Fuel the Fire

by Jamie Garrett

  He grinned. “Too late. You already declared me fit. Besides, I’m needed out there. Just like you’re needed in here. We’re all shorthanded.”

  She sighed and nodded, brushing strands of hair from her face. “I checked on David. He’s holding his own for now, a fractured femur and shoulder. I’ll be passing meds and checking on IVs upstairs for the next shift, and I’ll check on him again.”

  “And the cop?”

  “He’s being transferred to the burn center at Doctors Hospital in Augusta as soon as they can get a helicopter up. Apparently, the storm is moving that way, and everything with wings has been grounded.”

  Jeremy signed, shaking his head. “We’ll just have to take it one hour at a time, I guess.” He brushed his fingers through his own hair, picking out pieces of dirt, a small twig, and what looked like drywall dust. “I’d better get back out there.” His company was already stretched thin, even without Brian’s death. Every first responding unit was stretched thin, from the firefighters to the police department, paramedics, and even staff here at the hospital. Not to mention the local electric company, the shelters, the Red Cross . . .

  She nodded. “I have to get upstairs, too.” She clutched at his waist. “You be careful out there, Jeremy. I . . . I need you.”

  He looked down at her, undressing her with his eyes, desire warming his blood. “It’s going to be a long night, but when this is over, I guarantee I’ll show you how much I need you.”

  She smiled and then they both reemerged from the stairwell, stopping short when they saw the cluster of firefighters gathered near the Emergency Room doors. Jeremy swore as he wove his way through the crowded room, heading for the doors, Rachel close behind.

  “What’s happened?” he asked. One of the firefighters turned to him with a somber expression. “George Bickerson from Engine 29. He was off duty, but he was in his car making his way to his station house when the tornado made contact. It picked up his car, rolled it several times, and we just found him. Looks critical.”

  Rachel quickly separated from Jeremy, rushing toward the trauma bay, the curtains still open. Jeremy saw the cluster of nurses and a tall, lean, dark-haired physician hovering around the patient. He ordered people around, his tone impatient, then turned to Rachel, a grimace darkening his brow. “Get out of my ER,” he snapped at her.

  Jeremy frowned, taking a step forward, but paused when he saw the look on Rachel’s face. She didn’t want him to get involved. He knew many doctors were arrogant sons of bitches, and Rachel had worked here long enough to know which were just full of hot air. He saw her back stiffen as she eyed the doctor for several seconds, then abruptly nodded and left the bay and returned to Jeremy’s side.

  “That’s Doctor Moeller,” she said softly. “One of the best neuros in the area, but with a bit of a God complex.”

  Jeremy had heard of him. He did have a reputation of being one of the best in the region, but he was also an arrogant prick.

  He wanted to wait with the others as the injured firefighter was examined, but knew he needed to leave, that he was needed out there. Still, he watched as the nurses started two IVs, one in each arm. Patches went on the man’s chest, equipment, wires, and tubes surrounded him, attaching him to machines that assessed every aspect of his physiological state. Blood work was ordered. The guy’s clothes were cut off, staff crowding around, announcing stats, ordering blood or this or that. Jeremy couldn’t understand it all. He watched as Moeller asked for epinephrine, bumped into the nurse next to him, scolded her, and then pushed the syringe needle into the IV line.

  He stepped away as he said, “Get him upstairs to MRI, and I want scans of his brain, chest, and pelvis. He’s got internal injuries and we’ve got to—”

  A cacophony of machines started beeping and alarms went off. Doctor Moeller had just moved to take care of another patient, but he immediately returned to the bay. Jeremy watched in stunned dismay as one of the nurses immediately began CPR, another using an ambu-bag to force oxygen into the man’s lungs. Doctor Moeller quickly stepped in, pushed the gurney away from the wall, and demanded an airway scope as he ordered intubation.

  Jeremy couldn’t see any more after that, the area crowded with scrub-suited bodies, hands darting this way and that, nurses still trying to stop bleeding, delivering drugs, the ordered tube for the intubation . . . a few seconds later, the beeping transitioned to a steady tone and the doctor called for the paddles.

  Seconds later, he heard the distinct sound of a defibrillator charging. “Clear!” the doctor ordered. The resulting charge of the paddles, the alarms and the steady beeping tone continued, followed by another sharp order. “Clear!”

  Jeremy stood frozen beside the other firefighters, all of them riveted to the scene taking place in front of them. The alarms and erratic beeping stopped and settled into an erratic rhythm. The doctor handed the paddles back to a nurse and stepped away, tearing off his gloves and tossing them into the biohazard trashcan as he glanced up at the clock on the wall.

  “Get the OR ready! STAT!”

  Not another one, Jeremy groaned. Not another one!

  He barely completed the thought before two nurses stepped back and pushed the gurney with portable equipment piled between the patient’s legs toward the curtain, then rushed with the gurney down the hallway toward the elevator. The doors were just closing.

  “Hold the elevator!” Doctor Moeller shouted.

  A hand grasped the door just before it closed and held it open as the nurses and the doctor pushed the gurney inside. The doors swished closed.

  The firefighters slowly stood together, talking quietly among themselves. They should go. They all knew it. They knew there was nothing more they could do for now. Their buddy was on the way to the OR. They had work to do. They started to shift back outside while Jeremy and Rachel stood side by side.

  “Damn it!” Jeremy growled.

  “They’re doing everything they can,” she murmured, her gaze taking in the still crowded ER waiting room.

  “He’s a prick.”

  She smiled up at him. “Yes, he is, but he’s also one of the best.”

  “I don’t like the way he talked to you,” he muttered.

  “I don’t either, but it’s nothing new,” she agreed. “Look, I’d better get back to work, but if things calm down, if you have any spare time . . .”

  He smiled down at her though he didn’t feel like smiling. He felt like hitting something. He nodded. “I’ll keep you posted. You do the same.”

  He had just turned to leave when the elevator doors swished open. Jeremy turned and stared as Doctor Moeller stepped from inside, heading back to the ER. Behind him, a covered body lay on the gurney, the two nurses in matching lavender scrubs somberly waiting for the doors to close.

  “Wait,” Jeremy stopped him. “What happened? Why aren’t you—”

  “He’s headed downstairs,” the doctor said shortly, frowning when he saw Rachel standing next to him. “You don’t have anything to do?”

  “I asked her for information,” Jeremy interrupted. “What happened in there?”

  “He coded. I had to call it.”

  With that, his face expressionless, he walked into another trauma bay, barely sparing a glance at him.

  “What the hell’s happening?” Jeremy murmured, not expecting an answer.

  “Shit, that’s what’s happening,” a firefighter standing nearby muttered. “Fucking shit.”

  12

  Rachel

  Jeremy’s company was already stretched thin, what with Brian’s death. Every first responding unit was stretched thin, from the firefighters to the police department, paramedics, and even staff here at the hospital. Now another firefighter, George McPhearson was gone. While Rachel would like nothing better than for Jeremy to be able to stick around for a while, she knew he had to get back out there. Still, he lingered, as did the firefighters from the other engine company. A couple of them talked softly among themselves, wanting to stay and wa
it for family or loved ones to arrive. On the other hand, they also had a disaster on their hands. They were needed out there, and there was nothing more they could do here.

  “Go,” Rachel said, wrapping her arms around Jeremy’s waist and not caring who saw. “But please, Jeremy. Please, be careful.” She laid her head against his broad chest, reveling in his strength, his bravery. It sounded cliché, but she felt a nearly overwhelming surge of emotion for him, so strong that it left her speechless. His warmth, his support, his solid frame; it was more than just sexual attraction or chemistry, or whatever the hell you wanted to call it. She felt him deep in her soul. That they were meant to be together. At this moment, she wanted that more than anything. She didn’t want anything to happen to him. Didn’t want to think of a future without him.

  He sighed and shifted, and she released her grip on him with an apologetic smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. She felt numb. Her emotions dulled, as if subconsciously protecting herself from the emotions: the pain, the grief, the tragedy, taking place around her. “I’ll do what I can to find out more about what happened, and also let you know about the cop transferred to the burn unit in Augusta.” Rachel paused with a tired sigh. “And of course, about David.” She shook her head. To lose two firefighters within a few days of each other? A cop horribly burned, and an EMT severely injured? What were the chances of that? Then again, as much as even the thought reignited her fear, in the aftermath of a tornado of this scale, maybe not so unusual.

  “I don’t understand how it could happen so fast,” Jeremy said, arms still wrapped around her as he stared at the closed elevator doors beyond her. He looked down at her. “Can it happen that fast?”

  “Yes, it can,” she replied somberly. “He’d already coded once in the trauma bay. I thought that he’d been stabilized . . . but yes, it can happen that fast.” She sighed and gently pushed away from Jeremy. “You need to get back out there, and I need to get back to work.”

  He placed his hands on her shoulders and stared down at her for several moments, his eyes searching hers. Then, without a word, without any sense of caring who watched and who didn’t, he kissed her. It was a long kiss, but not as steamy as their first embrace. He kept his tongue to himself. The soft pressure of his lips on hers calmed her, grounded her. No, this wasn’t about sex. It was more concern and affection, a yearning . . . and she felt it too. There was nothing like a disaster to make people realize what they meant to one another.

  Jeremy broke off the kiss, squeezed her shoulders once more, then turned and left the ER. She turned back to gaze at the cluster of people still waiting to be seen, most of them walking wounded. Only a few remained in the hallways, most having been taken to examination rooms or upstairs for X-rays, or to small rooms that had been transformed into mini-clinics for stitches, wound irrigation, and minor injuries. Out of nowhere, she shuddered as a surge of anxiety rolled through her. The controlled chaos in the ER had been invigorating, that much Rachel admitted to herself, but she also felt overwhelmed. She strode down the end of the hallway and turned, then walked toward the double doors at the end of another short hallway, pushing one open. The PT department was calm and quiet, controlled. She liked it here. Her patients didn’t code on her. They didn’t come in screaming, hollering, or dying with life-threatening injuries. Her domain brought recovery, not death.

  While she had rehab patients that had experienced cardiovascular events or brain damage caused by strokes, and she was trained to perform CPR, she’d never had to actually do it on one of her patients. Also, if one of her patients got into trouble, help was a mere phone call away, and an ER doctor could get to her from the Emergency Department in less than a minute.

  Now, as she stood in the doorway to her quiet office, away from the chaos of the ER and the aftermath of tragedy, the sudden deaths, she questioned herself. Maybe she was out of her element over there. As much as Rachel wanted to believe that she was fully capable of handling anything thrown her way, she also had to admit that the Emergency Room was an entirely different world.

  She shook her head, forced herself to stop thinking, to stop second-guessing her skills. She’d been doing just fine. She had—

  “Miss Sorenson!”

  She startled, spun around and saw Dr. Moeller walking quickly toward her, a scowl darkening his features. What now?

  “Come with me, please.”

  He brushed past her, and she frowned but followed. Jeremy was right. He was a prick. Thought of himself as God’s gift to women and to mankind. She had met a couple of surgeons before who’d had that same God complex. They could hold a heart in their hands, had the power to restore life, but Dr. Moeller’s attitude was way beyond anything she had experienced before.

  Nevertheless, she followed him, his white coat flapping behind him as he strode down the length of the short hallway, past the main room of the Emergency Department, around the front reception desk, down a short set of stairs, and down a long hall broken by closed door after closed door. Why were they in the basement? Had he found out she had accessed medical records of patients that didn’t belong to her? Her mouth grew dry, and her heart raced a little faster as she tried to think of an excuse, but none came to mind. But no, he passed the door to medical records and continued on down the hallway.

  The morgue?

  Increasingly puzzled, she followed him as he opened the door, pushed it wide, and stepped in. What was he doing? Why had he brought her here? She’d been in the morgue a couple of times, but she didn’t like it down here. Not surprisingly, it gave her the creeps. The small lobby they stepped into smelled of antiseptics, bleach, death, and chemicals that made her eyes sting; chemicals she couldn’t identify, but as they were close to the autopsy suite, could imagine what they were used for. As she thought it, Dr. Moeller pulled a key ring from his pocket attached to an extendable tether, shoved the key into the lock leading to the autopsy suite, and pushed that door open, too.

  She hesitated. What was he up to? “Doctor Moeller, what’s going on?”

  “I want you to see something,” he said, gesturing impatiently for her to follow. He stood in front of the open door, waiting for her. “Miss Sorenson, I don’t have all day. I need to see patients. Come inside, please. You’ll understand in a moment.”

  What choice did she have? With a feeling of dread knotting in her stomach, she slid past him and into the autopsy suite. The overhead fluorescent lights were on, but they didn’t dispel the creep factor when she eyed the stainless-steel sinks, the glistening aluminum countertop surfaces, the jars and bottles of chemicals, tools, and equipment neatly organized around the room. The cement floor dipped slightly toward the center of the room, where a large drain was set into the floor. Above the drain stood an autopsy table, which at the moment held a body, covered with a sheet. She saw the top of a dead person’s head resting on a rectangular white block of textured foam or something.

  She stared at the body for several moments, then gazed up at Dr. Moeller. “Why am I here?”

  Without a word, the neurosurgeon stepped closer to the autopsy table and gestured for her to join him. She did, albeit hesitantly. Her mouth grew drier, and her hands trembled slightly, her gaze fixated on the outline of the body’s facial features pressing up against the sheet. Dr. Moeller extended both hands, reached for the top of the sheet, and slowly drew it away from the face, folding it neatly beneath the corpse’s chin. Rachel stared for several moments, not processing what she saw. Her stomach twisted into a tight knot. She crossed her arms over her middle as if trying to hold herself together as she stepped back from the table in shock. She lifted her gaze from the corpse to look up at Dr. Moeller’s face, then back again.

  “David! How . . . but he was just . . . I just saw him a little while ago!”

  She took another instinctive step back, eyes riveted to David’s pasty face, his skin now taking on a slightly marble cast, his closed eyes appearing to have sunk deeper into their sockets, his cheeks leaner, his mouth slightly open
and offering a slight grimace that, much to her horror, looked almost like his usual grin.

  “What happened?” she stammered, voice choked with shock.

  “That’s what I’d like to know,” Dr. Moeller said, pulling the sheet back up over David’s face and turning to her. “What did you do?”

  Rachel blinked, confused. “What I do? What do you mean? I didn’t do anything!” She stared down at the corpse again, a sick feeling rising in the pit of her stomach. God, she was going to throw up. She swallowed, took a deep breath, and forced the nausea back.

  “He died less than an hour ago,” Dr. Moeller informed her. “You completed the last med pass, didn’t you?”

  Her mouth moved wordlessly. Finally, she got the words out. “Yes, but . . .”

  “You must’ve mixed up the medications, made a mistake.”

  A chill raced down her spine as she stared up at Dr. Moeller, mouth agape. He was accusing her of making a mistake? A med mistake? “No,” she said, shaking her head, her gaze darting between David’s corpse and Dr. Moeller’s disapproving frown. “No, I didn’t make a mistake.”

  “It’s possible,” Dr. Moeller said. “You’re not used to passing medications. You spend most of your time in the therapy department. You may be a registered nurse, but you’re not familiar with many of our patients or their medication schedules—”

  Fear and panic raced through her, but Rachel stood straight and looked Dr. Moeller right in the eye. “I don’t have to be familiar with the patients, Doctor Moeller, as long as I’m following the med chart. I took my time! I wasn’t rushing. I double-checked every dose, every pill pack, everything! I didn’t—”

  The doctor held up his hand. “There will be an investigation. Until that is complete, I don’t want to see you in the ER or passing meds. You may continue your duties in the physical therapy department and on other floors as needed, but you won’t deliver any medication to any patient. And I don’t want to see you near or touching any of my patients. Is that understood?”