BAD GAS
by ardavenport
- - - Part 2
"Hey, Johnny, don't move!" Roy.
He froze. The jab continued in his arm. He turned his head. Roy grasped his arm, holding it down with one hand. There was a rubber tube tied around his upper arm so tight it hurt.
Morton appeared. "You got that sample yet?"
"Almost."
Roy was drawing blood. From him. It stung. A lot.
He yanked the needle out; the pain immediately faded. Morton grabbed his arm, applying pressure and loosening the tube, while Roy capped the sample and handed it and the needle to the student nurse who appeared beside him. Melissa? Missy? Morissa? Not too bad looking but he had not had a chance to check if she was married or not.
"Get that to the lab, stat."
"Yes, Doctor." She turned and hurried out the door. It looked wrong, but he couldn't think of why.
He was lying on a gurney in Rampart Emergency in a treatment room, except . . . . the door was in the wrong place . . . . hadn't he been in a different room just a second ago?
Morton noticed him. Out came his pen light and John squinted as it passed before his eyes, Morton's dark scowling face and glasses leaning over him.
"Glad to see you're back. How're you feeling?"
John used the arm that hadn't been stabbed to pull the mask away. "Mmm, got a headache." The unforgiving glare of the treatment room lights above were not helping.
"Mm-hmm, any dizziness, nausea, any pain?"
Pausing to think about it, John stared upward, away from the lights. "Ummm, no, not really. Headache's pretty bad though. Can you get me something for it?"
"We'll get you an aspirin. Stay on the oxygen for now." Morton replaced the mask and pointed at Roy. "Stay with him until we get this thing figured out." Morton moved on, leaving him alone with Roy.
Sort of.
Morton just turned around and went to an examination table on the other side of the room, to another patient: Dr. Brackett. Still in his lab coat, black hair on the pillow, an oxygen mask on his face. His eyes were open and they crossly watched Morton and Dr. Early on the either side of him.
"All we can do is wait." The silver-haired doctor earnestly looked over the patient to Morton. But Brackett wasn't having any; he pulled the oxygen mask off.
"Are you two finished playing doctor?"
Early was unfazed by the Chief of Emergency Medicine's sharp, loud demand. "I don't know. Are you finished fainting?"
"Come on, Joe. I just got dizzy for a minute."
"Twice." Morton was equally unimpressed.
John batted at Roy to get his attention and pulled off his own oxygen mask. "What's going on?"
Roy nodded toward the arguing doctors. "They haven't figured out what happened to you and Dr. Brackett. Harvey said that some kind of gas came out of the victim? And that you passed out?"
He nodded up at his partner. "Yeah, that's what happened. The guy just opened his mouth and . . . . exhaled . . . " he grimace at the memory, that big open mouth, "and it was worse than it was back at the accident. I just . . . passed out. And I woke up here." He shook his head. "What happened?"
Roy shook his head back. "They don't know yet. They were hoping that the blood tests from you and Brackett would tell them something, but the first ones came back negative. They're hoping there was a mistake in the lab and maybe they'll get something the second time."
"The second time?" John looked down at his arm. Roy had put a band-aid on the spot where he drew the blood.
"Yep. They even took blood from Harvey even though he didn't faint."
"Well, why not?"
"As soon a he saw you go down, he put the oxygen mask back on the victim. That," Roy shrugged with his hands, "kept it in, I guess."
"Well, where is he? What happened to him?"
"Harvey? He's out in the waiting area talking to some health department people. And they're checking the ambulance for contamination, or something."
"No, not Harvey, the victim."
"Oh. They took him upstairs. They think he's bleeding internally. But," Roy cast his eyes ceiling-ward, "I don't know how they're going to operate. I think they're afraid of what might come out if they cut into him."
"Man, this is crazy." John let his head fall back down on the pillow. His headache felt marginally better, at least it wasn't drilling through his skull anymore. "Did Morton say I could have some aspirin?"
"Oh, sure." Roy looked about, but Nurse Amy was ahead of him; she had aspirin and a glass of water in hand. John pushed himself up, with a little help from Roy, to take it.
Sighing, he lay back down and let Roy put the oxygen mask back.
"Hey. They don't know how long they want to keep you; I'm going to call the station. Let the Cap know what's going on."
John nodded and Roy left. How long had the squad been out of service? He lifted his arm, looking at his watch. Almost an hour-and-a-half since they arrived at the accident. If Rampart wanted to keep him any longer, they would want to call in a replacement to make the squad available.
Both Morton and Early came and went while Brackett impatiently waited, though he did get a round of aspirin, too. John glanced his way, but Brackett did not seem inclined to making eye contact. So, he settled for staring up at the ceiling, breathing in real air, faintly tinted with that pervasive antiseptic hospital smell.
One thing he did not smell was anything like garbage, sewage or burnt anything. He shuddered to remember that suffocating stench. It was if every bad smell (and he'd run into plenty) were wrapped up into one horrible stink. But what was it? Hydrogen-sulfide? Maybe that was in it, but there was more to it than that. Burnt plastic-metal-garbage-something? But there hadn't been any fire and that would have ignited the hydrogen-sulfide anyway. That didn't make any sense.
Morton, Early, Roy and Dixie McCall all returned at once.
"Bad news, Kel," Early stood over Brackett who sternly looked back, oxygen mask still in place. "The results came back normal, just like the first time."
The mask came off. "Normal! That's it!" Brackett pushed himself up to sit on the gurney.
"Kel!" But not even Dixie McCall's stern warning could keep him down.
"How could the tests come back normal? What about the tests on Bailey? Wasn't there anything?"
Early shook his head. "Nothing unusual, except for his injuries. Jim Parkins just passed word down that they didn't have any more out-gassing from him during surgery and it looks like he's going to pull through fine."
No one was watching him, so John put aside his own oxygen mask and sat up as well, his long legs hanging over the side of the gurney. "Does that mean we can go?" The aspirin seemed to have done its job, though his head still hovered somewhere between normal and queasy.
Early shrugged. "I don't have any reason to keep you here, but I'm going to recommend that you take the rest of the day off, just in case." He pointed at Brackett. "Both of you."
That initiated a short argument between the doctors about what Kelly Brackett was and was not going to do. Dixie settled it by pointing out that he had a 'mountain of paperwork' to do in his office and maybe he could take it a little easy and catch up on that. Brackett grouchily agreed to the compromise.
John was not really interested; he and Roy exited the treatment room together. But they couldn't leave. They still had to retrieve their equipment. Harvey had brought it in from the ambulance and left it at the base station, though he and his partner were still loitering around the waiting area and hoping someone official would clear them and their ambulance to go. The health department did not find anything (not even a lingering odor) and the two attendants wanted to take their wagon back to the shop to clean it, just in case. Early let them go and Roy asked him to sign their paperwork.
"Make sure that the fire department calls us when they find out what was in that car, Roy."
"They took it to the lab, but that's all I heard from the Cap."
Early handed the papers back. "I'd sure like to know what was in that car that made you guys sick. And what was coming out of our patient."
John had a disquieting thought. "Well, Doc, what if they don't find anything? I mean, there had to be some kind of chemical in there that got to us, but what if it wasn't in those canister?"
Shrugging, Early looked unsatisfying-ly philosophical. "Well, sometimes, especially in medicine, mysteries happen."
"Yeah, well I don't like it when they happen to me."
That got a smile back from the Doctor. "None of us do, Johnny."
They left. They put the drug box and biophone back in the squad compartments and got in, Roy driving. But Early's last words stuck and John stared out at the familiar streets passing by.
"Hey, Johnny."
John looked at his partner.
"You sure you're okay?"
"Yeah." The headache was almost gone, nothing else hurt and he wasn't hungry. "It's just what Early said, 'Mysteries happen'. What kind of answer is that?" He sat up, gesturing. "I mean, that stuff back there, whatever it was, was dangerous. You smelled it."
"Yeah." Roy eased the squad into a stop, two cars back from a red light.
"Well, that shouldn't be a mystery. We've got labs and doctors and – and – smart people working on it. We should be able to figure it out."
"Yeah." The light went green and they moved on after the cars in front of them.
"Well, doesn't that bother you that we might not figure it out?"
"Yeah. But if there's nothing you can do, there's nothing you can do."
John could not believe that his partner could be so complacent about something so serious. "Well, you don't look bothered."
"I'm bothered! I'm bothered! I don't ever want another run like that again. But the funny thing about gas, Johnny, is that it dissipates. And once it's gone, it's gone. There's nothing left to test. I'm not going to get all worked up about something I can't do something about."
John sat back on his side of the bench seat. Roy had a point. If they were testing for gas and it was already gone out the window then there was nothing you could do about it. He unhappily sighed.
"I'm not 'all worked up.'"
Roy glanced his way but didn't say anything. John supposed that when the victim woke up, he could tell them something. Or not.
"Did someone back at Rampart say that guy's name was Bailey?"
"The victim? Yeah. Larry Bailey. He had a driver's license in a wallet in his back pocket and not much else. Nothing about what he had in his car."
"Yeah. Figures." Elbow on the door of the squad, John went back to staring out at the concrete and smog-tinted sunshine of LA County all the way back to the station.
John was disappointed - and not very surprised - to hear from Captain Stanley that the preliminary results from the lab were that there was nothing dangerous in the canisters from the car.
"Detergent? All that stuff was detergent?" John looked down at his captain, sitting at his desk in the office.
"That's what the man said." Stanley held his hands up in surrender. "He said it was more likely to be good at putting out fires than starting them."
"I don't believe it. I don't believe it." John shook his head.
"Cap, we're more concerned about it being poisonous." The pitch of Roy's voice rose a little.
"I know, I know, I was there. But the guy at the lab said they only found detergent." Stanley got up from his desk. "He did say it was 'lemon-scented', too."
"Oh, there was nothing lemon-scented about what we smelled back at the accident." John left the office with his fellow fire-fighters and Roy started in on the story of what happened at Rampart and they went into the day room where Marco Lopez was putting together sandwiches for lunch. Bill Sanchez, who was taking the rest of John's shift arrived in time to hear most of it. The story astounded the engine crew, but John only added a few details, letting Roy tell most of the tale since he wanted to hear what happened while he was passed out.
"I don't know." He held his hands up when Marco asked if he was really out cold on the floor when they opened up the ambulance. "I don't remember anything until I woke up in Rampart.
Stanley was astonished. "You're kidding? That smell was coming from the victim? How could that man still be alive if you and Brackett passed out just from his breath?"
"That guy must have been eating that stuff that C-shift left for us." Chet Kelly folded his arms and Captain Stanley grumbled about leaving C-shift's Captain a note about taking care of their own dinner disasters.
"How's the guy?" Mike Stoker leaned forward, elbows on the kitchen table.
Roy shrugged. "Fine, at least they didn't have any problems in surgery - - "
Oooooooeeeeeeee-mmmmaaaaahhhh – BLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! Station Fifty-One – Traffic accident with injuries, in the parking lot – Corner of Hughes Avenue and Industrial Drive, Corner of Hughes Avenue and Industrial Drive – Time out: eleven-twenty-three.
Out of pure reflex, John automatically got up with all the others but Sanchez got out the door before him and he stopped. Oh yeah. He was off for the rest of the shift. He watched everyone, the squad going out first, the engine following, reds and sirens blaring as soon as they hit the street. He went back into the day room after the sound faded in the distance.
His headache was completely gone and it now seemed ridiculous that he should take the day off; he felt suddenly very sympathetic toward Dr. Brakett, doing his paperwork in his office. But Captain Stanley had told him that one of the B-Shift paramedics was looking for someone to take his shift, so he supposed it worked out and he wouldn't lose any pay over it.
He'd already bought in for lunch so he ambled over toward the counter. Tuna sandwiches. They'd had tuna last shift. He went to the fridge and opened it.
Cringing back, he stared at the inside. Bright white interior and metal racks. With one big covered pot with a few black drippings on the side.
Oh yeah, C-shift's dinner disaster.
Sniff, sniff.
It smelled a bit burnt. And maybe a bit sulfurous.
Sniff, sniff.
"Nyah."
John closed the fridge and went back to make a tuna sandwich.
^^oo^^oo^^ END ^^oo^^oo^^
Disclaimer: All characters belong to Mark VII Productions, Inc., Universal Studios and whoever else owns the 1970's TV show Emergency!; I am just playing in their sandbox.