like this. Turn those off.”
“Too late. Drive.”
So she drives. An ambulance. With the lights on. Down a crowded city street. She isn’t supposed to be here, not in the back, not anywhere. And yet here she is. Driving. She runs a few lights and eventually makes her way back to the car. She’s a little shaken but giggling, and when I ask if she liked it, she nods and says, “I kinda did.”
• • •
In May I finally escape. I’m standing outside a dialysis clinic, there to pick up yet another legless patient and carry her back to yet another run-down nursing home, when my phone rings. It’s the recruiter from Rural/Metro, the company with Fulton County’s 911 contract. My heart pounds as she tells me they’re about to start a new-hire class. “Are you interested?”
“Very.”
“Can you start next week?”
“I can start right now.”
She laughs and then launches into a disclaimer: The opening is in South Fulton County. North Fulton, she says, is much more popular because it’s affluent and safe and people don’t call as often for toothaches and headaches and babies with a fever. South Fulton, by contrast, is all run-down apartments and poverty and roach-infested ghetto.
She pauses, clearly expecting me to hang up. And then, with hope in her voice, she asks, “Are you ready for this?”
BOOK TWO
Fresh Meat
8
Pray for Carnage
Picture a lawn mower blade. Heavy and dulled by the constant thwack of sticks and rocks. Rusted steel and motor oil covered in a fuzzy green layer of minced grass. It spins on a bent axis, the bolt loose and the blade wobbling ever so slightly as it goes. It’s early morning, the grass wet with dew. A foot slips and disappears under the mower’s bruised metal frame. The blade, more belligerent than precise, hacks through leather, rubber, and cotton, right on down to sweaty black flesh and crooked bones. A single scream rises in the air, joining the pungent cloud of oil smoke from the two-stroke engine. The mower stops. Three toes, starting with the big one and working inward, are hacked off and scattered in the grass. Never to be found, just gone.
“Gone. Sheeeit.” Our patient looks at me, his pained expression replaced for a moment by a horrible realization—his toes are gone. He’ll never walk right, never run. Never go barefoot. He shakes his head. “Sheeit.” He’s sweating on the stretcher, shedding diced-up bits of grass. He smells like blood and gasoline. “Sheeit.”
This is my first call at Rural/Metro, my first call on a 911 ambulance, and I’m happy. Glad to be here, to be the one to catch this call, glad he cut his toes off. Somewhere there’s a doctor who’ll tell him there’s nothing to be done, that she can sew him up but the toes are a memory. “Get a cane,” she’ll say. These words will break his heart but not his spirit, and he’ll get over it and get better—eventually, he’ll get back to work. But I’m not here for the diagnosis or the cure. I’m here for the blurry and frantic moments right after the injury. My partner, a medic named Jerry, has been around a few years, so a man with three missing toes barely commands his attention. But me? On my first day? It’s magic. We drop him off and run more calls.
We end the shift with a woman who’s spent the night in the company of a dozen steak knives and an ever growing puddle of congealed blood. Jerry and I wander the house, collecting knives and looking for the second victim—no one has this much blood. But it’s just our patient and her demons, and though she won’t tell us what she’s done, she says it’s bad, too bad to tell anyone, and that she just wishes she could die. There’s a cleaver on the kitchen floor, bloody and rusted. Next to it sits a bent knife, the skinny kind used to filet fish. She kicks it dismissively, derisively, says it’s useless. No good for cutting through human flesh at all.
These are the endcaps to my first day, and when it’s over, I don’t want to leave. All I can think about when I get home is the start of the next shift. All I want to do is run calls, treat patients, drive the ambulance, stand in line at a convenience store in a rough part of town. This uniform, a light blue shirt with patches on the arms, opens doors. It conveys knowledge.