Moonshifted(3)

It hit him.

He crumpled forward against the hood, arms out, like he was hugging it in a moment of game-show triumph. Then it launched him into the air. I stopped in the middle of the road, stunned, unable to believe that I was actually watching someone fly. He made an arc, landed, bounced, and skidded to a stop, smearing red behind himself.

Half a second for the impact to occur, another half a second for the landing, and then the sound of screeching brakes as all other rightful traffic through the intersection came to a halt—except for the truck, which kept going. It missed the man’s landing body by inches, and drove away with his blood in its tire treads.

“Jesus Christ,” Charles said, and started to run for the injured man. I ran after him.





CHAPTER TWO





“I’ve already called nine-one-one!” yelled a bystander. I could hear someone retching behind me as we reached the man’s still form.

“Everybody back! We’re nurses!” Charles yelled.

Fuck me fuck me fuck me. I was no paramedic. I was used to people whom the emergency department had already cleaned up and put tubes and lines in. He was so injured—where to even begin? Charles knelt down, putting his fingers on the man’s neck. “He’s got a pulse. He’s breathing.” I knelt down beside him. Dark bruises were blossoming around both the man’s eyes.

“Raccoon eyes,” I whispered, having only seen it once before, on a trauma test in nursing school.

“Brain shear, go figure.” Charles spared me a dark glance.

We had no supplies. We couldn’t move him and risk his spine. One of the man’s legs was twisted the wrong way, denim torn open, exposing meat and bone below. A moment earlier, and we’d have seen the stuffing of him, ragged edges of skin, yellow-white subcutaneous fat, red stripes of muscle tissue. But that moment had let his blood catch up with his injuries, and now it welled out from arteries and leaked from veins. It filled up his wounds, overflowing their edges and spilling out like oil onto the ground. When it began to ebb, I gritted my teeth and reached in, pushing against his broken leg’s femoral artery. Blood wicked through the fabric of my glove and was hot against my hand.

“Here’s an old-timer trick.” Charles knelt straight into the stranger’s thigh, his knee almost into the groin, only pausing for me to pull my hands out of the way. The blood leaching out of the man’s leg subsided—although that might’ve been because there wasn’t much left. “It’ll clamp down the artery completely.”

I inhaled to complain now was not a good time for class—but I stopped when I realized teaching was what Charles did to cope. Our patient groaned and tried to move his head. I crawled through the gravel and broken glass up to the man’s head. “Sir, you can’t move right now. There’s been a bad accident.” I put my hands on either side of his head. His snow cap had been peeled off, along with part of his scalp, and his wispy white hair was sticky with blood. “I’m so sorry, just please stay still.”

“Aren’t you going to breathe for him?” someone behind me asked. I glanced back and saw a man with a cell phone jutting forward.

“What is wrong with you?” I swatted the phone out of his hand, sent it skittering into a slick of blood stained snow by the curb. “Show some respect!”

“Hey! That’s my new phone!” The bystander started pawing gloved hands through the grimy snow to get what was his. There was a shadow there, cast by the man himself, and I saw it shudder, swallowing the phone inside its blackness like a throat. I wondered if it’d been a trick of the light.

The injured man moved again, reaching up a hand to fight me. “No no no no no,” I said, but he continued to clutch my wrist with the strength of someone who had nothing left to lose. “Stay still, okay? It’s all going to be fine,” I said, knowing I was lying. “Just stay still.”

He groaned and the shape of his jaw shifted, becoming narrow and more angular. His teeth pressed forward, stretching against the limits of his lips, lengthening, showing yellow enamel. His beard began to grow—just like fur. “Charles?” I asked, my voice rising in pitch. It was daytime, on a cloudy December day—but I looked over my shoulder and saw Charles’s face turn dusky, like the surrounding gray sky.

“Code Fur, Edie. We need Domitor, now.” He fished in his coat pocket for a phone. “I’m calling the floor.” The sound of a distant ambulance began in the background. “Get back here before they do.”

I stood, found my footing in the ice and blood, then I was gone.