Page 87 of Second Alarm
"Cal."
No response.
"Cal."
Nothing. Two inches from his face. His breath is there. His carotid pulse is there. The shoulder is unmistakably separated — the joint sitting up under the collar of his turnout where it isn't supposed to be. Blood in his hair. A lot of blood. Scalp lacerations bleed the way they do. His eyes open.
"Cal."
"Brennan?"
"Yeah."
"My shoulder." His voice is rough.
"I know."
"Ow."
"I know."
"Is my head — "
"Head's fine. You got clipped."
"Truck."
"Truck."
"Idiot."
"Yeah."
"Okay." His eyes close again. Breathing even. Pupils good.
I hear Hanna before I see her.
She's two feet behind me, in a voice I haven't heard since she was fifteen and her father's captain came to the door: "Ty.Move."
I move.
Hanna does her job.
Hanna Larsen, paramedic, is on her brother in the gravel of Highway 12 with her hands doing the small precise things hands do when the patient is also the person you've loved longest, and she can't let either fact interfere with either of them. She checks his pupils again, palpates his neck, gets the cervical collar on. She calls for the board. Ruiz comes back at a run. She runs the secondary the way she ran Maureen's — faster if anything, meaner with herself about it, because she isn't letting the name on the patient affect the algorithm she was trained on.
I stand with my back turned, because looking at her face right now would break something in both of us we can't afford to break on this highway shoulder.
I go back to the truck. I do my job.
The foam blanket holds. The truck doesn't shift again. The propane company dispatches hazmat twenty-three minutes later. The second driver gets loaded and shipped. By radio, Maureen is already at Missoula General — stable, asking the nurses about a ham. Chief Rodriguez arrives thirty-five minutes in, driving her own truck on a Sunday because her pager went off as well. She stands on the shoulder in a ballcap, watching the scene with no expression for five full minutes. Then she walks to me.
"Status on Larsen."
"On his way to Missoula General. Stable. Concussion, probably. Shoulder out," Hanna says, stepping forward.
"Severity of the concussion."
"Unknown. Conscious on departure. GCS fifteen by the time they loaded him."
