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Dyno Mites, everybody called them.
    Almost everyone in ED had stood hushed in a silent homage as they passed—running, first with Bridget, then with Maureen—for the elevator, headed up to surgery. As if the doctors and nurses might salute, Amber thought.
    She sighed and set to work.
    The bay looked like a battlefield. It always did. Amber drew the curtains.
    With a nurse’s aide, Maria Alvarez, beside her, she stripped away the blood-soaked sheets and pillowcases and began to bag the packages that held tubing and gauze, rippedopenandthrowntothefloorinthebreakneckhaste. There was a bloody spatter on the portable X-ray, though not so much as in the other room. Bridget’s room.
    They had gone in to start her heart again. The medics came thundering through the doors, IV bags aloft, one holding the mask over her mouth while another com pressed the bag as they ran, snot and tears frozen on Carl Otterstad’s face. Carl had been chief of the volunteer medics for as long as anyone knew. He lived just across the street from the Flannerys and two doors north of the O’Malleys. Carl would have known the worst the second he saw Bridget . . . but they had worked like madmen on her all the way from the north side of Bigelow anyway.

    Carl still sat outside in the waiting room, crying. He had waited to say a word to the Flannerys and the O’Malleys after Dr. Collins spoke to them and they went upstairs, but he had missed them. Up there it could be hours. The social worker, Neely Cavendish, walked past and spoke to Carl, laying a hand on his shoulder, before heading for the elevators. Someone else would finish Carl’s shift. It was late anyhow. Amber glanced out through the meshed glass at Carl’s back, his big hands splayed and covering his face like a hockey helmet as he sobbed. After a little while Chief Colette showed up, too. Amber felt better knowing some one was there with Carl.
    When the mops and sterile solutions had arrived for washing down the equipment and the bed, Amber moved over to the other bay.
    How could it be just an hour ago that Bridget had been here? The mess was so much worse, actually, because Bridget was better off than Maureen. Bridget had been ac tively bleeding.

    “One, two, three . . .” and lift; Bridget was so tiny that she felt like nothing and so broken that she looked like some thing built on the set of a horror movie, blood pouring from her nose and her mouth, one leg rag-doll crooked. A bro ken shoulder and greenstick fracture of the radius were the least of her problems. Marie Kimmer had the IV in her poor groin, with the sucs and pentobarbital that would calm and immobilize Bridget, making it easier for her body to rest

    and respond. The charting nurse took her place at the por table desk. Tom Katz, the senior resident (who was cute, and who took a lot of teasing from the nurses because of his name) took his place at the foot of the table and called out, “GS three,” meaning that Bridget was low on the Glasgow Coma Scale, which was bad. He glanced at his students: the tall, bone-skinny guy who was new and blond Amy Daater, a first-year resident. Joe Deever, the anesthesiologist, did the ABC—airway, breathing, and circulation. Katz’s boss, Dr. Collins, the chief, roved around, taking it all in, gently pointing out the tiny details anyone but a twenty-year guy would miss.
    Amber stood at Bridget’s right shoulder, closest to the monitor, efficiently starting a fresh IV in on the first stick— not that Bridget would have noticed—and then beginning to sponge away surface blood. Dr. Katz looked doubtful about asking the first-year resident, but this was a teach ing hospital and so he said quickly, “That blood. Look at the picture. Are we looking at lacerations and some teeth knocked out?”
    “It’s not really squirting, so I think, yes, she has a bro ken nose and . . . ,” Dr. Daater said. “These teeth will have to be replaced with a bridge if we get that far.”
    “But we