“The guy’s dead. He was dots, I imagine. The woman’s still going, but she’s lost a lot of blood and her heart’s hurting. I got her patched and plugged in and she’s drinking plasma, but her pulse be weak still. She could use a proper heart machine.” Xavier’s black face is shiny with sweat, he’s looking uptrack anxiously, he wants them to go faster. Abe guns it, they rocket around the last curve onto the Laguna Freeway link between 405 and 5, left on 405 onramp and up the San Diego Freeway, not ontrack but on the shoulder beside it, flying past the tracked cars on their left, pushing 100, 105, quickly to the University Drive offramp and onto the meandering boulevard, here’s where the driving gets tricky, don’t want to pull a Fred Spaulding here, Fred who put a rescue truck into an overpass pylon and killed everyone aboard except the crash victim in back, who died two days later in the hospital.

Headlights, taillights, don’t you dare make that left turn in front of me there isn’t time screech, he puts the siren on full volume and the howl fills everything, throat sinuses cranium, they reach the campus and go down to California Avenue, hang a mean left and fire up the hill to the ER driveway and up to the ambulance doors. By the time he’s out and to the back of the truck Xavier and an ER nurse are rolling the woman through swinging doors and inside.

Abe sits on the loading dock, quivering a bit. A couple more ER nurses come out and he gets up, helps them get the dead driver onto a gurney. Inside. Back onto the rubber edge of the loading dock.

Xavier comes back out, sits heavily beside him. “They’re working on it.” All those years of medic work, the two tours in Indonesia and all, and still Xavier gets into it, every run. He lights a cigarette, hands trembling, takes a deep drag. Abe watches, feeling that he is just as bad as Xavier, though he tries not to care at all. Don’t get into a savior complex! as the unit counselor would say. He looks at his watch: 7:30. Two hours since they got the call. Hard to believe; it feels longer, shorter—like six hours have banged by in fifteen minutes. That’s rescue work for you. “Hey, we were off half an hour ago,” he remembers. “Our shift is over.”

“Good.”

Time passes.

A doctor bumps out the swinging doors. “Bad luck this time, boys,” he says cheerily. “Both dead on arrival, I’m afraid.” Briefly he puts his hands on their shoulders, goes back inside.

For a while they just sit there.

“Shit,” says Xavier, flicking his cigarette into the darkness. In the dim light Abe can just see the look on his face.

“Hey, X, we did what we could.”