The distinctive 'screech' of automobile tires spinning too fast around a corner is what alerted Nightwing to the danger. It was an otherwise normal Thursday evening. He had just finished mopping up a mugging in an alley when he heard the sound. There were several possible reasons for a car to be going that fast, and none of them were good.
Nightwing ran out of the alley just in time to see a glistening white pickup swerve away from a light pole. He watched the driver as the vehicle moved closer and was dismayed to see the unmistakable light from a phone screen shining on the man's face. The guy was texting while he was driving, something that Nightwing found reprehensible, and a woman directly opposite the hero was about to pay the price. But he wasn't going to allow that to happen. Without hesitating, he sprinted across the street.
The woman was standing near the curb at the bus stop, her head down as she searched through her purse. By the time Nightwing was close enough to do something about the situation, the truck was almost upon her. He had no choice but to dive. She stumbled back toward the sidewalk when his body barreled into her. His momentum turned her stumble into a fall, and she landed on her right arm. Her scream wasn't nearly loud enough to cover the sound of metal crashing into flesh and bone.
Nightwing's body replaced the woman's just as the truck arrived. He was folded in half and his head bounced off the hood of the vehicle. It knocked him out, so he couldn't roll out of the hit like he had done the last time he had been struck by a car. The driver slammed on his brakes and the hero rolled limply off the hood. This time it was the asphalt that crashed into his head. To nobody's surprise, the man at the wheel backed up, swerved around the motionless body in the street, and raced away.
Everyone was frozen, but not for long. A man was already kneeling by the fallen woman, calling for an ambulance on his cell phone. Two young teenagers were running toward Nightwing, yelling for someone to call 911. One person pulled out his phone and took a picture of the scene before turning around and walking away. The only other people there, a small group of unsavory-looking characters, quickly left. This was, after all, Bludhaven. If Nightwing were awake, he would be surprised that the two teens were hovering over him, wanting to help but not knowing how. It was rare for people in Bludhaven to offer help to anyone.
"He knocked me down!" the woman suddenly cried out.
"He saved your life!" one of the teenagers exclaimed, glancing over his shoulder at her incredulously.
"My arm is broken because of him!" she screamed.
"You would have a lot more than a broken arm if he hadn't shoved you out of the way!" the other teen yelled back, shooting her a quick glare.
It took four minutes for the ambulance to arrive, and the presence of the paramedics effectively ended the loud argument. The woman was sitting on the curb, cradling her right arm, but nobody had touched the young hero. He was crumpled a mere eight feet away, his right leg pinned awkwardly under his torso and blood pooling around his head.
Two of the paramedics went directly to Nightwing while the other one crouched by the woman.
"Can you tell me what happened, miss?" the paramedic, Laila, asked.
"I was minding my own business and that degenerate over there pushed me to the ground!"
The other two paramedics were asking the same question to the pair of teenagers who hadn't left Nightwing's side.
"A car swerved right toward that lady," the younger boy explained. "She would have died if he hadn't pushed her out of the way!"
"Where is the driver?" the taller of the two, Jeff, asked.
"He left," the other teen stated simply.
Jeff raised his eyebrows and glanced at his partner, Dave, who was taking careful stock of the situation.
"Jeff, we gotta get him outta here. He's not gonna make it if we try to do anything here," Dave said. "His right femur is broken, but that's the least of his worries. I'll wrap his head, you go get a stretcher."
Dave reached for the domino mask, intending to take it off so he could see the source of all the blood.
"Stop!" Jeff exclaimed. "You can't compromise his identity! This is Nightwing!"
"I know who the heck he is, Jeff!" Dave yelled in response. "But I need to see the actual injury!"
"Um, I think his forehead hit the hood of the car and then the back of his head hit the street when the car drove away," one of the boys volunteered.
"Just wrap his whole head, that'll take care of it for now," Jeff ordered.
"Fine," Dave muttered, "but it's not my fault if he bleeds out."
He grabbed a thick roll of gauze out of his kit and began wrapping Nightwing's head. Jeff stood up and headed for the ambulance to get the stretcher.
"Jeff?"
The man looked over at Laila, who was still crouched by the woman.
"What do you have?" he asked.
"Probable fracture in her right forearm and a swollen ankle. I'm assuming yours is much worse."
"Yeah, broken right femur, head wound, and probably some internal stuff. Dave said we have to move him now."
"We've only got space for one, Jeff," Laila reminded him.
"Yeah, and it's for Nightwing," he retorted.
"What do I do with her?"
"You're talking about me like I'm not even here," the injured woman snapped. "Well I am here, and if you don't mind, I need to get to a hospital. You have a perfectly good ambulance waiting right there, so take me to the hospital!"
"Ma'am," Jeff began with an internal sigh, "with all due respect your injuries are mild compared to the ones Nightwing has. Do you have somebody who can come pick you up? If not, I'll call another ambulance and Laila can wait with you until it gets here."
"WHAT?!" the woman screeched. "I pay my taxes, I'm a hard-working woman, and you're choosing him instead of me?! I have all of these injuries because of him!"
Jeff's eyes narrowed in anger, so Laila jumped in.
"Sir," she turned to the man who had been first to help the woman, "do you have a car we could borrow? Maybe you could do us a big favor and take this lady to the hospital? I'll go with you," she assured both of them.
"I do, and I can," the man replied, resignation in his voice. "But only if you won't start yelling at me," he said pointedly at the injured woman.
"At least somebody here knows what to do," the woman grumbled. "Don't worry, I won't yell at you. You are not the cause of all these problems."
Laila shook her head as she stood up. She and the man helped the woman to her feet and over to his car. While they were doing that, Jeff retrieved the stretcher and hurried back to Nightwing.
"We gotta problem," Dave said when Jeff arrived. "I don't know where to take him."
"Bludhaven General," Jeff promptly responded.
"Yeeeeeah, but the thing is, we don't know who he is. We don't know if he can pay, we don't even know if he has insurance!"
"Let them sort that out at the hospital. Our job is to get him there alive."
"They're not gonna like that."
"I don't give a rat's behind if they don't like it. There are insurance people at the hospital to figure out things like that. That's not in my job description, so unless it's in yours we need to get going."
Dave mumbled something that sounded like 'not my fault' but Jeff ignored it. They stabilized Nightwing's right leg then lifted him onto the stretcher. Two minutes later the sirens were wailing throughout the city as they sped toward Bludhaven General.
Jeff had called it in while Dave was driving, so there was a team of nurses and doctors at the emergency entrance when they arrived. The paramedics handed the problem to the doctors, then sped away to the next call they had just received.
"This is…Nightwing!" a nurse whispered in awe as they traveled toward the emergency room.
"Just another patient, Madge, don't go all giggly on me," Brittany, the older head nurse commanded.
They slid the young hero's gurney into a bay and began hooking him up to various machinery.
"Vitals aren't looking good," Madge commented quietly.
"Yeah, well he was hit by a car!" Brittany snapped. "I don't think your vitals would look too good either after something like that!"
Madge rolled her eyes and gently placed a warm blanket on Nightwing's body, pulling it up to his chin. A doctor flung open the curtain and Brittany took her leave.
"Geez, he's not looking good," the man commented.
He began scribbling some things on a clipboard he had brought with him, then he put it down on the bedside table. Before he could begin his examination, however, a woman named Sally walked in.
"Has he been awake at all?" she asked. When she received a negative response, she continued, "You can't begin treatment until we find out what his insurance covers. You both know that."
Her tone was slightly reprimanding, but the doctor ignored it.
"This is Nightwing," he stated, "and…"
"Obviously," Sally commented drily.
"And," the doctor continued, "I will be treating him whether he can pay or not!"
"That's not your decision, Dr. Samuels," she retorted. "You also know that."
"But he's a hero," Madge chimed in. "He protects the entire city without ever coming in here. Doesn't he deserve our help?"
"I wish we could," Sally said with a sigh, "but hospital policy…"
"Screw hospital policy," Dr. Samuels declared angrily. "This patient is dying while we stand here wondering whether or not he can pay and debating whether or not we should help him! There has to be someone we can contact for information!"
"We don't even know who he is!" Sally exclaimed. "How are we supposed to find someone to contact when we don't even know where he came from?"
"We could…take off the mask?" Madge commented quietly.
"That's the end of Nightwing," the doctor snapped, although he had just had the same thought.
"Without insurance information we have to send him to Bludhaven Mercy," Sally stated authoritatively. "Please don't make me get security."
"Screw security, too!" Dr. Samuels almost yelled.
"Then take off the mask!" Sally exclaimed.
"Doc," Madge said quietly, "he'll get good care at Mercy, too."
"Not as good as we can give him here!"
"But at least he'll be getting care instead of having people yell over his dead body."
Dr. Samuels shook his head, fury boiling in his veins. He made a decision and reached for the mask. A short sting of electricity zapped through his hands, and he immediately pulled them back.
"I guess we're not taking off the mask," Madge said with a sigh.
"We don't even know who he is," Sally repeated, "and now we know we have no way to find out. He has to go to Mercy."
Dr. Samuels ignored the statements as he glared at the machine monitoring the young hero's vitals. He wanted to throw hospital policy out the window and begin a thorough examination. Madge recognized that expression, and she didn't want him to get in trouble with hospital administrators.
"Doc, we don't really have a choice now," the nurse reminded him quietly.
"Fine," the doctor ground out through a clenched jaw. "But you need to get him there quickly."
Madge didn't waste time. She called to the desk that she needed a ride for the patient and then yelled for someone to come help her prep him for transport.
Eight minutes later, Nightwing was loaded into an ambulance for the trip to Bludhaven Mercy Hospital. It was in the seedy part of the city and consisted mostly of homeless people and drug addicts. The people who didn't have insurance and couldn't afford to get any.
There was one doctor and two nurses in the small emergency room. They received him and took him to a bay. The doctor didn't have to wait to begin an examination, and he soon realized that this was going to be the worst case of his young career.
"He's lost a lot of blood…"
The doctor paused and carefully unwound the gauze covering Nightwing's head, searching for the source. There was a small gash on the right side of his forehead, where it had connected with the car. But there was a much larger one right in the center of the back of his head, a result of crashing onto the dirty asphalt. That one ran straight through a big bump, and the doctor was suddenly worried about a brain bleed.
"We need x-ray, MRI, and CT. Let radiology know we're coming in ten minutes," he commanded.
The nurses flew into action while the doctor began gently prodding the hero's torso. He could feel swelling in the abdominal area, which concerned him greatly.
"We're going to need more supplies than we have here," he murmured. "He needs to go to General."
"Dr. Michaels," George, the head nurse, interrupted, "General sent him here. They don't know who he is, obviously, so they don't know who to contact to get his insurance information."
"That's fricking bullcrap," the doctor snapped. "He's Nightwing, he shouldn't need insurance!"
"Yeah," George agreed, "but there's nothing we can do about that. And…" the man paused.
"And?" Dr. Michaels prodded impatiently.
"Well, you're new here, so I guess you don't know this yet. We don't have an MRI machine or CT scanner. We don't even have a radiology department. We've got one x-ray machine."
"Are you fricking kidding me?" the doctor yelled. "How am I supposed to treat him when I can't even get a good look at him?!"
"We run on donations, Doc. Not many people want to donate to a hospital that caters to druggies and unknowns. We can only afford so much," George replied with an apologetic shrug.
"I…don't know what to do," Dr. Michaels said, his voice outlined with a tinge of panic. "I can't help him if I don't know how injured…I can't do it."
"Calm down, Doc," the nurse said evenly. "We can fix what we do know. I'll have Herb start working the phones, see if he can find a connection to anyone who can at least help pay for him to go back to General."
Dr. Michaels took a deep breath, attempting to calm himself down so he could concentrate on finding out as much as possible without all the machines he needed at his disposal.
"Okay, you talk to Herb. Send Wendy in to help with his leg and…"
"I'm here, Doc," Wendy said as she walked in and waved George out of the room. "I'm hooking up an IV and then I'll start on the vitals. What are we doing once he's ready?"
"Well," the doctor sighed, "we can obviously see that he has a broken femur. Let's start with that."
Wendy nodded, efficiently hooked everything up, and then began removing Nightwing's uniform.
"I'm leaving the mask?" she inquired.
"I don't know. If we know his identity, wouldn't it be easier to find someone to help?"
"Nightwing works alone, Doctor. We don't even know where he came from. Bludhaven is not good enough to produce a hero such as him, so I'm positive that he didn't grow up here."
"I guess I'm still too new. I just assumed he was from here."
Wendy wasn't surprised; Dr. Michaels had been in Bludhaven for less than a month.
"He's ready," she commented.
"Actually, x-ray first," the doctor ordered. "We won't get all the information but at least we'll know where to begin. And…" he paused, second-guessing himself. "And let's take off the mask," he finally stated.
Wendy reached for the mask and received the same shock that Dr. Samuels had.
"I guess we're not doing that," she commented.
"Let's just go to x-ray," Dr. Michaels said with a sigh.