Tomorrow We Die by Shawn Grady Page B

drove in the medicine.
    One. And two.
    No change. Mrs. Straversky stared at me.
    The beeping hiccupped.
    She groaned and clutched her chest.
    The heart rhythm went flatline. Her eyes rolled and her head tilted back on the pillow.
    Respirations stopped. As did her heartbeat.
    The reel of monitor paper curled on the floor. Still flatline.
    Come on now. . . .
    A thin green horizon on a black background.
    Come on. . . .
    Bones’s fingers twitched over the intubation kit.
    Still pulseless.
    “That’s it. I’m tubin’ her.” Bones pulled out the laryngoscope handle.
    “Wait.”
    The elongated tone continued.
    Still flatline.
    He clicked the blade in place. “Let’s start CPR.”
    It beeped.
    And again. In growing succession, like soldiers cresting a hilltop, they flicked on the screen.
    Mrs. Straversky drew a deep breath.
    Bones reached for her wrist. “I’ve got radials with that.”
    I checked the monitor. Eighty beats a minute. Then ninety. One-ten. Slow down, slow down. One-forty. One-seventy. Back to one-ninety.
    The fire crew walked in soot streaked and smelling like smoke. The captain said they’d just cleared from a house fire. I asked them for another blood pressure while Bones explained to Mrs. Straversky that he needed to stick the two large defibrillation patches to her chest.
    Her eyebrows knitted, her face morbidly pale.
    A firefighter reported back on the blood pressure. “Fifty-four over thirty.”
    Her eyelids drooped and her jaw went slack. I shook her shoulder. “Mrs. Straversky? Mrs. Straversky?”
    I switched the monitor settings for a shock that would synchronize with her rapid rhythm. “Charging to one hundred joules. I’m clear. Everyone clear?”
    The firemen backed away with hands in the air. I put my thumb over the shock button, the red light passing through the nail bed. “Shocking at one hundred.”
    Her body jerked and relaxed on the bed.
    I listened to the long somber tone of asystole.
    I would breathe when she did.
    It beeped.
    And again.
    In regular, marched-out succession, leveling at a beautiful rate of eighty beats per minute.
    Color returned to her cheeks. She opened her eyes. “What happened? I have got a horrible headache.”
    Bones smiled. “We’ll take a headache any day, ma’am.”
    On the ride to County Hospital she was talkative though tired. Her tennis friend rode in the front seat with Bones. I sat on the bench seat beside her, jostling with the motion of the rig, jotting down info on her chart.
    She brought a hand to my forearm. “Thank you for coming to my house so quickly.”
    Quickly? “Did it . . . seem fast to you?”
    “Oh yes. Compared to the other times.”
    “Other times were longer?”
    “This isn’t the first time I’ve had to call you handsome young men. Aprisa has been to my house before. Though I do live a ways up in the hills.”
    “But the ambulances, they didn’t arrive faster the other times?”
    She shook her head. “Oh no. I was fortunate that you boys were closer this time.”
    I patted her hand, got up, and sat in the captain’s chair behind the gurney. “Mrs. Straversky, I’m going to call the hospital and let them know we’re coming in.”
    “Thank you, dear.”
    I lifted the black phone from the wall and requested a patch to County’s ER.
    Mrs. Straversky would be all right. Our training, our tools – they did what they were designed to do. But had it taken us any longer to get there . . .
    There was a reason the first ambulances looked like hearses.

CHAPTER 14
    Bones swooned. “Has there ever been a sweeter voice to grace the VHF band?”
    It was no secret that he was infatuated with the sultry-voiced new swing-shift dispatcher. She melted his butter like nothing else. If he were a Warner Brothers cartoon, his heart would be beating out of his chest, eyes star-crossed, with songbirds flitting about his head.
    “Here she is, here she is.” He pointed at the radio console as if it held her very essence.
    “Ten-four,