Page 85 of Second Alarm
She instead drives to the station because Highway 12, seven miles west of town, where the world, in its unending ability to improvise worse timing than you could script, is on fire.
I'm already on the truck when she pulls in. She parks next to the ambulance in her personal car — not procedure, because Hanna wasn't on shift ten minutes ago, because she's not scheduled today… most of us aren’t, because we all heard our pagers and came. Medical is short. Medical is always short. She throws the car in park, sprints into the bay in civilian clothes, and gets into her turnout in ninety seconds. Faster than anyone I've ever seen, because Hanna Larsen has the fastest hands.
"Run down."
"Multi-vehicle," Derek barks. "Three cars, one box truck, Highway 12, west of mile marker six. The truck is an LP delivery. Harrison says assume the tank. One pinned in a sedan, two walking wounded, one refusing care, truck driver concussion."
"Cal?" Hanna asks me.
"On engine. Already rolling. Riley behind him in the utility."
"Me?"
"With me on rescue. I've got extrication."
We roll.
Hanna, in the seat of the ambulance next to the new medic — Ruiz, three months out of school, white-knuckled but steady — sets her jaw the way she sets it when the thing in front of her is a thing she'll do. I see her jaw through the cab window for one second as we pull out.
I don't look at it again.
The run to mile marker six takes four minutes. In those four minutes I do what I've done on every run since I was twenty-three, which is become the person who's on the run. It's a trick my first captain taught me.Brennan, you don't get to bring your day to a call. You leave the day in the station. You pick it up on the way back in.I leave the day in the station. I leave Ty and Hanna and Cal and the barbecue and the speech Hanna's mother saved for years. What's in the cab with me is one thing: the puzzle. The diagram of a scene I haven't seen yet. The sequence in which I'll approach it. The inventory of the tools.
Derek drives like he's late for a wedding. Derek is the best driver we have.
"LP," he says. "That's gonna be the thing."
"Yeah."
"We're going to want Cal off the truck."
"Cal calls it."
"But what about — "
"Cal calls it, Derek."
"Okay."
We come over the rise.
Below us, on the shoulder of Highway 12 in the afternoon in a light going orange-soft, is the scene.
It's a bad one.
A sedan is on its roof. A crossover has gone off the berm with its front end into the guardrail. A hatchback is spun sideways — intact but empty, the driver standing beside it with a phone to his ear and a jacket over his face, because he has, I assume, vomited. And across the median, on its side, is the box truck: white, with a propane company logo I've seen on signs all my life, and under the truck, pooling slow and bright in the gravel, is a spreading wet I don't have to taste to identify. The driver is already out; Rivera is with him on the shoulder, pressing gauze to a scalp laceration. The truck isn't on fire — specifically, deliberately not on fire — and will remain not on fire for as long as it takes us to extract the pinned driver from the upside-down sedan, during which time an entire county of people will be standing within a hundred-foot radius of three hundred gallons of liquid propane leaching down a gravel shoulder in the sun.
"Cal."
"On it," Rivera says.
Cal has the engine on the highway shoulder fifty feet back. He's at the pump panel before his door is fully open.
"Foam blanket now. Ty, extrication, and I want you fast — we've got an envelope here."
"Copy."
Hanna is already at the sedan with Ruiz. The driver, a woman, is upside-down in the belt, pinned against the wheel well by a chunk of the crossover that has come through the back passenger window. She's conscious. She's screaming. She's breathing. All of these are information.
