“Are you feeling okay?” Hansen asked, his eyes narrowing in my direction. My mother’s younger brother, Erik Hansen, was a handsome man. Kind. Charming. He was the guy who was friends with everybody, and we’d been mistaken for father and daughter on more than one occasion. Since my parents were back in Michigan, moving to Colorado for school had been that much easier with my uncle here, providing the support I needed to make it through. The truth was, I was closer to Hansen (as the fire department employees fondly called him) than I was to my own parents, and his unwavering support made me feel secure in this charming little district. This was home, and that’s how I liked it.
“I’m feeling good,” I lied. “Just tired.”
“Are you sleeping okay?”
“Alright, H, now you just sound like Mom,” I said with a roll of my eyes. My uncle pursed his lips with a low whistle.
“I try hard to be nothing like your mother, Mace.”
“Don’t we all?”
The alarm blared overhead, and the dispatcher’s voice came over the loudspeaker, cutting off our laughter.
“Ambulance Two, respond to 1456 Eagle River Road for reports of an injured student.”
“That’s the university,” I said, snapping to attention at once. “Hopefully, it’s not anybody I know.”
“Keep your head in the game,” Hansen said, slapping me on the knee. Addy and I quickly stored the supplies we’d been counting and closed the back door behind us, moving around to the front of the ambulance to get ready to go. Addy jumped into the driver’s seat, and I joined her in the passenger’s seat, snapping my seatbelt into place as she cranked the engine and flipped on the lights.
“Good?”
“Ready.”
It didn’t take us long to get to campus. Eagle River was a mere suburb of Denver. While we boasted our own University, fire department, police department, and medical center, we were just as small-town as anywhere else. It didn’t take long to get from Point A to Point B.
We found the victim almost immediately surrounded by worried and excited college students on the baseball field. Addy drove the ambo straight across the lawn, honking at the bystanders to get out of the way. We had barely rolled to a stop before I hopped out and grabbed the trauma bag from the side door compartment.
“Back up, please,” I called, shouldering my way through the crowd of excited onlookers. “Give us room!”
Slowly, the crowd parted, allowing Addy and me into the circle. On the ground in the grass was an unconscious man, an athlete. I dropped to my knees next to his still figure to check him.
“He has a pulse,” I said to Addy, who was pulling the EKG machine from the bag. I leaned over the man to check his responsiveness, digging my knuckles into his chest cavity with just enough force to provoke a pain response. The boy moaned and jerked his head but didn’t wake.
“Does anyone know what happened?” Addy asked the crowd, getting down on the grass next to me. “And what is his name?”
“He went really pale and collapsed,” a familiar voice said. “His name is Daniel Jacobs.”
Shielding my eyes from the sun, I looked up at the speaker, coming face-to-face with Jayce Gregory. He was dressed in his baseball attire, tossing a ball back and forth between his hands anxiously. His cap shaded his eyes, but I still noticed they were on me as he spoke, and I couldn’t read his expression. I didn’t care to. I was here to work.
“Was he complaining of symptoms before he went unconscious?” I asked Jayce while I prepared an IV.
“He said he had a headache and was feeling kind of dizzy. Sick to his stomach.” Jayce kneeled in the grass on the other side of his friend, far too close to me for comfort.
“Do you have any medical history on him? Do you know if he’s diabetic or gets low blood sugar?”
“No, anything like that would have been disclosed when he joined the team, I think.”
“Dehydration, probably,” I said, and Addy nodded.
“Let’s start a D5W IV and get an EKG enroute,” she said. “Maybe we can wake him before we get to the ER.”
Addy and I loaded a still unconscious Daniel onto the stretcher and wheeled him back to the ambo, followed by a few stragglers from the baseball team, Jayce included.
“Hey, Macey,” Jayce called from a few feet away. “You didn’t tell me you were such a badass.”
“Well,” I said with a slight shrug, sitting down on the seat next to the stretcher. “You never asked.”
Jayce laughed, shaking his head, those brilliant gray eyes sparkling with amusement. “You’ll have to tell me all about it when we see each other next,” he said. “Because I’m enthralled.”
