Extinction

by Korza, Jay

  The intern slowly joined the two putting on their safety gear and then the three walked in the room, followed shortly after by Bryce’s father. He looked at the people already at work and then the officers who stood nearby. “I understand you gentlemen have a job to do, but so do we. We need a little more room to work. Please, back up just a hair to the red line we have outlining the gurney. Also, blood can shoot quite a distance—there are disposable goggles on the wall outside this room. You’re more than welcome to grab some along with gloves, just in case.”

  The sergeant in the group looked down to the red line on the floor. “Move back, boys; give Doc some room. Jenkins, go get four safety glasses and some gloves for all of us.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant.” Trevor saw his team doing what they were trained to do; they needed very little direction from him in these sorts of cases. “I don’t think he’ll be able to talk to you, sir. His throat is fairly well damaged. Someone did quite a number on him.”

  The sergeant got a disgusted look on his face. “I’m not waiting here for a statement or suspect description, not this time. He is the suspect. Those are self-inflicted wounds.”

  “All of them? Are you sure?” Bryce’s dad was working on the man’s throat and trying to make a better surgical airway for him. The number of stab wounds all over his body made it seem impossible to believe that he had done it all to himself.

  “Yeah, we’re sure. Bystanders witnessed most of it and we have video feed from the bank security camera. They streamed the video to me while we were on our way here.” The sergeant took a deep breath. “He walked out from the bank after having an argument with the teller about a problem with his account. He pulled out a hunting knife and started to go back in. His wife tried to stop him so he began stabbing her. The kids got out of the car and were yelling and screaming at him and he turned on them next. After he stabbed everyone multiple times, he began stabbing himself. When the first patrol unit arrived on scene, he tried to slit his own throat. It doesn’t look like he did too good of a job of it, though.”

  “He did better than you think.” Trevor was now probing deep into the anatomy of the man’s neck and throat. “He cut one carotid and there are three separate lacerations to his trachea. I can fix it, though.”

  “Don’t try too hard, Doc. No one would blame you if you happened to ‘slip’ or maybe just didn’t do a great job this one time.” The sergeant received nods of affirmation from his fellow officers.

  Without taking his eyes off the patient, Trevor replied without emotion, “I can’t imagine ever doing anything to harm my family like he did, but it’s not my job to judge or punish. My job is to fix.”

  Bryce was pulling down a suture kit and advanced airway tray for his father. “My dad isn’t the Grim Reaper, sir. He doesn’t take lives—he saves them.”

  “Oh, uh, hey there, kid. I didn’t see you standing there. Sorry about that.” The sergeant was stammering a little as he tasted the leather from the sole of his shoe that was now firmly planted in his own mouth.

  “Don’t worry about it. I hear all sorts of things when I help my dad.” Bryce looked at one of the officers in the middle. “And Sergeant…”

  “Yeah, kid?”

  “You might want to catch Jenkins; he’s about to pass out.” Thump. “Sorry, too late.”

  Eight minutes after the patient came through the ambulance bay doors, a surgical team came and grabbed the gurney and whisked him away to the operating room. Trevor took his son to the basin sink and helped him remove all of his protective gear and then they both washed up. Holding Bryce’s hand, they walked out of the ER after Trevor made sure to tell the charge nurse that he’d dictate the chart from home later tonight after the kids were in bed.

  “See, dad,” Bryce looked at his watch, “we’ll only be a few minutes late and we helped someone.”

  Speaking thoughts that should have been kept private, Trevor sighed. “Yeah, sometimes the people I help don’t make me feel good about what I do.”

  Bryce stopped dead in his tracks and pulled his father to a stop. “Dad. You are not the Reaper. That’s someone else’s job. No matter how bad that man is, I bet his kids still love him. Someone, somewhere must still love him. You helped them, not him. Isn’t that what you’ve always told me?”

  “I love you, son.” He gave Bryce a quick hug. “I knew I kept you around for some reason.”

  Five weeks later, Bryce was laying on the living room floor trying to stay awake for the end of the movie. When the credits started to roll, his father stood and told him to go get ready for bed then come back so they could review one patient chart together before bed. Bryce completed his tasks and hurried back; patient charts had taken the place of bedtime stories for the past few years and he always enjoyed them.

  When Bryce returned, he found his father leaning forward in his chair, face buried in his hands, obviously crying. Bryce had only seen his father cry after the birth of his sister and he knew that these sobs were a completely different kind. He gently touched his father’s shoulder and was about to ask what was wrong when the picture on the TV caught his eye. It was the man they had worked on together, the man who had stabbed his family.

  Bryce didn’t recognize him when the news initially reported on the event weeks ago. His driver’s license photos and family photos they showed looked so different from the bloodied man they had saved in the trauma room. But after seeing his face all over the news for weeks, Bryce immediately recognized the man being reported on.

  The man had been released after an emotional plea from his lawyer, psychiatric physician and his wife and kids. Everyone assured the judge that he was better now, the medication was helping tremendously and it was a one-time mental break. He and his lawyer promised that he would stay in an apartment and only visit his family with their permission and with law-enforcement supervision at the local precinct. The judge agreed and added several other stipulations of his own and set a trial date. The man thanked the judge and said that he was ready and eager to take responsibility for his actions so he and his family could start rebuilding their relationships.

  The news channel was playing a slide show of pictures while they discussed the latest event that took place just moments ago at the family’s house, not too far from Bryce’s home. The picture on the TV now was the whole family in the courtroom, hugging each other and crying at the man’s release from custody. Bryce heard the news anchor say that the upcoming images were gruesome and not suitable for all audiences.

  Bryce watched as the photo dissolved and was replaced with a crime scene photo of a sheet-covered body on the lawn of a house. The sheet was soaked with blood and the size indicated that it was covering a small child, probably two or three years old. Bryce guessed it was the man’s youngest son from the previous picture. The scene changed again and there were more covered bodies in the living room. Bryce could easily make out two kids, one draped over a couch, probably trying to get away, and another one face down crawling away from the doorway. The mother, he guessed, was at the doorway, half in and half out, probably trying to protect her children as the man came into the house. He knew it was the mother because the one body that wasn’t covered was the man from the trauma room. His body bullet-ridden and torn to shreds, unrecognizable as the man from the previous photos, his identity known only because the news said it was so.

  Bryce knew why his father was crying. He felt responsible or at least somewhat connected to this tragedy even if in only some small remote way. He didn’t know what to do. How does a child console an adult at a time like this? Bryce decided that words were too cumbersome and useless right now so he just rubbed his hand back and forth across his father’s shoulders and back to let him know that Bryce was there for him.

  The news camera moved to a police officer who was about to be interviewed. Bryce recognized him as the sergeant from the emergency room. The reporter stood next to the sergeant and held a microphone between them. “Sergeant Ramsey, I understand that you
were involved in the shooting. I know there are obviously things you can’t say at this point, but is there anything you can tell us?”

  The sergeant looked off camera to someone in the background, apparently receiving some sort of permission from some unseen person. The sergeant gave a slight nod in return before he began speaking. “I can’t go into details right now, but we arrived on scene to find a suspect actively trying to kill another person. Several commands were given to him to stop as we were running to the front door from our patrol vehicles. Once we were close enough to open fire, he still had not complied with our orders so we fired on him to end the threat.”

  “Were you aware of who the suspect was when you arrived?”

  “I did. I can’t speak for the other officers involved, but I did. I responded to the incident with this family where the suspect had stabbed them all in the bank parking lot, just down the road. I knew their address from my previous report. I had a pretty good idea that it was them.”

  “Did that make you feel any different while you were responding? Knowing the history and seeing what the family looked like during the first stabbing incident?”

  The sergeant looked off camera again and gave a slight nod in return to whoever was playing the part of the shadow puppeteer. “It didn’t make me ‘feel’ different. We have a job to do and we try to keep feelings out of it. All we knew was that a stabbing was taking place. What if someone else was attacking the family? Some fanatic or someone coming after the father for what he had done before? We didn’t know anything else when we arrived. I honestly didn’t know it was him until I pulled the trigger. His back was to me until after my first rounds hit him and he turned to face me. That’s when I knew it was him, that’s when I had feelings, not before.”

  “Can you explain that, Sergeant? What feelings did you have then?”

  “Sadness. Sadness that the family was going through the same thing again. Anger. Anger that our judicial system is horrible and let this man out just to kill his family.”

  The sergeant paused and the reporter took advantage of that moment to interject her own adjective, “Triumph? Triumph at ending this man’s killing?”

  The sergeant’s previously placid face morphed into one of anger. “Triumph? We weren’t triumphant in anything here tonight. We didn’t stop anything. We tried, but we didn’t. Can’t you see the bodies lying around us? Where is the triumph in that?

  “Even if we had saved the family, I don’t know that ‘triumph’ would be the word to use. Maybe”, the sergeant looked at the ground as he tried to find the right word, “success? Success at saving the family and ending the threat.

  “My job isn’t to be the judge, jury, or executioner. But sometimes, we have to be the Reaper. We have to collect the souls of those who are broken, who can’t be a part of society no matter how much we want them to be. Sometimes we have to practice a bit of preventive medicine to make sure others won’t be hurt in the future.”

  Bryce knew that last part was directed at his father, and maybe him as well. Bryce suddenly realized that his father wasn’t sitting there anymore; he had gone to bed. Bryce watched the news for another twenty minutes or so, taking over his father’s chair, before he also went to bed. In the morning, it was as though nothing had changed. His father was doing a good job of compartmentalizing his emotions and making everything as normal as he could for his family. It took a few months before Bryce felt like his father was truly back to being himself, and a couple more months after that before Bryce was allowed to again visit his dad at work.

  It wasn’t too long before Bryce started high school and joined the ROTC program. He planned to be a doctor and follow in most of his father’s footsteps. He was still more interested in internal medicine and diagnostic medicine but he couldn’t wait to make his father proud of his trauma rotations once he got to medical school.

  Part of his ROTC training allowed him to go to the Navy’s Hospital Corpsman School when he was fifteen. The program was the exact same training as the adults got but the class was full of high school students in the delayed entry program. The idea was to get them excited about service so they would enlist right out of high school. With their technical school already done, it put them in the field that much quicker after boot camp.

  When he was sixteen, he went to the Corpsman Field Medical Services School, where corpsman go to learn how to be field medics with the marines. Bryce was involved in a lot of extra-curricular sports activities with school so he was fit and enjoyed the hard work they put in during training. He loved being outdoors and working as a team. He was no stranger to teamwork with his involvement in sports and working alongside his father in the emergency room, but this kind of teamwork was different, better somehow on an emotional level.

  He also enjoyed learning about firearms. He was pretty good with the weapons and was a little sad to find out that corpsman usually only carried a defensive sidearm in combat, or at least that’s all they were supposed to carry. One of the gunnery sergeants told Bryce that he should think about Special Forces if he was so interested in the firearms portion of training. The SpecOps Corpsman carried a full loadout of weapons in addition to their medical gear.

  Bryce told the gunny that he was planning to become an officer and going to medical school on the Navy’s dime. The gunny just rolled his eyes and made a comment about Bryce wasting his talents in order to go get an officer lobotomy. Bryce reminded the gunny that a lobotomy didn’t actually decrease a person’s intelligence; it actually affected the emotional center in the patient’s brain. This earned Bryce and his company a five-mile run.

  The next day, Bryce found himself riding in an armored personnel carrier, shoulder to shoulder with actual marines. Bryce always felt like an adult when he was in school; his size and maturity level made him feel as if he was standing with a bunch of kids. But now, sitting next to combat veterans, he realized just how small he really was and that he was several years away from being a real adult.

  The unit was transported to the forward area of the training exercise, the last test for Bryce’s class and a group of marines trying to graduate from boot camp. The battle exercises included veteran marines intermixed into the units of marine recruits and the corpsman from Bryce’s FMF school were also put in to companies as they would be if this were a real situation.

  Bryce had been had assigned to an eight-man fire team that was made up of all real marines, no recruits in the bunch. Their team call sign was “Echo Blue” and they were on the side of the good guys in this scenario. They were being deployed to an area that required some cleanup of enemy forces that had been bypassed or missed when the company made its push through the area. The bad guys couldn’t be left to the rear of the advancing force; that was just poor tactics.

  When the team first loaded up, they were all joking around and giving one another shit; they seemed to be a tight unit and probably worked together at their real duty stations. When the driver announced over the PA that they were two minutes from their drop-off, all of the chatter stopped and each marine took up deployment positions at the two doors in the vehicles. Bryce was caught off guard at their sudden intensity. This was only training; he wondered how they were on real missions.

  As the vehicle came to a stop, the first marine at each door was already on the ground and moving to a firing position that gave the rest of the men cover as they disembarked the vehicle. Bryce was close to being the last man out and as he was moving forward, he saw that there were still three rifles in the vehicle’s weapons closet. Bryce instinctively grabbed one, along with a shoulder-slung bandolier of ammunition that held six magazines.

  Bryce took up a firing position near one of the marines who looked down and saw the weapon Bryce held. “Hey, kid, you’re a corpsman. You’re not supposed to be carrying a rifle.”

  Bryce didn’t take his eyes off his field of fire as he spoke. “Do you think that when the shooting starts the other guys won’t aim at me? Or their bullets will magically miss the m
edic?” No response. “I didn’t think so.”

  The team leader walked up to Bryce. “I like you, kid, but if you’re going to carry a rifle, at least load it. Okay?”

  The rest of the team snickered as Bryce realized that his weapon was indeed empty. He knew from training that no loaded weapon was ever stored in a vehicle. He reached into his bandolier and pulled out a magazine of training ammunition and put it into the weapon. Bryce cycled the bolt and checked to make sure the safety was engaged. The team was already moving out so Bryce took up a position towards the rear of the element.

  After about an hour of working through the area of dense buildings, they had their first contact. Echo Blue was victorious and no one in the unit was taken out. When a training round hit a person, the training uniform sensed the hit and delivered a momentarily paralyzing shock to the soldier. If you were hit, regardless of where, you were out of the scenario. Bryce emptied a whole magazine during their first engagement but hadn’t hit any targets, much to his dismay. Maybe there was a reason corpsman shouldn’t carry guns?

  Echo Blue had several more engagements over the next few miles. Bryce actually scored a couple of hits, though it took him another four magazines to do so. The rest of the fire team was razing him in a good-natured sort of way, a way that made him feel as though they were actually starting to like him.

  As the team entered a small courtyard, Bryce heard a round being fired and then felt the light breeze of a training bullet passing by his head. The round struck the marine in front of Bryce, dead center of his back and the marine went down. In that moment of the adrenaline dump that Bryce was experiencing, he saw the time-dilation effect of the flight-fight-or-freeze mechanism kicking in. Everyone was moving in slow motion as the next two rounds passed by his head and two more marines were instantly locked up on the invisible electric leash that now held them in place and dropped them to the ground.

  Bryce slid to his right, unsure of where the attack was coming from. He could be moving towards it but his training and instinct together told him that moving in any direction was better than not moving at all. As he slid, he turned his body around and brought his weapon to bear towards where he thought the attack was coming from.