Page 84 of The Jock
“Yeah. Trucker called it in to the state police. Found him lying in the middle of the highway.” Tammy passed him a surgical gown, goggles, and a pair of gloves. “Come observe. There’s a lot of moving pieces in these, but when it comes down to it, Life Flights are the same as ambulance admissions. They just arrive on the roof and not in the parking lot.”
He followed Tammy and four other nurses into the elevator. Tammy briefed the team as they rode to the roof, and when they got there, they waited with Dr. Williams in the arrival bubble, a glass-encased vestibule. The landing pad was painted with a giant white cross, a red H in the center. Lights ringed the cross, and a wind cone flapped in the night breeze.
Justin bounced on his toes. He hung back, staying out of the way of Tammy and her team. As they waited, his thoughts drifted back to Wes.
Behind him, the radio built into the wall crackled. The pilot, announcing his final approach. Justin craned his neck as Tammy confirmed she had a visual on the helo coming down.
“All right, let’s roll.” Dr. Williams led the team out to the edge of the pad, ducking when the chopper touched down.
It wasn’t as fast as Justin thought it would be, based on Hollywood. This wasn’t the military, though, and it wasn’t combat. The crew chief helped power down the helo, and the flight nurses on board prepped their patient for transfer. Tammy and Dr. Williams guided the team forward, then conferred with the flight physician as the nurses transferred the patient. Justin held the gurney steady as four nurses huffed, hauling the backboard out of the helicopter.
Whoever the patient was, he was huge. His feet hung off the bottom of the backboard. He was shirtless, and his bare chest and tree-trunk arms were covered in smears of blood. More dried blood caked his hands, almost up to his wrists. Bruises littered his torso. His eyes were swollen shut and ringed in bruises. His face was cut, lip split, flesh torn open across his cheekbone. His neck was wrapped in a cervical collar, but there was some deep bruising under there, a wide band that ran all around his neck and up under his jaw.
Justin held the gurney as the nurses carefully slid his backboard up, until Justin was gazing down into the patient’s battered face.
Everything stopped, like someone had pressed pause on the world. The humming helo engine, still turning over on standby, faded to a dull buzz. The wind, the rotors, even the people slowed around him. “Wes?”
It couldn’t be.
It couldn’t be Wes lying in front of him. It couldn’t be, because he’d left Wes in the hotel room, and Wes was going to stay there and wait for him. “Wes?” His voice rose, panic shredding his vocal cords.
Wes hadn’t responded to his texts for hours.
“Justin? You know this man?” Tammy appeared at his shoulder. Her hand was steel on his shoulder, trying to pull him back.
He didn’t budge. He ran his hands down Wes’s bloody cheeks, brushed his thumbs over Wes’s swollen eyelids. “This is Wes Van de Hoek.” He gasped as every broken part of Wes’s body came together in front of him. He’d been looking only at the injuries before, cataloging cuts and bruises. He hadn’t been looking at the man like he was someone Justin knew, someone he loved.
Tammy yanked, both of her hands on his shoulders as she dragged him away from Wes’s gurney. Dr. Williams took over, running down a quick assessment. “His breathing and his pupils are sluggish, and his pulse is low. Has he regained consciousness at all since he was brought in?”
The flight physician shook his head.
“Where’s all this blood coming from? Anyone see any active bleeds?”
“We couldn’t find any,” one of the flight nurses said.
“Wes…” Justin pleaded. He tried to reach for him, tried to fight against Tammy’s hold. Wes looked so broken, so fragile. His chest rose and fell in fractional shudders. His hands dangled off the sides of the gurney, fingers limp and curled toward his palm.
“He might have internal bleeding. We’ve got to get him into the CT, now.” Dr. Williams nodded to the other nurses. “Let’s get him down to the ER. Michelle, page radiology as soon as we’re down. Tell them we have an emergency CT and X-ray coming to them. I also want neurology downstairs in twenty minutes. I want to know what kind of head trauma we’re looking at. Prep ICU, and have surgical on standby. All right, let’s move.”
They jogged for the vestibule, rolling Wes away. Justin tried to follow, but Tammy held him back. “You can’t be involved, Justin. You know the patient.”
“That’s Wes!” He fought against her, trying to shake loose. His vision was blurring, and his cheeks were wet. His throat, his lungs wouldn’t work. He wanted to call out to Wes, but he couldn’t make his brain and his vocal cords work together, couldn’t form the words he wanted to say.
His knees gave out and he sagged in Tammy’s arms, dragging her down with him as he sank to the concrete. Why? How? What had happened?
“You said that was Wes Van de Hoek?” Tammy crouched next to him, one hand on his wrist, holding on. “How do you know him?”
“Did you read the article this morning?”
“Is there anyone in this town who hasn’t?”
Justin cringed. “I’m his boyfriend.”
Tammy said nothing. She turned and stared into the night, over the cluster of office buildings in the center of their tiny downtown.
* * *
He ended up in the nurses’lounge, torn between crying and wanting to flip the furniture. Tear the metal lockers apart with his hands. Break a chair over his thigh and hurl the pieces against the wall. He paced instead, unable to keep still as he waited for information.
