the thought of my now twice-dead love life, my urge to make small talk chilled.
Across from me, Charles was starting in on his second cone of fries. Funny how knowing exactly what a ton of salt and fat could do to your heart didn’t stop you from wanting to eat them. Like nurses who worked in oncology and still smoked. Charles watched me watching him eat, and tilted the cone toward me. I waved away his offer—it still felt too early to eat, my stomach was on night shift even if I was awake—and he shrugged.
“You sure you don’t want to talk?”
“Yeah.”
Charles measured me as he polished off the fry cone. “Here,” he said. He wiped his hands on his napkins, then opened his coat and reached for his shirt buttons.
“What are you doing?” I whispered, and glanced around to see if other restaurant patrons were looking.
“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.” Three buttons down, he started pulling the fabric out and away from his neck. “Seven years ago. Were-attack. Shattered my clavicle. I couldn’t lift my arm over my head for six months.”
I couldn’t see anything; it was shadowed by the clothing he’d bunched away to show me. But I believed him that the scars were there. Even if they didn’t show—they were there. I shook my head. “I’m not showing you mine. Just trust me, it looks like I got a C-section from an epileptic.”
Charles released his collar and straightened his shirt. “That sucks. But on the plus side, at least you didn’t wind up needing to start a college fund.”
“True, that.” I helped myself to one of the loose fries on his tray.
“So now we’re scar-buddies. Right?”
I nodded quickly, a little ashamed at how badly I wanted Charles and me to get along.
“Then listen to me, Edie. What I’m trying to say is this—I remember how it was to be you. All excited about the adventure—it’s not a safe way to be. You have to protect yourself. You have to remember that to them, we’re disposable.”
I didn’t need to ask who
“So no heroics. Be safe. I want to keep you around.”
I was genuinely glad someone unrelated to me did. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” He finished his soda and stood. “Let’s get back. Only five hours of films to go.”
We bundled up and pressed outside again. “What do you think the next film will be?” I should have gotten a Diet Coke for the road. Maybe then the need to pee would keep me awake through class.
“I liked the one where they explained how to evacuate the hospital by taking people down the stairs one at a time.” I wasn’t even sure Y4 had stairs. I’d only ever taken the elevator in and out.
“God. If we did that, it’d end up being some sort of horrible Hurricane-Katrina thing. Some people would get left behind, others’d make bad choices. If it ever gets that bad, I’m staying home.” Charles hit the button to change the intersection’s light, and I decided to press my luck.
“So tell me about the were attack?”
Charles kept his eyes on the light across the street, but I could see him squinting into the past. “Ask me when we have advanced life support recertification. We can trade war stories then.”
“Fair enough.”
There was a man with tufts of white hair sticking out from under his snow cap six lanes across from us, pacing back and forth. At first I thought he was just trying to stay warm, but as he moved I could tell by his bearing that he was angry. The traffic between us slowed as the light changed. Charles and I stepped off the curb at the same time as the other man did. We were across half a lane when a truck that’d seemed to be slowing down for the red light sped up instead. I heard the engine shift gears, looked up, and saw the man coming toward us do the same.
It hit him.
He crumpled forward against the hood, arms out, like he was hugging it in a moment of game-show triumph. Then it launched him into the air. I stopped in the middle of the road, stunned, unable to believe that I was actually watching someone fly. He made an arc, landed, bounced, and skidded to a stop, smearing red behind himself.
Half a second for the impact to occur, another half a second for the landing, and then the sound of screeching brakes as all other rightful traffic through the intersection came to a halt—except for the truck, which kept going. It missed the man’s landing body by inches, and drove away with his blood in its tire treads.
“Jesus Christ,” Charles said, and started to run for the injured man. I ran after him.
CHAPTER TWO
“I’ve already called nine-one-one!” yelled a bystander. I could hear someone retching behind me as we reached the man’s still form.
“Everybody back! We’re nurses!” Charles yelled.
“Raccoon eyes,” I whispered, having only seen it once before, on a trauma test in nursing school.
“Brain shear, go figure.” Charles spared me a dark glance.
We had no supplies. We couldn’t move him and risk his spine. One of the man’s legs was twisted the wrong way, denim torn open, exposing meat and bone below. A moment earlier, and we’d have seen the stuffing of him, ragged edges of skin, yellow-white subcutaneous fat, red stripes of muscle tissue. But that moment had let his blood catch up with his injuries, and now it welled out from arteries and leaked from veins. It filled up his wounds, overflowing their edges and spilling out like oil onto the ground. When it began to ebb, I gritted my teeth and reached in, pushing against his broken leg’s femoral artery. Blood wicked through the fabric of my glove and was hot against my hand.
“Here’s an old-timer trick.” Charles knelt straight into the stranger’s thigh, his knee almost into the groin, only pausing for me to pull my hands out of the way. The blood leaching out of the man’s leg subsided—although that might’ve been because there wasn’t much left. “It’ll clamp down the artery completely.”
I inhaled to complain now was not a good time for class—but I stopped when I realized teaching was what Charles did to cope. Our patient groaned and tried to move his head. I crawled through the gravel and broken glass up to the man’s head. “Sir, you can’t move right now. There’s been a bad accident.” I put my hands on either side of his head. His snow cap had been peeled off, along with part of his scalp, and his wispy white hair was sticky with blood. “I’m so sorry, just please stay still.”
“Aren’t you going to breathe for him?” someone behind me asked. I glanced back and saw a man with a cell phone jutting forward.
“What is wrong with you?” I swatted the phone out of his hand, sent it skittering into a slick of blood stained snow by the curb. “Show some respect!”
“Hey! That’s my new phone!” The bystander started pawing gloved hands through the grimy snow to get what was his. There was a shadow there, cast by the man himself, and I saw it shudder, swallowing the phone inside its blackness like a throat. I wondered if it’d been a trick of the light.
The injured man moved again, reaching up a hand to fight me. “No no no no no,” I said, but he continued to clutch my wrist with the strength of someone who had nothing left to lose. “Stay still, okay? It’s all going to be
