Jessica Meigs - The Becoming Read Online Free PDF Page A

away, the man snapped at Jonathan with his teeth, biting at the air. Jonathan reflexively jerked back.
    “What the hell, man?”
    Theo ignored Jonathan’s exclamation. He was more focused on another nervous stirring in his gut. Something was wrong, but he wasn’t sure he could put his finger on exactly what it was. “Patient got a name?” he asked Chuck as he climbed out of the back seat to get the backboard set up.
    “No idea,” Chuck admitted. “I couldn’t get close enough to see if he had a wallet on him or to get any vitals. Not with the way he was acting.”
    It took Theo, Chuck, and Jonathan nearly twenty minutes of work and copious amounts of swearing before they managed to get the man—who’d begun to thrash and flail the moment the handcuffs were unlocked—out of the car and onto the backboard. By then, Theo felt like he’d been dunked into a pool of sweat; his uniform shirt stuck grossly to his back. He was panting for air as he and Jonathan strapped the man down, duct taped him into place, and restrained his arms with the Poseys before they began to haul the stretcher toward the embankment.
    “I have never in my life seen anything like this,” Jonathan confessed as he helped Theo wrestle the stretcher up the embankment and to the back of the ambulance.
    “Me either,” Theo admitted. “He’s definitely AMS. Probably the most far-gone AMS I’ve ever seen.” They loaded the stretcher into the ambulance, and both of them climbed into the back. “Grab that pulse-ox; get a reading on his rate while I get the EKG going,” he instructed. He snagged the leads from the bag on the side of the monitor and began to stick them to the man’s chest. Jonathan obeyed, slipping the sensor connected to the reader on the man’s finger and turning it on.
    “I don’t get how this man is still alive,” Jonathan said. The man on the stretcher wiggled and thrashed as best as his strapped-down position would allow. “I’ve never seen somebody survive with these kinds of injuries and be so…active.” He looked at the pulse-ox’s display and frowned, switching it off and on, and then checking the cable running from the sensor to the device. “I’m not getting a reading on O2 or heart rate,” he said, switching the sensor to a different finger.
    “Basics have been having problems with theirs,” Theo said. He wrapped the blood-pressure cuff from the monitor around the patient’s forearm, avoiding the wounds on the man’s biceps. “Maybe they swapped their crappy one for ours when nobody was looking.”
    “Maybe,” Jonathan said doubtfully. He tried the pulse-ox one more time as Theo leaned across the patient and flipped the EKG machine on. There was a pause as the machine powered on. Then the display lit up, and a straight line began to trail across the screen. He leaned closer to it, unsure if he was even seeing correctly, and then sat back, utterly confused.
    “Huh,” Theo said out loud. He climbed over to the other side of the truck and checked the machine over, then double-checked his placement of the leads before he shook his head. “Nothing here either. This isn’t right.”
    “You’re telling me.” Jonathan pulled a bright-orange bag out of one of the cabinets as Theo dug his stethoscope from his supply bag and plugged it into his ears. He leaned as close to the patient as he dared and pressed the cup to the man’s chest, listening intently as he watched for the patient’s breaths. He swallowed hard as he realized that he was, in fact, hearing what he thought he was hearing. Or not hearing, in this particular case.
    Jonathan was across from him; he had pulled the monitor’s blood-pressure cuff from the man’s forearm and replaced it with the one from the orange bag, his own stethoscope in his ears as he inflated the cuff and then slowly let the air out. His face took on a startled expression, and he looked suddenly up at Theo, his eyes wide. Theo was sure his own face mirrored