Dream Catcher

by M. C. Cerny

  Drawn out of my musing by the radio, Ellie Goulding was singing how she couldn’t think straight, and I was right there with her. Heck, with the rain pounding on my car, I couldn’t see clearly either. Love is stupid and I didn’t want to love anyone for a long time after this.

  With each passing minute it grew darker and the non-existent sun was setting. There were lights ahead of me on the narrow two-lane road, a large truck by the looks of the muted twin lights that appeared like thick pillows in the humid fog. Idiot had his high beams on, momentarily blinding me. I cupped my hand over my face to focus on the road but couldn’t quite manage it. I could just make out the yellow lines of the road and realized he wasn’t staying in his lane.

  Shit.

  He was practically barreling down the road swerving into my side, drifting so far outside of his lane. Panic gripped my chest and my heart seemed to slow down as he got closer and closer. Forcing air in and out of my chest as the seconds pressed on, one, two, three, I focused on the road in front of me. I couldn’t see much between the fog and the rain drops as big as quarters, the closer he got. He was going to hit my car and there was nothing I could do about it. My breathing hitched again, one, two, three. The ditch to the side didn’t look too deep, but who knew what was in it. I didn’t want to hit anything, but I didn’t want to die in a mangled wreck.

  I clutched the steering wheel, knuckles white, and prayed. “No, please, God, no, not tonight.” I repeated the names of my nieces, Laurie, Beth and my nephew, Max. The truck zipped by me, missing me by inches, and I breathed deeply, the muscles releasing in a relieved tangle. I was almost sure he was close enough to peel paint off my jalopy car if the hail hasn’t done so already. I shivered with a cold sweat from the nerves and fiddled with the defogger again, hoping to get it working. I tried opening my window a crack, which made it worse with rain pelting inside, soaking my shoulder. I looked up between the road and the panel, trying to get the right setting. Too hot and it fogged more, too cold and it fogged more. Those damn things never work anyway and maybe I was expecting too much from a twelve-year-old car.

  Suddenly, honking brought my attention back to see the glare of headlights in my face. Before I could give it much thought, I realized I was the jerk crossing the yellow line and swerved my car to avoid hitting the pickup truck.

  Crap!

  Shit!

  The car took on a life of its own, skidding and hydroplaning right off the road. I felt a bump as I crested over something, landing hard, my body jerking in the seatbelt, which pulled in and restrained me tightly. The scrape of metal and the groan of the rusted frame of my car creaked to a sickening silence.

  My whole body was banged up real good. “Owww.” Automatic responses and a mental cataloguing of what hurt went through my disorientated brain. Everything hurt, including my face, which had been whacked by the unexpectedly deployed airbag. I supposed that was good, lucky even...the thought made me snort, which in turn made me wince in pain. The pain meant I was alive, but certainly not getting to Woodland Creek anytime soon.

  Taking stock of my injuries, pain began to radiate up my left arm from my wrist. I moved around in my seat and found myself jammed, with my right knee scraping the underside of the wheel. The seat somehow unlocked and slipped forward only to lock again, squishing me against the wheel, which pushed painfully against my chest. Ruefully, I was thankful for my generous boobs and a twelve-year-old airbag in working order. This definitely wasn’t my week.

  I wasn’t sure how long my car had been sitting there while I took stock of things. I was alone and shivering. Looking out the windshield did nothing since the front end of my car was now covered in debris and junk from outside. One headlight was out and the other glowed lonely and pathetic into the thick, soupy fog.

  I doubted I was going to be found on this deserted stretch of road anytime soon. I didn’t even know where I was, having forgone the map some hundred miles back when the cracked window soaked anything worth having inside. Reaching over my chest, I tried to open the door with my right hand. I grabbed for the handle and pulled up the release lever to push it open. “Come on, come on, damn it.” The lever was jammed and I whined my misery to the empty interior. “Please, somebody just cut me a break.” I gave it another pull from my awkward position. I caught it and the door opened an inch. My heart lurched with excitement until cold rivulets of water edged their way inside. I pulled the door shut, but it jammed again, only this time it wouldn’t close all the way, catching something. “Are you fucking kidding me?” I kept pulling the door, trying to shift in my seat, but it was useless. Cold water filled up the bottom, stinging the cuts and scrapes on my legs.

  “Okay, this is worse, definitely worse. Stuck in a rat can and now my car’s flooding.” It was so cold that my fingers felt like brittle twigs ready to snap. I wanted to rail at somebody or something because it shouldn’t be this cold in August. I lived in the Midwest with drought warnings all summer and now this? Panic coursed through me and my chest heaved. Closing the door wasn’t working and I was pretty sure my little ditch was beginning to flood from all of the rain. For all I knew I was in some frickin’ floodplain. Slumping back in my seat, I gave a cursory look around. My purse was on the floor of the passenger seat, currently getting soaked by the water. Who knew what the boxes of clothes and school supplies in my trunk looked like.

  Lovely.

  Drops of water smudged the printed out ink on my neatly stapled orientation papers for Hastings-Albrecht. I tried to maneuver myself with my one good arm to reach. “Ugh.” I leaned back against the headrest, slamming my head once and then again in frustration. “Damn.” Again, I leaned over, letting my right arm reach as far as I could. “Come on!” My fingers just barely tickled the leather strap of my cheap purse. “I bet shit like this never happens to Katie Wilson!” Leaning back again, I thought about the hot television journalist Dillon would pant over every Friday night when she broadcasted her interview segments from New York. Not that I didn’t like her. On the contrary, she was smart and who could argue with JCrew apple pie good looks and being engaged to a billionaire like Jacob Reed? That wasn’t my life and I guessed we all kind of had our crosses to bear.

  My life…well, that was currently stuck in a ditch, filling up with water and going nowhere. No boyfriend, no job and on my way to start school in a town I’d never been to before and the closest family a couple hours away.

  Peachy.

  “Okay, one more time. Uhhhhh!” I gave myself a good heave-ho and pushed over in the seat, reaching out desperately. My fingers caught the strap and wiggled to grab it. “Finally! Woo!!!” I pulled the purse up to my lap, still cradling my left arm, and with my right hand I reached for the phone. My fingers submerged inside to cold, wet contents, pulling out a soaked cell phone. “Really? Fucking really? I couldn’t have just one thing work out for me?” To add insult to injury, I watched the phone power off into blackness, and with it my heart sank further into my chest.

  Chapter Three

  “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” Maya Angelou

  WARREN

  I flipped through my phone lying on the bunk in the ambulance house. Twelve hour shifts were no joke and of all nights, tonight was a torrential downpour with flash flood warnings in effect all over Craft County and in Woodland Creek. The water table was dangerously low for our area in particular from the unusually dry summer. We were lucky no tornados were being predicted for our area as well. The conditions were just right for a twisted monster to rip through, and during a fast moving storm like this, well, it was the last thing we needed working these long shifts with no relief in sight.

  Jase and I already responded to two medical calls earlier and finally had a break. I could hear Jase snoring in the bunk below me. Low rumbles and puffs of air drifted up while I clicked away, checking my personal social media page. I would be glad to finish up my paramedic schooling at the university. Right now I served as the captain of our EMS squad
, but I had interest in getting my pilot’s license to medivac patients eventually. When that happened, I would probably have to leave Woodland Creek and I wasn’t ready to give up the comforts of home so soon. My mom made the best food, all my friends were here and it was unlikely another community would be so understanding of my…shifting.

  All day my skin felt taught and the hair on my arms rougher and thicker than usual. The change in weather was keeping me on edge, waiting for the shoe to drop or another incoming call from the Clark Country dispatch center to respond to another emergency call. It was unusual to run back to back twelve hour EMS shifts, but with the storms dumping massive and unexpected rain in our area, there wasn’t much we could do except wait out the storms and run calls as they came in.

  I had a lot on my mind, recently enrolling in a paramedic course at the university and moving out of my mom’s house into a shared place with my cousin Jase Lupinski. We had grown up together, running the woods and spending many summers camping and visiting family in Northern Canada with our extended pack family. They were eager to see both Jase and I settled with companions, preferably a shifter of some kind to keep the lineage going. Something I wasn’t terribly keen on, but it was getting harder and harder to say no with family throwing willing females in my way. Jase already had a companion waiting for him when the time was right to settle down.

  It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested. Nothing up north was going to quiet the urge I had to continue doing my own thing. My mother had moved here, leaving her pack when she met my father. This was where they chose to build their life and I had been here ever since I was a mere pup. I wasn’t looking to be set up on some ridiculous mate-date as Jase referred to them.

  Family could be so exhausting for a young and unattached wolf shifter.

  I read a message from one of the girls, another shifter I usually hung out with, when a call came in over the radio. Unit fifty-four, please respond. Motor vehicle crash reported on Riverlane Road mile marker nineteen. Single car accident requesting medical assistance.

  “Damn it, I was just getting to sleep.” From below, Jase growled half-awake, rolling out from his bunk to stand up, stretching in some weird ass yoga pose, his bones cracking against each other.

  The sound of bone on bone popping made me cringe. “Every time, Jase, really?”

  “Dude, I still don’t get why we can’t sleep at home in the comfort of our own beds instead of these bunks the day crew uses.” Yawning, he continued stretching, reaching up in what I recalled him telling me was half moon pose. He looked ridiculous if you asked me, swaying back and forth, and I got up to follow him.

  “Because the ambulance is here and this is our job.”

  “Mr. By-The-Books all the time. We’ve got a scanner at the house to hear calls.” Grunting Jase grabbed his jacket and I grabbed mine as we jogged to the ambulance bay, hitting the button for the garage door to open up into the storming night. He was right, I preferred to do everything the right way. It was how I got to where I was in my life so far. Jase was still dependable and trustworthy even if I knew he preferred the shortest route between point A and B as a given.

  “Come on, Jase. You drive this time.” Clapping him on the back, we got to the vehicle.

  “Gotcha, Captain.” He smirked, knowing the nickname wasn’t my favorite. I got inside the ambulance’s passenger seat, buckling myself in. We backed out of the squad building, flipped our lights and sirens on, and turned toward the scene of the call. Hopefully, Sheriff TJ Rickman would be there already assessing the accident.

  I keyed up the radio to see if dispatch could give me anything else. “This is unit fifty-four calling command center. Can you give me follow-up on the accident? Over.”

  “Copy, fifty-four. Accident reported by the Crow’s nest. No one is on scene yet to respond. Over.” The dispatcher ended the call, leaving us with nothing to go by except it was called in by another shifter in the area.

  “What do you think we’ll find?” I grabbed a clipboard from the glove compartment and slipped a report sheet in to take notes for our reports to be entered into the computer system at the end of our shift.

  “Are we taking bets? I say it’s a male, late fifties, thinking he could make it home from Vider’s pub before the Mrs. was missing him.”

  “I think it’s a young female just beyond the Woodland Creek sign in that damn ditch I’ve been telling the sheriff and the DOT guys to fix.”

  “How specific do you want to get?”

  “I dunno. Hair color? Weight?”

  “Twenty bucks?” Jase looked over from driving and I hit his shoulder, annoyed.

  On a sigh, I nodded at the road in front of us. “How about you pay attention to the road and you buy me dinner later?” Jase drove like a maniac, getting to the scene in record time. My anticipation likely had less to do with the moon cycles and more to do with my rush of adrenaline. Jase was a good driver despite his high strung personality and I trusted him to have my back as I had his. The rain was still hitting hard and the road flooding was making the main road in and out of town difficult. We drove a good eight minutes, coming up to the accident where we found a single car off the road, down in the damn ditch as I predicted. The Woodland Creek sign population 3,150 stood behind us, illuminated for a moment by a flash of lightning.

  “Shit, no tow vehicle to get the car out.” Jase was looking out the window of the ambulance toward the ditch.

  “And no sheriff here either.” I zipped up my town issued uniform jacket and reached for the door handle to get out. “I guess we’ll have to go in and see what we can do.” My skin continued to feel ultra-sensitive and it wouldn’t have been the first time Jase and I used our talents to help out a patient in our care. Just acknowledging that part of myself we typically concealed from others gave me an itchy awareness.

  “You going down there?” We both peered into the darkness of the ditch.

  “Yeah, let me check it out first. Do you think we can make it to the hospital?” The ominous weather seemed to decide for us.

  “Let me call it in and see. The wrecker isn’t here yet to tow it out. There’s always the clinic or the university student center depending on the volume of calls.” I left Jase to sort things out from inside the ambulance and got out, carefully trudging my way into the ditch. Surprisingly, icy water lapped at my legs and sucked my boots down into muck, covering them to my knees. Luckily, I’m tall, but coming up to the car I found a good portion of it submerged.

  “Crap. This isn’t good.” I made my way past debris, pulling out large branches in my way and tossing them over the car with my increased strength. I had to wedge myself between the wall of the ditch and the vehicle. My ears were tuned into the sounds around me. Whooshing water, the creaking of the car, and a low, keening moan came from inside the vehicle. “Hang on, we’re coming. Jase! Jase, get out here!” Yelling, he clamored behind me to catch up.

  “Dude, what is it?”

  “Female, stuck inside the vehicle. I don’t know how injured she is, but we don’t have time to wait for the fire department to get here and rip this shit box open.” I got alongside the partially open door. Water had filled it up to the window and all I could see were her shoulders, bluish skin, and tangled pale hair.

  “Well, I’ll be damned. Dinner it is, Boone.” Nodding, Jase jumped down to where I was and cuffed me on the shoulder. “Let’s do this, Warren.” Both of us partially shifted into wolf form. Who needs the Jaws of Life when you’ve got increased strength and grip with razor sharp claws? I was liable to scare the crap out of the girl if she saw me like that with my back hunching slightly to accommodate for the change in my bone structure. My hair grew fuller and my face elongated into a wolf jowl and large ears. Focusing to keep my hands from fully changing into clawed paws, to keep from accidentally injuring her, I grabbed a hold of the door, my hands trying to pull it open as wide as we could to get the metal off the frame.

  “More, Jase, I can’t get it loose.” Growling, the
struggle was real to get the door off the bent and rusted frame before we were joined by two other bystanders both willing to help.

  “Hey, we heard the call on the scanner and came as fast as we could.” There was no vehicle in sight to have transported our helpful bystanders, their clothes soaked through, torn and muddied in places. I didn’t care at the moment as long as we could help the woman.

  We both nodded at them and unsurprisingly they shifted as well, a sleek black panther and the other a large black bear. The woman inside the car slumped forward unconscious into the rising water that covered her to the hips inside the low car. “Jase, again!” A combination of frantic pushing and pulling, I tried to hold her head up gently as the water continued to rise and get caught filling the car. I was standing in water that just sucked me down further and made it harder to hold her steady. Together we were able to finally get the door off its hinges and the bear tossed it downwind of the ditch.

  Jase was panting heavily like me. “She could have drowned. Pull her out carefully. I’ll get the stretcher ready. There’s no way I can get it down to you and pull it back out like this.” We were all slipping and sliding in the mud and debris from the unexpected flooding. Jase seemed less affected by the whole ordeal than I was. He quickly shifted back with ease, something I often struggled to do when I was hit hard with the adrenaline rush. “Warren. Warren.” His voice was biting and brought me back to attention. I didn’t know how many times he called my name before I heard him.

  “Yeah, I know. I got it handled.” Ignoring Jase, I went back to concentrating on helping the woman out of her car as best as I could. There was no way to know how long she’d been in there, but her skin was cold and she was shivering. Reaching down, I was unable to snap the belt buckle, my own fingers not shifted, exposed and affected by the cold water.

  “Here, let me do it.” This time the panther reached in over my shoulder, nudging back against the rock and dirt wall of the ditch. He used his sharp claws to slice through the belt efficiently. His bear companion roared into the storm, holding the car out of the water about six inches up and just enough for me to reach in between the high wall of the ditch and the car, taking her out safely. There didn’t seem to be much of her as I pulled her out from the car, careful to not jostle her anywhere.