SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

Then I checked the machines.

Then I checked my patient again because I do not trust machines to tell me if someone is alive or dead.

"Jane—?"

I didn’t let Rob finish. “I’ve got a rhythm.”

Rob didn’t take his eyes off the road as he called back, “You’ve got what?!?”

“He’s alive,” I said.

And that’s when the asshole sat up and bit me.

You will not believe the paperwork you have to fill out when you save someone’s life, and then your ungrateful patient turns around and bites you. The forms that pile up when said patient then spits a glob of your flesh into your partner’s lap, which causes your partner to drive your ambulance into a utility pole are truly staggering.

And then, to add insult to literal injury, after we finally finished the paperwork, they put Rob and me both on leave for thirty days.

“I should have just let him die, Gina," I said. "At least then he wouldn’t have bitten me, and I could still work.”

I hate not working. At least, that was the excuse I gave to Gina. Gina was my last foster mom. We met when I was fourteen and had no interest in having another mother, and even less of a skill-set for being a daughter. But something must have rubbed off because here I was, calling her to not admit that I might have HIV or drug-resistant hepatitis, or that I was scared to death.

A car full of club-kids honked on their way up to Sunset and obscured whatever Gina said in response. Conrad, my bull mastiff who does not—it turns out—like loud noises, peed himself.

“What was that?” asked Gina after the car had passed.

I lied without thinking. “The TV.”

“Uh huh.”

“If I told you I was out, you’d worry.”

A sigh from the other side of the phone. “I worry anyway.”

I could have pointed out there was no point in her asking then, but I’m not a total tool. It wasn’t like I wanted her to worry. “I’m not alone. I’m walking a bull mastiff.”

“Conrad is blind.”

“Muggers don’t know that.”

Well, they wouldn’t have, except Conrad chose that moment to walk into a Westside Rentals sign. I cringed. Even with the day I’d had, I should have seen that for him.

Too cool to admit he hadn’t meant to face-plant the sign, Conrad stopped to sniff at it. It wasn’t fooling anyone, but I didn’t push the issue. We all have our coping strategies, and Conrad’s past—I suspected—rivaled my own. I never asked the nice people at the shelter what exactly they had rescued him from. I have enough trouble sleeping with only my own nightmares to worry about.

“Some of the kids are coming home this weekend,” Gina said.

“Oh?” I asked, even though I knew why.

“We’re going to the cemetery to visit Marissa. But after, we’ll have dinner at the house. You’re welcome if you want to come.”

Notice, Gina didn’t ask me to come. She’s very smart that way. I hadn’t been to her house in nearly three years. For my foster sister’s funeral, she had insisted.

“I don’t know if I’ll be able to make it,” I said. Leaving out that I couldn’t stand cemeteries. I knew she knew that. And I knew she wanted me to know I was welcome anyway. I had come home for Marissa’s funeral. I hadn’t managed the interment.

Finished with the sign, Conrad sniffed the air, no doubt searching for rogue hydrants that might be throwing themselves in his path. I felt, more than heard, the low rumble of Conrad’s growl against my right calf.

Conrad never growled.

I hung up on Gina.

When a pregnant woman is on the verge of dying, it triggers a series of reactions in her body which cause her to miscarry and expel the fetus. It’s simple lizard-brain reasoning. Re-task the resources currently being used by the baby to try to tip the balance and save the mother’s life. A woman who survives could become pregnant again. An infant with a dead mother would die. In evolutionary math, one dead is always better than two dead.

But then you get the tragic case of a young couple expecting their first child, driving home from a doctor’s appointment when their car French kisses a fully-loaded garbage truck. Father-to-be was decapitated on the spot. Mother-to-be was rushed back to the hospital where she was declared brain dead. And that would have been the end of it. Except some bright bulb of the medical arts had a theory that if you crammed a woman’s blood full of drug A, drug B, and just a touch of hormones X, Y, and Z, you could fool her uterus into thinking that there was still someone at the controls upstairs and maybe it should hang onto the baby a little while longer.

And because they could do it, they did. If anyone wondered if it was a good idea, they kept quiet. And I get that. I mean, I don’t know that I’d have been able to look at a little thing wiggling on an ultrasound and pull the plug on it either. So the tubes stayed connected, the ventilators kept venting, and when the mother’s heart stopped, a machine took over that too. For two months.

Until I was born.

And people act surprised that I was kind of screwed-up from the beginning.

Conrad and I reached the intersection just as the light turned, and the car full of club kids raced off with another ear-shattering set of horn blasts. Conrad pulled on my arm, and his growl, already low, dropped to sub-sonic levels.

We crossed the street, carefully, and found an empty lot where a couple of bungalows had been ripped out. A developer had been planning to build an apartment building before the economy tanked. Now, the lots were nothing but a crop of weeds.

Fortunately, the indigent population of the neighborhood was not about to let prime real estate go to waste. It wasn’t hard to find a gap in the fence, and Conrad and I pushed through.

We found it towards the back of the lot.

Pause for accuracy.

We found them .

Hidden from the sidewalk and the neighbors by the fence and high weeds, the lot had become a pretty nice little homeless camp. Half a dozen piles of blankets around a fire pit, an old bucket under a standpipe outlet, even a small TV propped on a milk crate. Well, it had been nice before my very bitey John Doe arrived and ripped the occupants limb from limb. I have a good memory for the faces of people who cause me pain, and there he was, taking a bite out of some poor bastard’s calf, right through his jeans.

I froze. Conrad froze. John Doe looked up from his dinner and saw me.

John Doe opened his mouth. I could see a bit of denim stuck between his teeth. “Jane,” he said.

I am not proud of this, but I screamed like a little girl. Screamed like I hadn’t screamed since I’d found nice Uncle Antonio hanging in the basement when I was five. The cannibalism part was bad enough. What really freaked me out was that I was pretty sure I’d never introduced myself to him. John Doe lurched towards me. I ran. So did Conrad.

Unfortunately, Conrad and I chose different directions.

By the time I realized that, John Doe was tangled in Conrad’s leash, and I was wrenched around right on top of them. I put my hands out to catch my fall and slammed into John Doe’s chest, taking us both to the ground. I could feel his skin rip against the friction of his shirt, and as I scrambled to my feet, my hands came away wet.

I threw up on them.

It was an improvement.

I stood there and looked down at John Doe, unmoving on the ground, lying in a growing pool of bull mastiff urine.

Pause for accuracy.

It might not have been entirely bull mastiff urine.

I would like to say that finding a man whose life I had saved eating a homeless guy less than a block from my apartment who dropped dead as soon as I touched him was when my training kicked in and that I proceeded to calmly alert the authorities like the emergency professional that I was.