marbledog
Joined: 28 Jun 2008
Posts: 26
Location: Virtually everywhere
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| Posted: Mon Jun 30, 2008 8:57 pm Post subject: Savior (Working Title) Ch. 1 |
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Be advised that the following text may contain profanity and adult content.
Eddy Price smoked slowly as he wrote up the run report. His hands did not tremble in the least. The glowing cherry tip of his Camel was a fixed point, his Polaris. He did not speak, but he thought. He considered his hands as he wrote, pale and wrinkled and fresh in their rubber casings. His left hand held the cigarette loosely, even casually, as the right scribbled out the events of his last call. He glanced over the figures and marks that did nothing to convey what had actually transpired ten minutes earlier. Eddy wrote automatically as he thought, trying to remember how it felt, what precisely had happened. The boy was alive at least. Whatever it was that occurred, miracle or magic or fluke, it had to be a good thing. Eddy wanted to believe that. He let his eyelids slide a bit lower, shutting out a bit more of the harsh fluorescents that illuminated the smoking area. His hands continued to work as he drifted, scribing perfectly comprehensible nonsense and raising the livid cigarette to his lips and back again, back again. His gaze fell on the ambulance and stuck there, drinking in the sight of it and remembering…
Sirens are never lonely. Their wail is not lonesome or ashamed. Whatever they herald, whatever danger or death they announce, they are always accompanied – by people, by vehicles, by medicines and riot arms and the silent assurance that they scream for someone else. Sirens toll for everyone but thee. Their unabashed howling announces their existence, delivers the imperative to MOVE and the unspoken bargain, “It could be you… but not this time.”
Eddy did not hear the banshee. He had been inoculated against it for some time. He worked swiftly and methodically in the back of his ambulance, a coordinated mechanism of conditioned reflexes and applied knowledge. His hands were slick inside his ivory gloves, and his dark uniform was speckled with darker drops of someone else’s blood. Eddy didn’t notice these things. He was a machine, an automaton, a robot whose programming contained one directive – Save The Child. His gloved hands moved over the boy with assurance and precision: prodding, testing, mending. The child did not respond.
He looked to be eleven or twelve, the dark-haired boy that lay bleeding and wilted on the stretcher. Earlier, when they first arrived on the scene, Eddy had been hopeful. The child’s mother was killed instantly, thrown from the vehicle, but the boy was intact. Eddy remembered the image of the boy’s face imprinted in the windshield. The features were clearly distinguishable, like an old-fashioned death mask sculpted in ground glass. He remembered the small, waxy sliver of nose handed to him by a terrified volunteer fireman. Fireboy, he thought. He couldn’t have been older than nineteen – terrified and awed and holding the strip of tissue in his hand like a relic, precious and horrible. Eddy knew that the boy wanted nothing so much as to run as fast as he could away from that place, but he stayed, and Eddy thanked him for his help. He reminded himself to call the fire station and commend them when they returned from the hospital.
But remembrance is a luxury of idleness; there was no time for memory when it happened. The child was fading. Eddy knew the signs, had read them in books and gauges and monitors and seen them painted in sanguine life. The young could compensate for injury remarkably well… up to a point. The youth under his hands was fast approaching that peak, and he knew that there would be no return from it. Adults may linger and waver, but a child takes only one path once compensatory mechanisms fail.
The boy was pail, waning. His quickened pulse went reed-thin.
Eddy knew these things, though he didn’t think about them. His mind was occupied with regulating the hands and body, measuring dosages and applying balms and reading monitors. His brain, however, an altogether different thing, thought about those things and more. The darker corners of his labyrinth considered the motherless child who would soon be gone – alone, hurting, afraid, unaware. It considered the others who had died in Eddy’s hands: grandmothers and firemen and rapists and bums and, most of all, children.
The boy did not breathe.
Death is not cruel, never cruel. It is heartless and brainless. It does not care because it does not know. His hands worked faster, of their own accord, such sleight of hand to stave of death – to distract and misdirect the stupid brainless thing. Such léger de main, a trick, an act of simple prestidigitation to raise the dead. It could be done, he knew. Such was the state of the art that death could be cheated and tricked with these simple trappings: a chemical, a pump, an electrical current.
The heart stopped its rhythmic dance. Eddy responded without truly noticing.
A trick is what it was, just a little misdirection. That is the essence of magic, no? Man, alone among the animals in intelligence, in his ability to lie and deceive could simply play a minor trick – could fool idiot death any time he pleased. It was just… a… matter… of…
Eddy stood stock still for a moment. Sweat dripped into his eyes and into the face of the dead boy. His hands began to move again, though not with the probing, technical gesticulations of a medicine man. They were the hands of an ingénieur – sliding, flaring, insinuating. Heart follows hands, he thought. He did not question why. He merely concentrated on the task at hand.
Heart follows hands. It’s just a matter of misdirection.
The child’s chest moved faintly, then stilled.
Eddy concentrated harder, his hands ever working, transcribing occult paths in the air above the boy’s heart. The boy lives, he told himself. It was almost true, a practical reality, only one part illusion. He sold it and sold it and made the turns again. The boy lives. It was such a simple sell. He wanted to believe, and that made him an easy mark. He just needed the flair, just a simple act of innocence, a naiveté that would allow him to believe, just for a moment. Eddy closed his eyes. The boy lives, he told himself, and he knew that it was true. Something broke.
The child bucked against the restraints of the spineboard, his spindled chest heaving in the straps. He gnashed at the tube in his mouth and vomited violently. Eddy’s mechanics kicked into gear once more. He freed the tube gently from the child’s trachea and suctioned the sickness from his throat, fastening on an oxygen mask as he did so. The boy’s screams did not register. His pain was a laboratory thing, the be noted and disregarded. He calmed as they approached the hospital, enough to talk a little. His voice was raspy and paralytic from the trauma of the endotracheal tube, but he told Eddy his name.
His name was Brian. Brian lives…
“You hungry?”
Eddy blinked twice before he could focus. His partner was approaching him, speaking. He gave an inquisitive grunt.
“Are you hungry? I just finished cleaning the truck. Thanks for making such a mess back there, by the way. I just figured we should get something to eat before we catch another call. What are you in the mood for?”
Eddy shook his head slowly and gave a shrug.
“How about some waffles? Come on, bud. That was a hell of a save. Let’s go celebrate. I’m buying. You can finish your report in the truck.”
Eddy glanced down at his hands. They had never stopped writing. It took him a moment to recognize the black ichor that coated them: his gloves, melted and singed. The skin that showed through in cracks was pink and chapped but unscarred. His partner noticed, too.
“Woah. You’d better get cleaned up before you get in the truck. Try to hurry up, ok? I’m starving.”
Eddy nodded and walked towards the hospital’s ambulance entrance. He had much on his mind, but, for the life of him, he hadn’t a clue what any of it was.
So what now? Eddy obviously has a lot to think about, but what should he do with this newfound power? Should he just sleep on it and not think about it? Maybe experiment with it to see what he can do? Should he consult a priest or a doctor? I just started this piece, and it's very rough, so all suggestions are deeply appreciated. |
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