by Jamie Davis
“Take it away,” Rudy said with a wave of his hand. “I’m no hostage negotiator. I would much rather take a direct approach and charge in there. But I also know what that would mean to our friend in there.”
Dean nodded and moved around in front of Rudy.
“Hello inside the office,” Dean called out. “My name is Dean. I’m a human paramedic. Can you tell me your name?”
There was no answer.
“Look, I understand you are injured, that you were bitten,” Dean called out again. “I want you to know that no matter what you think, there is a way to keep anything from happening to you as a result of that.”
“You’re lying,” the shaky voice came from inside the room. “I know that it’s just a matter of time until I turn into a freak like those other monsters out there. I’d rather die.” There was a shriek from inside the room and then Dean heard Gibbie’s frantic voice.
“Dean, he’s got a stick, and he is sharpening it with a pocket knife. Get me outta here.”
“Everybody needs to calm down,” Dean said trying to project his voice without sounding like he was shouting. “Tell me your name. I told you mine.” There was silence for a bit then the voice answered.
“I’m Eric.” The voice sounded exhausted. Maybe he was losing blood, Dean thought.
“Okay, Eric, I’m not lying about helping you,” Dean replied. “I have a drug that can reverse the shape-shifting effects of the bite, but I need to administer it quickly after the bite for it to work.”
“How do I know you’re telling me the truth?” Eric asked.
“I’m a paramedic, a healer, a medical professional and a human,” Dean replied. “I don’t lie to my patients. You are my patient. I came here to treat anyone wounded during this rescue. That includes you, too.”
“You’re him,” Eric said.
“What?” Dean asked.
“You’re the one that we helped the Chief frame for Zach’s murder,” Eric explained. “Why would you want to help me?”
Dean paused. As much as he felt vindicated by hearing Eric’s admission, he was angry, hurt and emotionally engaged. That made it tough to be a professional in this situation. If he were an armed tactical medic and he had been in the lead elements of the assault on this building, he might have even been called upon to injure or kill this person. Now he was in the difficult role of trying to help him. Why was he interested in helping this guy? Letting Eric become a werewolf, turning into a creature the man had dedicated his life fighting against, would be a fitting punishment. But that wouldn’t be the right thing to do. Dean was a healer. Being a paramedic and helping people was all he had wanted to be, if he stopped doing that, even for a moment, just because he was angry — well, that made him no better than them.
“Eric, all I can tell you is that I’m here to help you. I also want to rescue my friend. We can accomplish both things here. You sound tired. Is your wound still bleeding?”
“Yes, I can’t do much with one hand to stop it,” Eric said.
“I think you need to let me come in there and stop that bleeding. Once I do that, I can give you the medicine that will stop you from getting the disease that causes shapeshifting. That’s what it is, you know. It’s just a disease. They aren’t monsters. They are just people who got a type of virus, and have adjusted to living with a long-term illness.”
“We don’t really see it that way, Dean,” Rudy whispered behind him.
“Shhh,” Dean said lowering his voice. “I’m trying to talk him out of there. We can talk about your lycan culture and history later.”
Eric was quiet for a few moments, then he responded. “I don’t want to become like them. I don’t know. You could come in here and do anything to me. How do I know you are telling me the truth?”
“Eric, at the end of it all, I can’t give you any guarantee beyond my word, my promise that I want to help keep you from dying, or developing the shapeshifting illness,” Dean said. “Think of what you’ve heard about me. Have you heard anything about me that denies that I work hard to take care of my patients, whoever they are?”
Another pause in the conversation, then Eric replied. “Okay, but if anyone comes in, it is just you alone. If I see anyone else, the vampire dies.”
A hand clamped on Dean’s shoulder. “No, Dean, it’s too risky,” Rudy whispered in his ear. “We have no way to protect you.”
“Ashley told me that I had to make a choice,” Dean said to the pack leader. “That I would have a decision to make that would solve the problems here in Elk City. I think maybe this is it. I am a healer first and foremost. I need to go in there and tend to the wounds of a man who is my enemy, no matter how I feel about him personally. I have to do this.”
“If anything happens to you, James and Ashley will have my head on a stick,” Rudy said. “If you’re wrong, and this goes south, you are dead, and another decision you were supposed to make never gets made, then we are all screwed; you know that, right?”
“I’m not wrong in making this decision,” Dean said. “This may not be the choice Ashley is talking about, but I have to try and save that man - enemy or not. Plus, you heard what Eric said. He has the information I need to clear my name in Zach’s murder. He knows about the plan to frame me. This has got to be the solution Ashley foresaw.”
“It’s your head, so it is your decision,” Rudy said. “We will be just outside. We are still listening in over Gibbie’s hacked phone. If you need us to rush in, just say the word ‘banana’ in a sentence. We will try to do our best and rescue you.”
“Banana, really?”
“Sorry. I’m hungry; food is on my mind,” Rudy said with a shrug.
Dean almost laughed, then stifled it and turned back to the office. Raising his voice again, he said, “Eric, I’m coming in alone. I’ll come up and open the door slowly. I’ll have my trauma and medication bags, and a heart monitor, okay?”
“Okay,” Eric called back. “Just move really slow when you get to the door.”
Dean shouldered his bags and picked up the heart monitor. He stepped out from behind the stack of crates. He half expected to hear a gunshot and feel the punch of a bullet. But that didn’t happen. He took a deep breath to steady his nerves and walked over to the door to the office holding Eric and his hostage. Dean slowly turned the knob and opened the door. He looked inside.
In the back corner, away from the windows, stood a man not much older than himself. He had blonde hair, and if Dean had met him under other circumstances, might have been the kind of guy Dean would have thought nothing about on the street. The man’s shoulder was oozing blood, and the bite had shredded his shirt so that Dean could see tendon and bone exposed there. This was Eric, and he must be in a lot of pain, not to mention going into shock from blood loss. Dean knew he had to work fast.
Eric held a sharpened wooden stake over Gibbie’s chest, but his hands were shaking. Gibbie was seated in a chair wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts. There was a silver cable around his neck that wrapped around his chest and down to his feet. Dean could see red welts in the vampire’s skin where the metal cable contacted it. That had to be painful for Gibbie, but he was silent. His eyes were wide, though, and seemed to plead with Dean to get him out of this predicament. Dean shot him a grim smile.
“Eric, I’m Dean,” he said from the doorway. “May I come in?”
“Yes,” Eric replied. “But close the door behind you.”
Dean followed the instructions, taking a few steps forward and pulling the door closed behind him. Dean moved a little closer, taking his time until he was about five feet away from the pair in the room’s corner. He set the bags and heart monitor down on either side of him. He pointed to the Eric’s shoulder. “That looks painful, and it’s still bleeding like you said. Let me tend to it and give you the medicine I talked about.”
“What is it?” Eric asked.
“It’s a wolfsbane extract,” Dean said. “It will act as a counter-agent against the virus you
probably contracted when you were bitten. I don’t know the full numbers, but nearly everyone bitten by a shapeshifter contracts the disease unless the extract is administered within an hour or so. When we get you to the hospital, we can get you the follow-up doses you need.”
“I don’t want to become one of them,” Eric said, his voice falling to a whisper.
“They don’t want you in their pack either, not this way,” Dean said. He smiled. “The shapeshifters are a proud group, and they wear their disease as sort of a badge of honor. They don’t let others in unless they feel they’ve earned it in some way. This happened as a result of a fight, and they would like very much for me to heal you, so you don’t turn.” Dean knelt down and slowly unzipped his medication bag. He had prepped a few syringes for this likely occurrence, and he held one of them up for Eric to see.
“May I?” Dean asked. “I’ll give you this shot and then I can do something to stop that bleeding.”
Eric looked at Dean, then at Gibbie. He lowered the stake he was holding on his hostage and sank into a chair just behind him. He nodded to Dean. “Go ahead. I guess I have nothing to lose.”
Dean walked over and pulled the other guy’s t-shirt sleeve up, exposing the deltoid muscle of Eric’s uninjured arm, giving him the injection after quickly swabbing the skin with an alcohol prep. He stepped back to his bag and looked at his patient. “I’d like to dress that wound and stop the bleeding next, but it’s going to hurt. May I give you some morphine to help with the pain first? It might make you sleepy. It is your choice.”
Eric just nodded. He seemed resigned to the situation now. Dean drew up some morphine and gave him another injection in the same shoulder. He rubbed the injection site with his gloved fingers to hasten absorption of both of the drugs.
“I’m going to give that morphine a minute or so to start working, Eric. Okay?” Dean asked. Eric just nodded. Dean hoped that the drug would help to sedate him. The opiate painkiller had some euphoric effects as well as helping to manage pain. After a few minutes of silence, Dean gathered a trauma pad and some four-by-four gauze pads from his trauma bag and started to tend to the wound, packing the gauze in tightly to stop the bleeding, and topping it all with the trauma pad which he held in place with direct pressure from his hand.
Erik winced a little but otherwise watched the paramedic work in silence. He looked up and met Dean’s gaze. “I didn’t think you’d do it. I thought you’d try some sort of trick. Why?”
“I told you. I’m a paramedic,” Dean said. “It’s my job, or at least it was until I got suspended for a crime I didn’t commit. You sounded like you know something about that? You said the chief killed him, and you helped him frame me for the murder?”
“It was awful,” Eric said. His eyes welled up, and he looked like he was about to cry. “Zach had been caught on the security camera setting the Sabatani’s fire. The chief told Zach that he had to leave, that he couldn’t stay in Elk City. But after Zach left the room, the chief told us he could serve another purpose. When Zach came back after packing up his stuff so he could take off, we held him as ordered and called the chief, waiting for him to arrive. He showed up and then — then he just walked up to Zach, pulled out this big knife, and he just stabbed him while we held on to him. I didn’t expect that. None of us did, but what was I supposed to do? Then the chief had us wrap up the body and sneak him up to your apartment. It was easy enough to stick him inside and put your kitchen knife in his chest.”
“But he was your friend, part of your group,” Dean stated. He stepped back and looked at the other man. “How could you do that to him?”
“I don’t know. I guess I was just in too deep at that point,” Eric replied. “I didn’t know how to get away. We had done so many bad things at that point. I knew that what happened to Zach, well, it could happen to me, too.”
“You keep mentioning the chief,” Dean prompted. “Who do you mean? Do you know his name?”
“I heard Zach call him Chief Compton once,” Eric said. “I think that was his name. We just called him the chief because he and the other fireman, Mike Farver, would show up sometimes in their fire department uniforms. It was like they wanted us to know they were connected to the top, you know?”
Dean listened as Eric started to talk about everything. He talked about the attack on the witch, the assault on other patients, the setting of the Barrens fire. He tied himself, and this group in the warehouse to everything that had happened. Dean hoped that Gibbie’s phone caught it all and that Rudy had the recording still going. This was everything they needed to stop The Cause. When Eric was done talking, he sighed.
“What’s going to happen to me?” he asked.
“We are going to turn you over to the police, and you can tell them what you told me. Maybe they’ll offer you some sort of deal.” Dean secretly hoped the police did not do that, but he didn’t know much about how such things were done. “In the meantime, can I get those silver cables off my friend? He looks like he’s in a lot of pain.”
Eric nodded, and Dean started to work Gibbie free of the silver cable. He soon had them worked loose enough for the vampire to slip out from under them and extricate himself. Gibbie stood up and turned to look at his captor.
“Won’t he attack me?” Eric whined looking at the vampire standing over him. “He’s going to kill me.”
“Oh, honey,” Gibbie said, rubbing at his sore wrists. “You are not my type, believe me.”
25
Dean walked outside to the street and took a long breath of fresh air. He needed to settle his nerves after what had happened in the warehouse. The police were on their way. Rudy had called them. He wanted them to handle the situation once Dean had settled Eric down and released Gibbie. Dean heard the sirens in the distance coming closer. He hoped this would finally rid them of the problem with this hate group in the city. He wanted things to return to normal again.
Eric had known nothing of Artur. In fact, he had refused to believe Dean when he brought the vampire lord up. He told Dean there was no way any of them would take orders from any of those creatures. Dean knew it was too much to hope for to be able to tie him directly to all of this. Ashley and the others had told him that Artur was a careful planner with lots of experience at intrigue and insulating himself from direct involvement. He should be happy enough with what they recorded about Zach’s murder. There was now plenty of evidence about what the chief did to Zach, and how they framed Dean. Marian checked the phone’s connection and confirmed that the recording was complete. She even made sure it was saved to the cloud with a back-up just in case. Once the police heard the recorded conversation and talked with Eric directly, it should clear his name completely regarding the murder charges against him.
He pulled out his phone and called Ashley. He wanted to hear her voice. It always calmed him to talk to her. He also wanted to see if she thought he had completed his quest - that the decision to treat Eric and save him instead of attack him had to be what he was supposed to do. It must be the choice she had talked about. Dean wanted to see this finished and know that everything was done. He got her voicemail and left a message that he was okay, then disconnected the call. He would have to get an answer to his questions later. Most of all he wondered if Ashley would leave Elk City now that the reason for her presence was resolved.
The first police cars arrived, and he was hustled off to one side as their response teams entered the building. He also saw two ambulances arrive. He recognized U-191 as it pulled to a stop nearby. Dean saw his friends, Bill and Lynne, climb out of the Station U ambulance. They saw him, and each nodded to the other as they set up to take care of the patients he had started care on.
“Flynn,” He heard a voice behind him. He turned to see Detective Ricketts. “I don’t suppose I should be surprised to find you here. You seem to be mixed up in this up to your eyeballs.”
“Detective, I’m here as a contractor with a private security team sent to investigate a corporate kidnapping,”
Dean said, using the cover story Rudy had worked out for him at the beginning of this operation. It covered him from getting in trouble for operating as a paramedic while suspended by the fire department.
“Private contractor, huh?” Ricketts snorted. “I’m sure you have the paperwork to back that up so I won’t even ask.”
“The most important paperwork should be the paperwork to drop the charges against me. I believe you will find that everything I have said about my innocence is true. We have recorded evidence and an eyewitness to clear me,” Dean said. “The security team has all of it inside the warehouse, as well as whatever other evidence you discover inside. We recovered Gibbie, too.”
“I’m glad your friend is alive and well. We shall see about the rest of it. Let me do my job and process the evidence,” the detective said. “You should stick around, though, in case we need to ask you any questions about this highly unusual, private security operation inside city limits.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Dean said. “I’ll be right here if you need me.”
The detective nodded, left a patrol officer with Dean, then went inside the warehouse. Dean was not sure what it was about him that the detective did not like. He had thought Dean was guilty in the murder of Zach and didn’t seem inclined to change his opinion about him, despite Dean’s protestations of innocence. He guessed that was related to the detective’s experience in his job as a police investigator.
Dean waited and watched as a lot of police and assorted evidence-gathering crime scene techs entered and left the building. Eventually, he saw Bill and Lynne bring Marian’s Uncle Morgan out on a stretcher. Marian walked beside him to the ambulance, then climbed into the front seat. She looked around and gave him a little wave before she closed the door. Dean was sure she was excited to ride in a real ambulance. It looked like Bill was driving. Knowing him, he would probably let her run the siren on the way to the hospital. Dean laughed at the thought and hoped the people on their route had ear protection handy.