Page 479 of End Game

Saw here.

Move that.

Hold.

More gauze.

Don’t move for a minute.

Now he's inside the trauma bay with a dozen people around him, and I'm standing off to one side giving report while somebody else's blood dries in stiff patches across the front of my uniform.

“Tourniquet at nineteen-oh-six. Second one three minutes later when we couldn't control the proximal bleed. Two large-bore IVs, TXA started en route. Pressure dropped into the seventies twice but came back into the nineties after blood.”

The trauma team orders twenty other things before I'm finished talking.

That's how it works.

Our patient becomes their patient in pieces.

Mechanism.

Vitals.

Interventions.

Response.

What changed on the way in.

What almost killed him before we got there.

I answer questions until there aren't any more.

Then I step back.

The room keeps moving without me.

For the first time in more than an hour, I realize how hard I'm breathing.

Adrenaline can be a bitch.

My shoulders ache from holding pressure at an angle the human body wasn't designed to maintain. There's blood dried into the creases around my fingernails despite gloves and wipes because apparently if the blood reaches your wrist, well, bodily fluids are committed to finding a way.

One of my partners catches my eye from across the hall. “You good?”

“Yeah.”

Automatic answer.

He looks like I feel.

Sweat at his temples. A red smear along one forearm that isn't his.

The other guy who jumped the call with us is already dealing with the stretcher and trying to make our equipment look less like we dumped the contents of the ambulance onto the interstate.

I look down at my hands. “I need five minutes.”

“Take ten.”