramedic. Did you call us? We are here to help,” Dean calls into the darkness.
At first, there was silence; then a voice called from the shadows. “Over here, they are over here. Please help.”
It was a woman’s voice, and Dean motioned to the others to follow him as he moved in the direction of the voice. Soon his flashlight beam fell on a trio of figures. Two were lying on a mattress, and one was standing next to it. It was a woman, scrubbing her hands together in frustration.
“Please help us,” she called as the paramedic and his team approached. “I think they overdosed.”
Dean continued closer and started assessing the scene in front of him. There is an old, tattered mattress on the floor with a man and woman lying on it. They both looked homeless, their clothes a mismatch of items and layers. They both looked pale and apparently unconscious.
“I’m a paramedic,” Dean said again as he approached. He held up his hand showing the new tattoo. The woman glanced at his hand and then looked back at him. She gave him a relieved smile, and he caught a hint of her elongated, sharp canines.
“I told him not to drink so long, but he didn’t listen, now he’s taken too much and won’t answer me. She has just stopped breathing, too.”
“What did they take?” Dean asked. He knelt down next to the pair on the mattress. He motioned to Gibbie and the vampire responder started unpacking the wires of the heart monitor and getting out the blood pressure cuff.
“She likes heroin, so Bryce got her a hit in exchange for letting him feed on her while she was shooting up. It’s been fine every other time. This time, though, we got the stuff from a new supplier. It must have been too strong because they both went out almost immediately. It scared me, so I called a friend, and they called you guys.”
Dean looked at her. “What’s your name?”
“Mya.”
“Okay, Mya,” Dean said, using a calm and soothing voice. “We are going to do the best we can to help Bryce and your other friend. Do you know her name?”
“We just call her Red,” Mya said. “I don’t know her real name.”
Dean looked back to his patients. He knew what to do for opiate overdoses, but was unsure how to assess the effects in a vampire who didn’t breathe at all, unless it was to talk. The opiates suppressed the respiratory system and depressed the central nervous system. They also caused pinpoint pupils of the eyes.
The girl was breathing way too slowly; he could see that. Her ragged, snoring breaths were not regular. He leaned forward and shined his light in her eyes and then in Bryce’s. The pupils
didn’t change. They remained tiny points of black in the irises. Dean decided to treat her first, then the vampire.
“Marian,” Dean said. “Get out the naloxone, two syringes, two needles, and two nasal atomizers from the med bag.” The naloxone was the drug that would counteract, temporarily, the effects of the heroin. Marian started digging in the medication bag and handing the requested items to Dean.
Dean drew up a dose of the drug in each syringe and then attached the small silicone rubber cone-shaped atomizers to them in place of the needles. Leaning over his patients, starting with Red, he used a syringe on each and sprayed the atomized drug with half a dose in each nostril. The medication would be absorbed in the nasal mucosa and into the bloodstream. He waited for the drug to take effect. It would have been a faster effect with an IV injection, but that would have taken too much time to get started. She was an IV drug user so her veins would be crappy and hard to access. Vampires had little, if any blood flow, so they were hard to get an IV line in as well.
Bryce started to come around first. His hand moved to brush against his face, then he sat up suddenly, leaned over and vomited blood onto the floor next to him. Dean knew that was the effect of the sudden withdrawal from the heroin. The naloxone worked by suddenly blocking the drug’s access to the body’s opiate receptors. Bryce also started shaking with tremors, but he was wide awake as he looked around the darkened room at the figures hovering over him. Dean showed his tattoo to the newly recovered patient and the recovering vampire saw and nodded. Mya rushed to his side and hugged him.
Red was slower to recover, but her breathing soon became easier, more even and deeper. Her eyes fluttered open a minute or so later. Dean had Gibbie get a set of vital signs on her while the paramedic went and attached the heart monitor leads to check her heart. She looked up at him as he did it.
“Red,” Dean said. “I’m Dean. I’m a paramedic, and I’m here to help you. Do you remember what happened?”
“I think so,” she said looking around. “Did I pass out?”
“Yes. I think the heroin you were using was stronger than you expected or you overestimated the dose,” Dean explained. “I’ve given you a drug to counteract it, but it’s only temporary. You will need more medical attention.”
“I don’t want to go to the hospital,” Red said, a frantic tone coloring her voice. “Can’t you stay with me here and watch me?”
Ordinarily, Dean would have said no. When he was working on the Station U ambulance, the protocol was to transport and put the unit back in service to take care of the next person. What was the protocol here? He guessed he’d have to make it up as he went along. He had plenty of the drug to give until the heroin wore off for both of them. He and Gibbie and Marian were safe right now, so that was not an issue. Dean looked around at his team and then back at his patients. He’d never get them to go to the hospital, and he didn’t have an ambulance to take them in any way. He would have to stay and continue to monitor them, giving additional doses of naloxone as needed.
“Okay, Red,” Dean said. “I’ll stay for a little while with you and Bryce until you are clear of danger. Maybe we can talk about you and what drew you to start using heroin in the first place. I want to give you some IV fluids, too. You’ve lost some blood during this situation.” Dean looked at Bryce, who gave a grim, tight-lipped smile. He looked back at the human girl, and she nodded.
“You aren’t going to call the police, right?” she asked.
“No, that’s not my job unless you do something to hurt me or my companions. As long as we are safe, we will stay, and there will be no police,” Dean soothed his patient’s concerns. “Now let me get that IV started. You’ll feel better with some fluids.”
Red nodded and lay back on the mattress while Dean got started with the IV preparations. Her veins were going to be crappy, but he’d find something. Gibbie started assembling the IV fluid bag and tubing, handing the flashlight to Marian. Dean’s time training some extra skills in his CERT class was paying off. His team knew how to assist him, and it smoothed the process of care. He was able to get fluids started for his human patient. Then he turned back to Bryce.
“How do you feel?” Dean asked.
“Better now,” Bryce replied. He looked at the vomited blood on the floor next to him. “I guess I got that out of my system.”
“At least for now,” Mya snorted. “When are you going to stop using, Bryce. Feeding on junkies just to get high? It’s disgusting, and it almost killed you.”
Dean stayed silent. He wasn’t an addiction counselor, and he had never considered something like this before with an Unusual patient. Addiction was a huge problem for all communities, though there was little he could do to control it other than just respond and treat the addicts. Sometimes a paramedic could encourage someone to seek some professional help, but that was all. Dean turned his attention back to what he could control since he couldn’t stop the addiction itself. He and his CERT team started taking vital signs and monitoring both patients, wary of the need for the eventual follow-up dose of the drug that could save their lives.
14
It was nearly dawn when Gibbie drove him back into the garage at the Nightwing building. They had dropped Marian off at her home hours before, at around midnight. She had school the next day, and they wanted to make sure she paid attention to her grades, as well as her desire to be a paramedic someday. Dean did leave her with some praise for her work that night, along with a warning to keep her grades up if she wanted to keep coming on the emergency response calls with them.
Gibbie pulled his white van to a halt near the elevators and slid the gear lever into park. He looked at Dean with an exhausted glance. Dean knew he looked tired, too.
“Good night, boss,” Gibbie said as he smiled at Dean. “It was a good night, wasn’t it?”
“I think we were successful,” Dean said. “We saved a few lives, and we were able to let people know that we were out there to help them. I still wished they would call the real 911, but for now, this will have to do.” He climbed out of the beat up van and then opened the back to grab the med bag. “I’ll get Ashley to grab us replacements for what we used tonight, Gibbie. Will you please make sure to plug in the heart monitor batteries, so they are recharged for this evening?”
“Got it, charge the batteries,” Gibbie said with a thumbs-up. “You get some sleep. I’ll see you after dark tonight.”
Dean shut the door, stepped back and waved once as Gibbie pulled away and out of the garage. He was exhausted. The first call had been stressful enough, going into that abandoned building. The other three calls they ran over the course of the night had been more routine for EMS calls. An elderly weretiger woman had an asthma attack and had run out of her medications. Dean had administered a breathing treatment for her and then called in to Ashley to see if social services could arrange to have her meds delivered the next day. Then there was an injury sustained by a new vampire who thought he could just jump from a roof and fly away in bat form. Luckily he had fallen into some bushes below that helped break his fall. There was a broken leg that Gibbie helped him set and splint. That would be healed by morning, but it had needed to be attended to before it would heal properly. Gibbie explained to the newbie that his powers would take a few years to develop fully and to take it easy.
The final call of the evening was a young fairy family in the Barrens mobile home park with a baby who had had a febrile seizure. This was a type of seizure brought on by a sudden fever. It was rarely life threatening to the child, but Dean knew it was scary as hell for the parents who witnessed it. Dean stayed on scene for a while, counseling the parents after giving the baby a dose of liquid acetaminophen. He advised them to get some acetaminophen to help keep the fever down until she was better. He also urged them to see about getting a pediatrician. He would get Ashley to refer one who was Unusual friendly. The seizure was unlikely to happen again, but if it did, he recommended they drive over to the ER and get the baby checked out. The
mother hugged him as they packed up to go, thanking him for being available to help them. He knew she meant that he was able to help without bringing the risk of additional human attacks. He told her to let her friends and neighbors know he and the CERT team were available for a while, and that they were working on fixing the whole system to get them safe 911 services again. Thinking back about the night, Dean thought that overall it had been an exciting first evening with the new team. Plus it just felt good to be out on the street helping people again.
Dean pushed the button for the elevator and was waiting for it to arrive when a black sedan with tinted windows pulled into the garage and parked in one of the VIP slots nearby. Dean watched it stop and then Artur climbed from the driver’s seat. He gave Dean a half grin and helped two young ladies from the back seat and walked over to the elevator. Dean wondered if he should warn them what they were in for, but decided to keep his mouth shut. Now was not the time to challenge the ancient vampire. The elevator doors opened, and Dean stepped inside and held the doors for the other three. He pushed the button for their common floor and waited quietly as the doors closed.
“What’s that you’re holding, Dean,” Artur asked. “Missing your time on the streets and carrying an ambulance bag around with you?” The sneering sarcasm in his tone infuriated the paramedic.
“If you must know, I was out all night providing patient care on my own so that people can still get the help they need.” Dean shut his mouth as soon as he said it, but it was too late to take back what he had said. He saw the vampire's dark eyes narrow as he looked down at the battered and used medical bag.
“Well, well, well,” Artur said. “I suppose people couldn’t have expected to keep you on the sidelines for long, provided that was what they were trying to do. You should be careful, Dean. I’m sure your opponents have nothing personal against you, but if you insist on pushing forward with rash and irresponsible actions, things could get … uncomfortable.”