“S-sorry,” he whispers. “I tried… It came on too fast.”
“Your heat?”
God, someone please pick up the phone.
“The flare.”
His eyes roll back as soon as he says it, and his body spasms.A seizure, my mind supplies. Horror mixes with the fear, replacing everything I might have felt before this moment in one sweeping, violent rush of emotion.
On the third ring, the line finally picks up.
“911. What is your emergency?”
Thirty-Seven
MEGAN
“Hey, Megs, EMS called in an Omega trauma,” Riley says as he approaches the desk.
He waves the paramedic radio he keeps in his pocket as the responding nurse. My phone vibrates with a call, but I silence it without looking.
“An Omega trauma?” I verify, saving and closing out the patient chart I was working in. It takes me only a minute to grab everything off the desk. Scissors, alcohol wipes, and notepad in the left pocket, pens and tape in the right, stethoscope around the neck.
Riley nods. “Yep. Apparent blow to the temple, too.”
Well, that’s one hell of a way to start a morning. We haven’t managed to get through the typical rush from all the care homes bringing in their sick residents like most mornings. I glance at the clock above the nurse station. Not even nine yet. Damn.
“Hey, Luke.” I grab the arm of one of the other nurses as he walks past me at the main desk. He pauses with a frown. “We have an Omega trauma inbound.”
Understanding smoothes his features of their irritation.
“What do you have right now?”
“Finalizing discharge instructions on the foot laceration in room three. Peterson’s already signed off on everything.” He nods. “And then I think Erica was just processing someone from the waiting room, eighteen year old with lower left abdominal pain.”
His gaze sharpens. “Got it. I’ll take care of them.”
The radio goes off in Riley’s hand.
“This is Holden with ambulance fifteen,” a static-filled voice says.
Riley presses the side and offers a quick response.
“We are currently about five minutes away. We are upgrading from just an Omega trauma to an OBS crisis event with extraneous trauma.”
Shit.
“Good luck,” Luke offers, quickly dodging out of the way of Riley and me.
Riley responds and then begins the process of paging the proper teams. Even as he’s issuing instructions, we rush to the trauma bay designed for these types of emergencies, pulling the proper cart of supplies and staging it just inside the room. The doctors working today walk through the sliding glass doors before we’re finished. There are students here today, so they’re discussing treatments options and other variables we won’t even begin to know until we’ve seen the poor Omega. Bond sickness is no fucking joke.
“Crap. The respirators aren’t in here,” I say.
Riley nods and then disappears out the doors. I lean against the cart, crossing my arms as I listen to the doctors run through potential scenarios. More people crowd the room, grabbing the name tags that identify us by our role in the response team. Ituck my standard badge inside the neckline of my scrubs to keep it out of the way and put on the “Trauma Nurse Two” name tag.
“Alphas that aren’t bonded or on a suppressor need these,” Riley says as he walks back in to the room. He hands a respirator to one of the ER techs before he can ask for it. “EMS says it’s a full crisis. We don’t need to be risking any kind of rutting response. John, if you’ll start the negative pressure for the room, please.”
Riley crosses to me. Without a word I take one of the respirators and adjust it. Riley helps tighten it down and then rearranges one of the prepped carts, pulling some of the medicines and putting on the name tag “Trauma Nurse One.”
