Primal Threat - Earl Emerson [1]
“Good. What’s your name?”
“Nadine Newcastle.”
“Hello, Nadine. My name is Zak. Now, I don’t want you to worry. I’ve been to dozens of wrecks, and most were a lot worse than this one, so we’ll get you out. Actually, this will be fairly easy.”
Zak could see her breath in the dark interior of the car. Even though it was early February, she was clad in shorts and a short-sleeved blouse and was shivering, partly from the influx of cold night air and partly from shock. Her femur looked intact; her knee was aligned and normal looking, but below that her tibia and fibula were not visible in the twisted metal.
She started crying again, a desperate series of hiccuping sounds that almost resembled giggling, tears glissading off her upside-down face. “I want out. I want out of here.”
“Don’t worry. It’ll just be a few minutes. Then we’ll both be out of here, but we’re going to have to be patient.” He smelled gasoline, and even though the motor was off he had an ominous feeling that the car was going to flame up with them inside, a feeling he always entertained while working inside a wreck. Without letting go of her, he reached up with one hand and tried to remove the keys from the ignition, but they wouldn’t come loose. Even with the car off, he would feel better with the keys in his pocket.
“Can you wiggle your toes?”
“I think so.”
“On both feet?”
“Yes. I’m so scared. Please get me out, Lord. I know You know what’s best, but I don’t want to die like this.”
“Listen to me,” Zak said. “Nobody’s going to die. We’re getting you out, and I’m going to stay right here with you until it happens.”
“Honest?”
“Of course. That’s my job.”
“Pardon my saying so, but I think you have a lousy job.”
“Well, I’m glad I have it tonight, because it offers me the chance to help you through this.” As he spoke, her cheek brushed his, her long hair falling into his face. Her teardrops cooled his neck as if they were tiny splashes of alcohol.
“Do you ever get scared?” she asked. For a moment he thought maybe she’d felt something in his touch that conveyed his own terror. “Of course you don’t. You’re a trained professional. It was stupid to even ask.”
“No it wasn’t. But listen. You’re going to be fine. Let’s just try to keep weight off that leg. That’s our goal right now.”
As they waited for help and as Zak inhaled the aroma of shampoo from the girl’s hair, his hands felt a steely strength in her shoulders, and he wondered if she was a swimmer. He explained that a truck company would arrive with a Holmatro tool, which they would use to strip the door off its hinges, that the car would shake and there would be noise, and that once they had her leg free she would be lowered onto a backboard and removed from the vehicle. All standard operating procedure.
“Jesus, just please let me get out of this. Please, Jesus.”
“We’ll get you out. Jesus and me,” Zak said, with a pinch of sarcasm she either didn’t notice or noticed and refused to be offended by.
A minute and a half later a lieutenant he didn’t recognize poked his head inside and eyeballed Zak and the patient. “Wha’dya got?”
“Her leg’s pinned under the door. Everything else is free. Tib–fib, I’m thinking. No loss of consciousness.”
“Okay.”
The officer stood up and shouted something to his crew.
“I’m not feeling so well,” the girl said.
“These guys will have us out of here in a couple of minutes, Nadine.”
“I like how you say us.”
“That’s right. I’m not leaving until you do. You and me all the way.”
As soon as the power unit for the Holmatro started up, the noise level increased tenfold. It was always somewhere around this point, always with a lot of people looking on, that Zak began to get overwhelmed with a desire to scramble out of the vehicle and run away. He had never been to an accident scene without the sense of wanting to flee, but so far he never had, at least not in the fire department; still, that didn’t mean it wouldn’t happen tonight. His vision of sprinting down the street was so clear and stark, it might as well have been a recent memory instead of a fantasy.
Peering around