Chapter 3 - The Race for Two Heartbeats
The emergency transport vehicle wasn't an ordinary county ambulance; it was a modified heavy-duty Ford F-450 tactical medical rig operated by the private security firm Alex ran with his veteran teammates.
Inside the climate-controlled cabin, the world smelled of sterile gauze, high-flow oxygen, and cold sweat.
Alex laid me down on the pneumatic stretcher, strapping the safety harnesses across my chest while Marcus engaged the siren—a high-pitched, dual-tone warble that parted the predawn traffic on Interstate 90 like a snowplow through powder.
“IV access in the left antecubital!” a female flight medic named Sarah shouted, tearing open a vacuum-sealed trauma pack. “Starting two large-bore lines! Bolus of lactated Ringer’s wide open! Get the portable Doppler on her abdomen now!”
A cold, conductive gel splashed across my swollen belly.
I cried out, the shock of the cold making my abdominal muscles seize in a violent, protective spasm.
“Breathe, Claire, breathe with me,” Sarah commanded, her fingers pressing the ultrasound wand deep into the lower quadrant of my pelvis, right beside the spreading purple bruise where the walking stick had landed. “Deep breath in through your nose, out through your mouth. Don't fight the monitor.”
The machine let out static.
Shhh-shhh-shhh.
The sound of my own frantic, terrified pulse—one-forty-eight and climbing.
Then silence.
“Find her,” Alex ordered, his voice trembling for the first time in his life. He stood braced between the stretcher and the ceiling rail, his knuckles bone-white as the rig banked hard around a ninety-degree highway interchange. “Sarah, find my niece. Find her right now.”
Shhh-shhh... click...
And then, faint and rapid, like the frantic flutter of a hummingbird’s wings inside a paper box, the second sound broke through the speaker.
Thump-thump-thump-thump-thump.
It was fast—dangerously fast, pushing one-eighty—but it was there.
It was alive.
“Fetal tachycardia,” Sarah reported, her face set in grim concentration as she adjusted the oxygen mask over my nose and mouth. “The placenta has torn at the lower margin, Claire. The baby is in acute distress, but she’s fighting. Her heart is beating.”
Tears flooded my ears, cold and burning. I reached out blindly with my right hand, searching for something solid, and found Alex’s thumb. He gripped my fingers with a pressure that would have bruised an ordinary person, but to me, it was the only anchor keeping my soul from slipping off the edge of the world.
“You hear that, Claire?” Alex choked out, his head resting against my temple, his breath warm against my chilled skin. “That’s your girl. That’s a Bennett girl. She took their best shot and she’s still swinging. You hold on to her, do you hear me? You don't let go.”
“I’m tired, Alex,” I sobbed into the plastic mask. “My back... it hurts so bad...”
“No, you don't sleep!” he snapped, the commander returning with fierce, uncompromising authority. “Look at me, Claire! Eyes on me! Remember the river? Remember when the current took your kayak over the weir in Maine and I told you to kick until your boots came off?”
“I... I remember...”
“You kick, Claire! You kick right now! We are three minutes out from St. Catherine’s! Dr. Evelyn Reed is waiting at the bay with an emergency surgical obstetric team!”
Outside the reinforced glass windows, the flashing blue and white beacons of two municipal police cruisers fell in behind our rig.
My heart hitched in sudden, suffocating panic. “Trent... his father... Richard plays golf with the police commissioner... they’re coming to stop us...”
Alex looked out the rear window. A thin, terrifying smile crossed his lips.
“Richard doesn't play golf with these boys, Claire,” Alex said. “That’s Captain David Ross from the Major Crimes Division. He was my platoon sergeant in Ramadi. I called him five seconds after your SOS hit my phone. The only place Richard and Trent are going this morning is the holding cells at Central Booking.”
The rig screeched to a halt, the rear hydraulic doors swinging open with an explosive hiss of pneumatic pressure.
A flood of blinding hospital lights, shouting voices, and rolling chrome gurneys swallowed us whole.
“Trauma Bay One!” a tall, dark-haired woman in surgical scrubs shouted, leading four nurses to our stretcher. Dr. Evelyn Reed—the chief of maternal-fetal medicine. “Gestational age twenty-four weeks, blunt force abdominal trauma, active third-trimester hemorrhage! Prep four units of O-negative, get the neonatal intensive care transport isolette into OR Three, and page pediatric cardiology!”
The gurney was flying down the linoleum hallway.
Alex ran beside me, his hand never leaving mine, until two surgical nurses put their hands against his chest at the double red doors of the sterile operating suite.
“Sir, you cannot enter! You have to wait in the surgical anteroom!”
Alex stopped at the threshold.
His eyes locked onto mine as the doors began to swing shut. He lifted his right hand to his brow, snapping a crisp, trembling, perfect military salute.
“Bring her home, Claire,” he whispered.
May you like
The doors hissed shut.
The smell of iodine washed over my face, the cold surgical lamps blinded my eyes, and as the anesthesiologist pressed the mask down over my mouth, the rhythm of the heart monitor faded into the dark.
