IMPORTANT NOTE: 3500 words of this first chapter are missing. It's a long, frustrating story about website glitches and other uninteresting things. Unfortunately, I don't have the original document of chapter one on my computer anymore, so it is going to take me some time to remember what I wrote and then rewrite it. Until then, I'm just going to put a line break in the middle, which is where those 3500 words of writing were before they vanished into another dimension. Sorry, it's very incoherent this way, but I will fix it soon.
And finally: I don't own the show or characters, blah blah blah.
Once again, Shay was covered in blood. In her line of work, this wasn't an uncommon occurrence. She had her share of blissfully boring calls that didn't involve any bodily messes, but Chicago was also quite giving with disasters. Today was no exception.
The ride in the ambulance was wonderfully routine at first. Dawson was chattering non-stop, cuing Shay in to the fact that she was in a good mood; when Dawson was unhappy, she was either stubbornly silent or could only spare the most scathing of comments. On that frosty March morning, though, Dawson was going on endlessly about her and Casey's relationship. They were looking for a place to move in together, which she was both excited and nervous about.
"I told him I don't want to be more than thirty minutes away from work," she explained, taking a right turn. "I also don't want a townhouse,"
one of those areas that no one really knows why they exist. Shay was grateful nonetheless.
Dawson got out and reentered through the ambulance's double-doors. Both women felt that familiar feeling of urgent apprehension when they saw just how much blood the man had lost. Sweat had collected on both their faces. They needed to stabilize him immediately.
"Sixty-one, they're on their way back! You need to get out of there!"
Shay lunged for the receiver and shouted into it, "Where are the police?" The man on the other end assured her that they were on their way. Dawson and Shay looked at each other. Severe blue eyes met burning copper ones. Knowing that Dawson was most engrossed with the patient, Shay nodded and jumped out the back of the ambo. She would have just clambered around the driver's seat, but there was limited space with a coding patient and a busy paramedic. She was running to the driver's seat when the rusty sedan came to a screeching stop in the road.
The first thug to jump out was the first to fire his weapon. A loud *bang* penetreated the world around them, followed by a persistent barrage of pop-popping. Shay felt a focused force shove her off-balance. As she fell back, she saw the sun glint off of each of the three thugs' guns like a flashing silver siren light. The cold earth came up hard on Shay's back. She was granted a single heartbeat of numbness before her body registered the pain it was in. It felt like nothing she had ever felt before. She would have screamed, but her lungs were busy sucking in frantic gusts of oxygen. Her pale hand clapped instinctively over her pained left shoulder. Red ink burbled out from under her hand. It was the second time she was covered in blood that day.
The rest was a blur of motion and color. Shay remembered flashes of blue and red, followed by several uniforms making a constricting circle around the three thugs. At some point, Shay saw horizontal lines of fluorescent hospital lights light slide past and Gabriela Dawson's scared face hanging over her.