A Thief in Medic's Clothing

Charlie fought off a wave of nausea as she secured the IV in her patient’s arm. Her fingers moved apart from her, spiking the bag of fluids, connecting the line, titrating the flow. The young woman on her stretcher had bright friendly eyes and an easy smile, her breathing finally returning to normal after the adrenaline rush of her fender bender. She was sickeningly grateful, thanking Charlie and her partner Fred with every other sentence. She really thought they were saving her life.

The truth was she could have walked home. Charlie palpated the seat belt rash across her chest, noting no signs of broken ribs. She had neck pain that was from minor whiplash and not a cervical injury, although she was eager to receive the c-collar to protect her spine from further damage. Most patients stubbornly refuse the c-collar for its minor discomfort, including many that truly did have cervical injuries. Charlie had never seen someone so excited to have hard plastic propping their chin up like a giraffe.

Charlie knew this woman would have been fine. She would have some aches and pains that could be treated with an over-the-counter anti-inflammatory, and she would tell her girlfriends all about how she almost died over brunch and mimosas this weekend. Charlie’s breaths came tight and shallow at the thought.

Fred snapped the gloves off his hands and launched them across the back of the ambulance to fall a whole foot short of the trash can.

“You good to go, Charlie?”

She had lost count of the number of times Fred had rolled his eyes behind their patient’s head. Fred was old in Paramedic years, a whopping forty-five. His decorum was in short supply, and he reserved his empathy for those few people that would benefit from it. At nineteen, Charlie wasn’t sure how much longer she would last.

Charlie knew Fred had to bite his tongue often on this call to keep from telling this woman that she didn’t need to go to the ER. That was against company policy. Not that policy had stopped him before, but they also had new body cams to ensure those policies were followed. She was honestly surprised that Fred hadn’t already “lost” his body cam down a sewer with the way he constantly cursed the thing.

“Good to go, Fred.” She gave a shaky thumbs up and coughed into her elbow to excuse the catch in her voice.

Fred paused halfway through closing the side door, squinting at Charlie.

“You sure? I can take this one if you want.”

Charlie was sure her skin was starting to take on its telltale gray pallor, but she straightened in her seat and said a little more forcefully, “No, it’s okay. Thanks for offering though.”

He squinted harder.

“Okay… you yell if you need anything. You hear me?”

“I hear you, Fred. Thanks.”

He shut the door and Charlie’s heart plummeted to her toes as her eyes returned to her patient’s beaming smile. She was telling Charlie about the eight-week-old Weiner dog her husband had brought home for her birthday. She named him Toodles and she was in the process of sewing him tiny beach outfits to wear on their vacation this Summer.

Charlie snapped off her own gloves and pulled her notebook and pen from her pocket. She braced her feet on the floor as the ambulance started moving, her body starting to feel weightless, untethered. She interrupted a story about Toodles befriending a caterpillar.

“Sorry, Dear, could you tell me your name again?”

“Oh no problem at all! It’s Patricia Smilee. That’s Smilee with a double ‘E’.”

Charlie’s pen stuck on the page, and she glanced up at Patricia.

“Yes, I’ve been told it’s ironic. I like it though, it’s a kind of self-fulfilling name, don’t you think?”

Charlie grunted and finished writing the name.

“And your birthday?”

“Ten days and twenty-four years ago.” She chirped. “I already can’t wait for the next one. Maybe Jeff will get a brother for Toodles.”

Charlie’s eyes burned as she recorded the date of birth. She blinked away the wetness and tried to ignore the darkening in the corner of her vision. Whether that was because she felt like she was about to pass out or because she was fast approaching her deadline was irrelevant.

She found her eyes wandering over the skin exposed by Patricia’s polka dot dress and pink heels, praying to glimpse a prison tattoo under a hem or a track mark or a suspicious bruise. Anything to tarnish this woman’s golden aura, to make what she had to do seem like a mercy in one way or another. Patricia deserved another birthday.

Charlie had been lucky so far, working in the city. Most of the time when the darkness came reaching, she had a criminal, or a junkie, or someone with a terminal illness or just a terrible quality of life in front of her. There had always been some way to justify the trade, however flimsy that justification was.

She looked at Patricia, imagined a halo floating above her strawberry blonde curls, and the nausea was back.

Charlie swallowed violently and focused back on her notebook. This next question was important. Not that anybody could ever prove she did anything, but she already had the worst outcome ratio of anybody at her company and she had to include some semblance of natural plausibility in her report.

“Patricia, do you have any medical history?”

“Oh, you can call me Patty, Sweetheart.” She patted Charlie on the knee and Charlie almost flinched out of her seat. “And no, I do not, healthy as a horse!”

“Are you sure, Patty? I need you to think real hard.” Charlie tried to keep the desperation from her tone.

“I mean, I guess my momma mentioned a heart murmur or something when I was a little girl, but that’s all I can think of. Does that help?”

It would have to do.

“Yes, Patty, that helps. Thank you.”

Patty smiled even wider, if that was possible, her white teeth so shiny Charlie had to look away for fear she’d catch her own guilty reflection.

The ambulance hit a specific bump and a turn that told Charlie they were only five minutes out from the hospital. She could swear the hands of her watch found a megaphone to project their ticking.

“Patty, I just have to call the hospital real quick to let them know we’re almost there.”

“You do you, Sweetheart! I can’t believe it’s almost over, you’ve made this ride fly by.”

Charlie moved to the airway seat behind the stretcher and grabbed the radio with clammy hands. She patched into the ER and gave them the quick report, her tongue thick and lifeless in her mouth.

“P3 coming in with a twenty-four year old female, driver, rear-ended in a two car MVC. Patient was restrained, no airbag deployment, no head strike. Complaining of neck and chest pain, vitals stable, be there in five. Any questions?”

Silence on the radio. That was just as well. Charlie could feel her heart getting sluggish and her insides hollowing out.

She moved back to the bench next to Patty. Her vision tunneled on Patty’s gaudy charm necklace. The darkness in the corners gaining weight and form, long and spindly, getting too close for comfort.

“Patty, do you have your phone on you?” She heard herself ask.

“I do, but its dead.” She looked down, pink coming into her cheeks. “Jeff is always telling me I need to charge it more often.” She looked up through her lashes and giggled, “He can never know he was right.”

Charlie always kicked herself afterwards when she offered this, but she couldn’t stop herself in the moment.

“If you want to give me his number, I’ll call him after we drop you off and let him know you’re alright.”

“Would you really? That is so sweet of you.”

Charlie wrote down Jeff’s number.

“Is there anything in particular you’d like me to tell him for you?”

“Oh yeah, please tell him he’s not allowed to skip Toodles’ nighttime bath just because I’m not home.”

Charlie cringed. She still hadn’t figured out a good way to ask someone what their last words would be to a loved one without freaking them out.

“Anything else?”

“Yes, please tell him I’ll be bringing this collar home for spicy time. It’s a thing for him, don’t ask.”

Charlie choked a little.

“I think I’ll just stick with the first part if you don’t mind.”

“Yeah, that makes sense. Sorry, TMI, I know,” Patty chuckled to herself.

Charlie looked out the back window and recognized the traffic lights in reverse, two minutes to the hospital.

Patty cleared her throat and her tone was suddenly much more serious than Charlie had heard it.

“You know, I just wanted to say that I have so much respect for you and what you do. I do realize that it could have been a lot worse for me, and you have been so kind putting up with me, I know I can be a lot for some people. But I know you must see worse all the time. I couldn’t handle seeing death every day like you do, and I just… well, I just want you to know that you are appreciated.”

Charlie couldn’t stop the tear that slipped down her cheek this time, or the laugh that broke from her chest. The irony had teeth.

She did see death. Not every day, but on a schedule. The first time had been when she was fifteen. She’d had the incredible stupidity to play tag with her best friend in a thunder storm. They had loved playing in the storms, feeling the current thrumming through the air and the chaos whipping through the trees. It made them feel alive. Nothing bad had ever happened and the ritual had become more powerful each time they survived it. But this time, the lightning found her and the lightning hurt her.

As she lay splayed out on that muddy plain, heartbeat slowing in her chest, rain slipping down her gaping throat, eyes wide and frozen on her friend’s panicked hands fluttering over her, she met death.

She had heard lots of theories about what death looked like, even some stories from near-death experiences. But in the end, death wasn’t a skeleton in a cloak, it wasn’t an angel, it wasn’t a light, and it wasn’t a comforting embrace leading her to a better place.

Death was a shadow. It reached with spindly limbs of darkness that latched on to the edges of her loose soul and sucked and pulled and scraped. Charlie had never felt such pure white-hot fear.

She didn’t really understand what happened next, but she thought it might have something to do with the residual lightning ricocheting through her cells. Her fear gathered like an explosive in her heart, until she screamed with her soul and blasted those inky tendrils away from her. She thought she could hear death snarling at her impudence.

The next thing she knew, she was gasping, choking on rain, her heart hammering loud and powerful. She looked over and her friend was cold and dead on the ground next to her.

Charlie knew Death, and Death knew Charlie. Death hunted Charlie. It crouched in the confines of her shadow and waited for her borrowed time to run out. She could feel it there, slithering closer and closer as her body burned through its stolen salvation, as she grew colder and slower and weaker. The fear that haunted her came slamming back each time, setting her aflame, and she had to steal again. She was no different than any of the addicts she had sacrificed to Death’s ravenous maw.

Charlie realized she hadn’t answered Patty’s heartfelt words. She didn’t know how to tell her that the only reason she became a Paramedic was for ease of self-serving murder. That wasn’t entirely true. Charlie liked to tell herself that it was also so she could fight Death for other people in between her sacrifices; to atone. But she figured that was a moot point. No good deed could wipe her slate clean. There was no forgiveness, no redemption, no scrubbing the stains from her skin.

Charlie slumped back on the bench seat, unable to hold herself up any longer. Thirty seconds to the hospital. Her heart reached a glacial pace, her breath seized in her chest, and she could only see Patty’s falling smile through the vines of darkness swarming her body.

“Sweetheart, are you okay? You aren’t looking too hot.”

Charlie felt Patty’s hand grasping her own cold deadened digits.

“Oh my Lord! You’re colder than a grave! Do we need to stop?”

Charlie told herself she would give in this time, that she had taken enough, and she deserved to be taken in return. She thought Patty deserved another birthday and Toodles deserved a brother.

She tried to greet Death like an old friend, with a presumptuous familiarity, scared that the versions of themselves they’d become didn’t fit anymore, but optimistic that they would if she could just break through that first wall of awkwardness.

She tried to reach back towards those tendrils, to grab them like a life raft and be pulled to deliverance. She touched the tip of one and Death salivated as it lurched forward and sunk fangs and thorns into the soft tissue of her frayed soul.

Charlie reveled in the sting and thought, just for a second, that she had done it. She thought she had finally done the right thing, but then there was the fear. The scorching wave of terror that sent electricity rotting through her veins. It was infinite, all-consuming, and undeniable. Death screeched and Charlie cried as she thieved her way back to life once again.

Heart pounding and lungs gasping, Charlie wiped the tears from her face and got to work, hands moving from memory. Applying defibrillator pads to Patricia’s chest, noting the lack of any electrical activity on the monitor. She inserted an oropharyngeal airway device to keep her tongue from choking her, applied a non-rebreather with high-flow oxygen, and she started chest compressions, knowing it was futile. Any potential future Patricia had was currently thrumming beneath Charlie’s skin.

The Ambulance stopped after parking in the ER bay. Fred threw the back doors open, squinting at Charlie. This wasn’t the first time he had left Charlie with a perfectly stable patient only to find her pounding on the chest of a corpse at the end of the road.

“You’re looking better,” he said. It sounded like a question.

Charlie met his eyes for just a second and couldn’t bear the accusation there.

“She had a heart murmur,” she said between panting breaths that sounded a lot like sobs.