“These are helping hands, Lieutenant, and I am the newbie around here, so point me in any direction and I’m basically your bitch.” I chuckled a bit.
“I like the sound of that, Katz.” A sweet voice snickered behind me.
“Don’t get too used to it, punk. I’m not on your shift.” I turned to see Bryn toweling off her dripping blonde locks as she made her way of out the bathroom. “Long night, Malloye?” I asked, trying to not get captivated by the sweet mint of her conditioner or how adorable she was even without makeup on.
“I’m beat. We stretched three times from ten last night to three this morning,” she responded before walking past us to grab her things. “See you guys later, I’m going home and crashing hard.”
* * *
The day rolledby relatively uneventfully. All the men I was on shift with seemed nice enough. They didn’t give me too much shit for being new, and that was really all I could ask for.
Once Lieutenant Goff and I checked the trucks and got my gear all set up, we had breakfast with everyone. I did get stuck cleaning the bathrooms and doing the dishes, but I halfway volunteered to do it. It was the only way I could think of to show everyone how much of a team player I really wanted to be.
I was in the middle of my second set of squats in the empty gym when the horn blew. I threw the bar up onto the rack and rushed to the locker to get my gear on.
“Nice hustle,” Goff called to me while I was grabbing my helmet and jumping onto the engine.
“It’s my first call with you. Gotta show y’all what I got.” I huffed as I felt my lips pull at the corners. I was fucking excited to see a little bit of action already.
The scene we rolled up to was a nightmare. The sun was setting, giving a golden glow to a motorcyclist lying trapped under his crotch rocket. The blood trail that was smeared on the pavement showed the couple hundred feet he’d skidded after being hit by a Dodge Dakota that was off on the shoulder, smashed into a cement barrier and smoking, the driver slumped over the steering wheel as the horn blared.
It was one of the more gruesome sights I had seen in a long while, but it was one heck of a first call with a new crew. I went into autopilot, trying to get the feel of how all of the guys worked together.
Rushing over to the guy pinned under his bike, I started to assess the situation. He screamed and squirmed.
“Sir, stay still. Let me get a good look at this.” I put my hand on his shoulder gently as his pleading eyes locked with mine.
“Help!” he screamed. “I can’t move.”
The handlebars of his Yamaha were twisted, with one of them impaling his right flank.Ouch.The EMTs rushed over to us and I explained to them what I had figured out in the few seconds I had been with the man.
As they peeled him off the pavement and got the bike up off of him, he must have gone into shock. As I was helping stretch a pipe out to the smoking truck, I saw one of the weirdest sights of my life: the motorcycle guy was talking to the paramedics while continually putting his fingers into his open wound in his side. I fought back the bile that threatened to come up as I watched in horror for a few seconds.
Once the driver of the truck and the biker were off in buses, we got the truck’s engine fire under control. It was a fairly quick and smooth endeavor, which I was pretty proud of.
“Not something you see every day,” the lieutenant remarked as he stepped out of the driver’s seat after we pulled back up to the firehouse.
“That image of that poor guy fingering his wound like that is something I won’t forget for a long time.” I shook my head as I started to take all my gear off.
We washed the truck, made sure everything was back where it needed to be, ate a quick dinner of baked chicken and rice, and then made our way to the dorm to get a little bit of sleep. Even though it was only nine at night, it was better to get some sleep while we could just in case we had a busy night like the other team had the evening before.
I woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, startled and hyperventilating. Most people dream about fucked-up shit they see on the job—dead kids, mangled bodies, terrible shit. Me? Nope. My recurring nightmare was of the day Cali left me. It assaulted me over and over, fucking with me almost every damn night. I’d been waking up at two-thirty in the morning like clockwork realizing that Cali was not in the bed next to me and never would be again.
For the next hour, I tossed and turned in the twin-sized bed. It was rock hard, and so was the pillow. Usually, that wouldn’t bother me, but after the weird-ass scene we had been on and the dream about Cali, I was cranky.
Once five A.M. rolled around, I decided to just get up and forget about trying to sleep any more. I made a fresh pot of coffee and turned on the TV in the day room, landing on a Dr. Phil rerun.
He was lecturing a parent about being an absentee mother, basically roasting her for her daughter being a drug addict ass hat. There was something about his accent mixed with how passionate he got about being a jerk to this poor woman who was bawling her eyes out that made me laugh more than it probably should have.
The daughter was a cute petite blonde with tattoos all over her arms. As soon as the camera panned to her, Bryn popped into my mind. The visual of her pressed against my wall was all I could think about.
I pulled out my cell and without really thinking about it, I typed out a text.
Me: How’s the arm feeling?
It was six in the morning. I expected the message to go unanswered for hours, but my phone lit up within seconds.
Bryn: A little sore but nothing too bad. How was your first shift?