Fantasy & Science Fiction Mar-Apr 2013 (23 page)

He wondered how it would be to sit and wait for the sunrise, but checked himself. He stared back in the direction he had come from. He could roughly make out the path, and the ledge where the cave was hidden, where his father was waiting. Committing this to memory, he pranced downhill, turning back every few moments to further solidify in his mind the cave's location.

Soon he was on a field without rocks or trees. A million stars, the universe endless. Wheel ruts. Snow covered them lightly along with scattered hoofprints. Going east, he soon found himself between tall trees and a wooden fence. He smelled a wondrous smell, the aroma of smoke from a wood-burning stove.

A small cottage stood before him, with a wooden porch in front and a smoky wisp curling from a chimney. He felt joyous but also cautious. He was unsure how the inhabitants might welcome his nighttime calling.

He strolled up to the front door and knocked, feeling lightheaded. He waited a moment. He knocked louder; heard voices. A bilious wave rippled up from his gut and the world started spinning. Someone on the other side of the door asked, "Who goes there?" His legs buckled and the landscape tilted. Out of his peripheral vision, the porch approached. He felt a clapping crunch and swirled into blackness.

 
THE ROOM was dark. He was in a bed. Pillows, sheets, blankets. A young woman was asleep next to him. He closed his eyes and drifted….

Later, he awoke, alone. The room drenched in sunshine. On a wooden box was a pitcher of water, and a glass half-full. Through a window: evergreens, shrubs. Scattered patches of snow, glistening blue at the edges.

He swung his legs over the edge of the bed. His stomach ached and his head throbbed. He put on his pants, shirt, and socks. Where were his boots?

Opening the bedroom door, he shouted, "Hello?"

He heard rustling elsewhere in the house, and a beautiful woman with black hair appeared. Dark eyes, his age.

"My name is Kaleb."

Tilting her head, she looked at him oddly. "That's what you told us…last night."

"I don't remember."

"You didn't say much," she said, leading him down the hall. "We were worried."

They entered a larger room, with chairs and a fireplace, and a sink and table and cupboards. He smelled food. An older woman with white hair looked up from a rocking chair.

"He's awake," the young one said.

"Kaleb," the older woman said. "You must tell us your story. After you eat."

Kaleb ran his hand through his hair. "Are there any strong men in the village? My father must be rescued."

The women exchanged glances.

"I beg of you," Kaleb said, "we must get help at once."

"The food's getting cold," the young one said, draping her arm around his waist. He felt good and a little lost; it was a strange and cozy feeling, being touched this way, and he wanted to sink into her for support and hold her tightly, but he was hungry. Starving. He needed sustenance.

He sat. The old woman smiled and picked up some knitting needles.

He was given oatmeal with butter, and he spooned it in gulps. There were sausages. He picked them up one at a time and ate many, sucking his fingers after each one.

And later he would remember the view through the window: a shapeless cloud blotting out the horizon.

It snowed that afternoon as he and four men from the village finally set out down the road. Two women came, too, the wife of one of the others, and Anna, the beautiful dark-haired one he had stayed with last night. He was glad for all the help. For a time he felt part of something larger than himself, a tribe united in a purpose; but then the wind died and the snow turned to rain, a drizzle at first and then a steady downpour, and almost imperceptibly the mood changed. Night came. The women prayed, and then, after saying farewell, headed back to their cottages.

Under curtains of rain, the men left the road and trudged up the mountain while clouds obscured the moon and mud sucked at their boots.

When at last they found the cave, a raging creek was feeding it, and there was a debate as to who would enter.

The oldest man stayed back with the one horse while the others, in single file, squatted and descended the scree on hands and rumps as water gushed underneath the boulders they were clutching.

At the bottom of the rocks, they huddled together in water up to their thighs; the tunnel going forward, which had been partially filled with water yesterday, was now completely submerged.

He remembered standing with them, as they each held torches, illuminating their wet hair and dampened spirits, as they discussed the options. They made tentative plans to return the next day, and then the next, but it rained for a fortnight, and the cave was not mentioned again. Kaleb left the village.

He wandered alone, living off the land and by his wits. In his travels he came across other villages, and sometimes found work for a few days, to buy food and shelter, but he rarely spoke and was looked on as a ne'er-do-well; some even considered him deaf and dumb.

When summer came, he returned to the cave but did not enter. He spent several weeks nearby, never venturing far. During the days he strolled about naked, and at night he made fires, which eventually one of the villagers spotted. They sent out an emissary—Jibbs—who visited him and urged him to return to the village. "It may not be the place you have in mind," Jibbs confided, "but you might be able to make a contribution of sorts that will, in turn, yield its own rewards, in a manner of speaking."

And so it was that Kaleb returned to the village, and eventually fit in, more or less, as one of its inhabitants.

Some years later, during springtime, he hiked back to the area near the cave and lay on a parcel of grass. Closing his eyes, he smelled sweet pollen and heard birds, and the gurgle of a nearby brook, and then he felt a pleasant peacefulness, a sensation as if he were comfortably falling into a dream. He awoke to a sound of shouting and for a moment he felt disoriented, as if what was about to happen had happened before, or maybe it had never happened and this was the first time.

He squinted in the sunlight. A boy with black hair was running toward him, a boy with a gleam in his eye and a face brimming with excitement. "Papa, Papa," the boy said, "I have something to show you…Papa! Papa! Come quick!"

Almost a decade ago, Mike Reaves told us the tale of the Midnight Cruiser. Now he spins a new tale of life and death on the roads...but this time, the vehicle is an ambulance and the Emergency Medical Technicians staffing it are looking to save lives.

Those of you who share
F&SF
with younger readers probably shouldn't pass along this story on account of the adult situations and language in it.

 
THE FIRST THING JACK noticed, as his shocked senses came back on-line, was a considerable amount of pain in his neck and shoulders. Next, almost nauseating in intensity, were the smells of antiseptic and blood. The antiseptic he was used to; it was part of the rig, every bit as much as the shiny chrome, the compartments filled with syringes, saline flushes, catheters, and tourniquets, the drug box holding norepinephrine, atropine, insulin, and dozens of other protocols.

The blood scent he wasn't all that used to, seeing that it was his own.

The wagon was rolling at a good clip. Jack felt it slow, heard the siren snap out a brief warning rasp before it accelerated again. Too light outside to see if the rack was lit, but he suspected it wasn't. Code 2, then—expedite, but not a hot response.

So he probably wasn't dying.
Good to know
.

Claire, his partner, was sitting beside the gurney. She smiled at him. "Ironic," she said.

Jack shook his head—or tried to. That was when he learned he was wearing a whiplash collar. "No," he said. His voice sounded far away and echoing to him, and his mouth felt stuffed with cotton. He looked quizzically at Claire. "You gave me morphine?"

She snorted. "Right. I'm gonna dose you Sked One after a suspected TBI. Dream on—or rather, don't."

"I never went under, though I was swirly for a couple of minutes." But his arguments were pointless, and he knew it. No EMP-T with the sense to spell "malpractice" was going to give a possible concussed patient any chem that would potentially put him or her out, because from there it could be just a short stretch down the track to comaville.

Claire leaned in close; he could smell the tart sweetness of the gum on her breath and felt another surprisingly strong surge of nausea. "Listen close, Mobley—you will
not
fucking die on me. Understood?"

"Yes, ma'am." He didn't know what else to say. He had to drop something into the intensifying silence, however. "Anyway, like I said—it's not ironic."

Claire looked puzzled. Her improbably red hair shimmered as she cocked her head quizzically, unwrapped a second stick of gum, and slipped it into her mouth. Then she meticulously folded the foil and tucked it into the watch pocket of her black 501s. "You're an ambulance driver whose rig was totaled by a DUI. I'd call that—"

"Ironic. I know you would. But it's not." He forgot his circumstances again, tried to sit up, fell back with a groan. "'Irony' conveys a concept that's the exact opposite of whatever you'd expect," he told her. He searched his aching head for an example and, not surprisingly, couldn't think of one. He tried anyway: "Like if I said, 'Yesterday I rolled on a fifty-one-fifty,' and you said—"

"'You're an asshole,'" she finished. "Would
that
be ironic?"

Jack smiled sheepishly. "No, that would be the truth."

The two of them had started together; Jack Mobley and the rig. Jack couldn't be sure that it had rolled off the assembly line the same time he had completed 1-Basic, but he liked to think so. It was oddly comforting.

He remembered seeing it for the first time in the ER lot, gleaming bright and otherworldly in the halogen glare. The paint job was crisp and clean, the company logo almost three-dimensional; the chrome grips and stanchions unblemished by fingerprints and smudges; the aluminum diamond plate innocent of so much as a single molecule of blood, vomitus, urine, or serous fluid. Even the tread on the tires was brand new.

This pristine condition hadn't lasted long, of course.

Claire Jefferies was already an experienced EMT-D when she'd been assigned to the new truck. The idea of riding a wagon that still had—however briefly—that showroom smell had appealed mightily to her, but the rookie who came with it, not so much. It wasn't that she disliked Jack personally—it was simply the same impatience and vague contempt the seasoned pro always feels for the amateur. Once she felt confident that Jack had fully assimilated what she called "The Awful Truth"—that their job had little, if anything, to do with saving peoples' lives—then she knew that the two of them could face together the ninety-eight-point-six percent bullshit that EMTs had to wade through every day. So that was all right.

The first few calls had been fairly routine, albeit with their share of stomach-churning moments for the new guy. Jack quickly learned about such things as the unofficial but all-too-descriptive Code Yellow and Code Brown, and the importance of seatbelts—graphically illustrated one night by the convertible full of drunken teens that had hit a tree at seventy-five. When they'd arrived on scene there were only two bodies in the car—the other three were impaled on the branches overhead like macabre fruit. One of the boys had been flayed of his pants by the impact and subsequent impalement, and his bowels had let go as part of the universal atavistic fight or flight response. His underwear, stained and still dripping, hung from his shoe. "Hey, look at that," Claire had deadpanned. "Fruit of the Limb underwear."

The choice between losing his lunch and laughing in shocked astonishment had been surprisingly hard. But he'd made the right decision.

You had to laugh.

Then there were the absurdly grotesque cases, such as the man who'd hired a prostitute to blow him while he was riding in a limo. Things were going pretty much okay until the lady of the evening, for the first time in her life, had a
grand mal
seizure and clamped down, her jaws locking in a convulsive spasm that probably clocked in at over 300 psi. The limo driver, distracted by the client's sudden blood-curdling screams, drove off the road, down an embankment, and into an oncoming lane, where the limo was hit three times and rolled 200 feet. The driver was killed, the prostitute miraculously uninjured, although thoroughly traumatized, and the client suffered considerable injuries from ricocheting around the compartments; not the least of which was an almost-severed penis.

You had to laugh.

You had to laugh because it was either grow a shell thicker than the carapace of a hundred-year-old sea turtle or go fucking insane. Those were the choices, and there wasn't a lot of room for nuance. The door stayed shut or swung wide. It was either TV or real, and, not surprisingly, most of those who lasted opted for the former. EMTs, doctors, firefighters, police, morticians, and all the other professions that dealt with the dead on a quotidian basis…they all had one thing in common: an irreverence for those cooling pieces of meat that had once been animated by personalities, souls, or whatever you wanted to label them. Their humor was mordant, tasteless, shocking…and, ultimately, their salvation.

The situations weren't always that bizarre, of course, but what they did have in common, pretty much all of them, was a life-or-death urgency. It was called by various names: the Golden Hour, the Sunset Hour, or, perhaps most tellingly, the Magic Hour; whatever the nomenclature, they all meant the same thing. If the patient could be stabilized and "lifted" (the term used to apply to medevac helos on a war line; now it simply meant getting the Dump to the ER STAT) to treatment within an hour of First Response, his or her chances were about as good as could be expected for survival. The survival probability dropped precipitously after that first sixty minutes; Jack had seen patients go from "Stable" or "Fair" to "Critical" in less than five minutes. They'd once brought in a knife victim who'd had his femoral artery cut. They'd got him stable (they'd thought), but had neglected to notice a very slight nick in the brachial artery from the same blade. The latter had popped during offload; the guy was dead before an intern had noticed the rapidly spreading red stain beneath the shock blanket and the corresponding BP drop from the bleeder.