Nature Noir, Jordan Smith [early reader chapter books .txt] 📗

Twenty minutes later I had my part of the statement-taking done. I returned to my Jeep to drop off a page full of notes and get a drink of water. Glancing at the prisoner in the back, I saw him slumped over sideways. I took off my sunglasses and studied his face. It was blue, ashen blue, like a dead man's. He was absolutely motionless.

"Finch! Look at this!"

Finch walked over and peered at the man through the side window of the car.

"He's faking it," he said.

"The hell he is."

"He's faking it."

"I don't know how he could fake that color. Take a look."

I opened the door, leaned into the back seat, and put my hand on the man's clammy chest, feeling for movement. Holding my face cautiously close to his, I listened for breathing. "Nothing," I told Finch over my shoulder. "He's not breathing."

"Shit," said Finch.

I reached for the latch on the man's seat belt. Grabbing his feet, I dragged them up off the floor. He was dead weight. I pulled on his legs. Finch shoved in next to me and grabbed one foot. The man tumbled out of the car onto his back on the rocky beach.

Kneeling on the rocks next to the still body, I rolled the tips of the index and middle fingers of my right hand down from the prominence of the man's Adam's apple to the carotid artery, feeling for a pulse. Finch was on the radio calling for an ambulance.

"His heart is still beating," I told Finch.

I jumped up and ran around to the back of the Jeep, opened the tailgate, opened the equipment box inside, and jerked out the medic's pack and oxygen kit. I ran back around the Jeep, put them down, ripped open their cases, and cranked open the oxygen supply valve. The regulator made a reassuring hiss as the gauge spiked up. I pulled on a pair of surgical gloves. I reached into the medic's kit for an airway, sized it against the man's clammy jaw, discarded it for another, opened his mouth gingerly with a finger and thumb, and threaded the curved plastic tube over his blue tongue and down his throat. Finch was uncoiling the shiny green supply line for the demand valve and handed the valve to me. I hit the button once: It made a satisfying shush. I picked up a mask from the kit and press-fitted it onto the valve, pushed it over the man's mouth and nose, and began to breathe him. Dispatch called; our ambulance was en route. I reached for the speaker-mike and acknowledged their transmission.

For maybe half an hour, maybe forty minutes, I watched his chest rise and fall in response to the oxygen I forced into it with the button under my thumb. Periodically I'd stop to check for a pulse. His heart was still beating. Weak, but beating. With Finch and the other rangers to keep an eye on the crowd, my world got very small and simple, just the sshhush of the demand valve, the still body, and the rounded river rocks beneath it.

Around the body were cobbles of greenstone the color of jade, and granite ones with sparkling salt-and-pepper crystals. There were river-rounded schists, the alternating layers of black and white minerals across their flanks like stripes on a zebra. There were charcoal-gray gabbros. There were tan quartzites in which more wear-resistant veins of quartz stood out in bas-relief, branching like the blue veins on the still man's pale arms. There were eggs of porphyry the color of dried blood and orbs of milky quartz blasted by nineteenth-century gold miners from fossil riverbeds high on the canyon walls upstream, where they'd lain entombed for fifty million years since those rivers had been buried by volcanic eruptions. Back in the living world now, these stones were orphans, because the mountains from which those ancient rivers had plucked them had long ago been washed down to the sea. Each rock and its texture, each lungful of oxygen, each moment, and then each next moment—these are all life is made of when nothing else can be counted on. And for this reason there is a strange peacefulness at the center of catastrophe.

After a while, the man's face began to pink up. His limbs twitched. The airway I'd put down his throat began to bob and click against the interior of the clear plastic oxygen mask. He was coming to, and as he did, his gag reflex was coming back. Quickly I lifted the mask and pulled the airway out of him so it wouldn't cause him to vomit and inhale his stomach contents, which could lead to pneumonia that might kill him slowly later, if he didn't die before the ambulance got there. His eyes fluttered. He took a couple of ragged breaths, and then another. Then there was nothing. Then another breath. Then nothing.

He had stopped breathing again. Again I inserted the airway and began moving his air for him. It went on like this two, then three times.

One of the other rangers stood over us, watching. The mob had gathered in a circle around us. "Is he dead?" a woman asked. "I hope so," some guy answered.

There were needle tracks on his arms. When he had run away, he must have gone in the bushes and fixed himself up with a speedball—a heroin and methamphetamine cocktail.

"Where's the damn ambulance?" I asked Finch, watching the man's chest deflate for the umpteenth time and glancing at the declining pressure gauge on my O2 tank. It'll be harder to keep him alive if I run out of oxygen, I thought. I heard Finch calling dispatch for a status on the ambulance.

Eventually the ambulance got there. The other rangers moved the crowd of bystanders out of the way. A man and a woman in dark blue jumpsuits took over my patient, placing him on a gurney while I continued breathing him.