The Walking Dead

The bells rang loudly inside the old dial phone that hung on one of the eight-foot tall plywood walls that together, made up the small roofless cubicle where we slept. The set of green steel army bunk beds, that held our sleeping bodies, sat adjacent to where the phone hung on the wall. My partner reached up and pulled on the chain that dangled from the single light bulb mounted high at the ceiling above the walls, then reached for the ringing phone. I could tell from his short conversation that it wasn't a social call and we would soon be out in the night once again. The bare light bulb shined so brightly I had to squint as I rolled out of the bottom bunk and began to dress. I looked at my watch. Three a.m. Man, we just got to sleep an hour ago. I heard my partner finish up with the dispatcher and head for the toilet as he always did before leaving on a run. You never know where you're headed and how long you're going to be there. I pulled on my shirt and began buttoning it. It's always hard to wipe the sleep out of your face and eyes after an hour of heavy sleep. This had been our first chance to get some shuteye since we started our shift yesterday morning. Twenty-four hour shifts were a standard throughout the industry. 24 on, 24 off, almost perpetual I thought. If you wake up at work, you know your going home and if you wake up at home, you know you're going to work. At $1.25 an hour, we needed all the hours we could get.

The Oldsmobile ambulance was parked in the garage just the other side of the makeshift walls separating us. I climbed in the driver's side as my partner lifted the heavy wooden garage door. I pulled the unit out and he closed the heavy door from the inside, locked it then exited out of a small door on the side of the garage. At this point we can only hope to get cancelled and go back to sleep, although, now exhaust fumes lay heavy in the garage air.

My partner got in and I asked where we were headed. "2769 Preston, possible suicide with a gun, he said, as he picked up the mic and told the dispatcher "104 is 10-5. I turned on the overhead map light as my partner opened the map book and quickly ran down the location of our call. I turned on the overhead beacons and side tunnels as we pulled out on to the main road in front of the station. Traffic was sparse this time of the morning so I didn't have to use the siren, besides, why make that kind of noise at this hour. We always had an unwritten rule to never use your siren at night within 5 or 6 blocks of the station. It kept us on good terms with the neighbors.

The long sleek white over red Cotner-Bevington slid smoothly down the road as the rotating red beams from the roof mounted beacons bounced off the storefront windows and shot through the night's darkness. We snaked our way through the city until we turned onto Preston and saw the red rotating lights of the Fire Rescue unit. As we approached the house my partner reached through the rear access windows of the patient compartment and began gathering extra clean white towels. Shootings are not usually messy unless something explodes¦ like the side of someone's head. He gathered 3 extra towels and wrapped one around his neck and gave me one to do the same. Always having something to wipe up with would help us avoid getting blood, flesh, and maybe even brain matter on our clothes. There was an art to moving messy bodies. Lifeless bodies are literally dead weight and moving them becomes much more difficult when they're covered with fluids like blood and tissue. The skin becomes so slippery it's like trying to hang on to a greased pig. We were issued only 2 uniforms and had to buy anything extra on our own. The first street lesson you learned was how to dodge blood. It became an everyday battle to keep your uniform free of spots and spatters in a 24-hour shift, not to mention trying to avoid pukers too. Car accidents could be a real bitch. You always have to be cautious of getting gas, oil, or any engine fluid on your clothes, not to mention how easy it was to tear them on the multitude of sharp twisted metal parts as you move around an accident scene.

I thought back to a run I went on a few months ago where I kneeled in a small puddle of white fluid. Ah shit, I couldn't believe I just did that. The second uniform ruined this week. It was almost unnoticeable against the light colored floor mats where it had accumulated. A young woman had lost control of her car on I-94 and ran into a bridge abutment at about 70 miles an hour. She wasn't wearing a seat belt and had gotten stuffed under the dashboard from the impact. The fire department had to used the Jaws of Life to lift the dash off of her lifeless crumpled body. As the dashboard and steering column began to separate from the floor, I reached in and attempted to pull her body free. As I grasped her obviously broken legs, my fingers slipped into a large gash in the back of her knee joint. I remember it felt like I just poked my fingers into warm oil. As we lifted her out and onto our stretcher, I noticed the fluid on my fingers was a white pearl color just as the spot on the right knee of my pants. When we arrived at the emergency room, the doctor told me it was Synovial fluid. It is a viscous fluid that resides around the knee joint as a lubricant. I learned two things that day, what Synovial fluid looks and feels like, and that it would never came out of my pants no matter how many times I washed them.

I backed the unit into the driveway and stopped short of a walkway leading to the front door. We got out, opened the heavy back door of the ambulance and unloaded the stretcher. My partner stuck the extra towel under one of the safety straps and gave me a look to assure I knew it was there. As we approached the front door, we saw the fireman hurry past us saying, sorry guys; we've got another one over on Delmar. This one won't give you any trouble, as he pointed to down the hallway behind him. With that, they jumped in their fire red panel truck and raced off. We continued into the house and noticed a police officer to our right sitting on the couch in what looked to be the living room. We paused awaiting a sign from him before proceeding to what might be a crime scene. A distraught looking woman sat next to him. She looked to be in her mid 50's wrapped in a dingy white housecoat without buttons or a wrap so she was holding it closed with her arms crossing her lap. I noticed her slippers were made up of matted blue fur and had an open toe that showed her yellowish unpainted toenails. What I could gather from their conversation she was the victim's mother. I heard her telling the officer of her inability to control her daughter's behavior and had mentioned the name Eloise. I immediately knew this person's name either had to be Eloise or she was a patient there. We were well acquainted with D building. It is a part of the complex known as Eloise. Eloise started out as a poorhouse and a poor farm back in the early 1800's, through the Civil War, and later became Wayne County General Hospital. Another 70 or so buildings were added to form a complex that eventually became a city in itself. It even had it's own Post Office. The complex was named after the first postmaster of Detroit's six-year old daughter, Eloise. A life-size portrait of her and her dog still adorn one of the main buildings.

"D building is where the post office was located. It was also known as the Looney bin. We had taken many people there but never got used to being around it. Most of the doctors were oriental, Chinese mostly, I think, maybe Korean or Japanese? Names like Kim, Wong, Chin, or Woo from what I could remember. They mostly spoke broken English and found it hard relating to most of the patients we brought in. I know I had a hard time understanding them and relied on the nurses for direction. I can only imagine what some of the patients must have thought.

The officer looked up at us and I asked, "Where are we taking her? He said, "Her mother would like her to go to County General, her docs are out there. But, why don't you ask her. He gave us a wink as he motioned with his thumb over his shoulder pointing toward the back bedroom. I thought to myself, why be a smart ass at this time of the morning. Just a little cop humor, though we weren't in the mood for jokes. Besides, he probably just started his shift a couple hours ago. I was a little puzzled as to why the mother wanted to go all the way out to County. We had a hospital right up the road. Maybe for an autopsy I thought. We moved the stretcher down the hall until we came to a small bedroom on our right. It couldn't be larger than 8x 10 with pale yellow walls with white borders and a small curtain less window at the far end of the elongated room. Against the left wall were 2 steel milk crates. One held a small TV and the other a small lamp, the only light in the room, and wind up alarm clock. To our immediate right we saw a small single bed pushed tightly against the wall. Sitting straight up with her back tightly against the wall, in the middle of the bed, was a noticeably overweight young woman. Her faced shadowed from the dim light of the small lamp. Her legs were outstretched and her dirty feet barely hung over the bedside. She had on green stirrup stretch pants and a white sleeveless top. We would later find out it was a .45 caliber handgun that she put to the side of her head and pulled the trigger. My initial thoughts were that she probably went fast by looks of the wound. The bullet went completely through the front portion of her skull and blew out both of her eyes, surrounding tissue, and any bone or cartilage that was present there. It looked kinda like ground hamburger hanging from where her eyes and sockets were. The force of the shot threw tissue and pieces of her eyes all over the walls and down the front of her white blouse. Her long stringy black hair was soaked with blood and small bone fragments. I thought to myself, this isn't going to be easy getting her out of this little room. We looked at each other and pulled off the towels from around our necks and laid them on the bed near the patient. If we could pull her over the towels we could then fold them over the messy spots to keep from contaminating ours clothes and equipment. We maneuvered the stretcher as close to the bedroom door as possible and then turned and approached the young woman's body. As I reached over to give her an initial tug toward the towels, her mouth opened and she said, "I can move on my own. We were shocked! We both jumped back in surprise. My eyes got wide and my throat had a momentary lump in it. My partner stood back by the stretcher in utter amazement. The woman slowly reached out with an open hand waiting for one of us to grab it. We looked at each other thinking, you grab her hand, I'm not grabbin her hand. My partner finally grabbed her hand and helped her to her feet. The walking dead, I thought. We guided her to our stretcher where she sat down then turned to lay back. We covered her with clean towels and a sheet then secured her with the safety straps.

As my partner began to clean her face as best as possible, she said her name was Rita. She was 23 years old and had been institutionalized at Eloise for the last 3 years. She came home last weekend for the first time. Unfortunately she found her fathers gun.

We took her over to Wayne County General where they stitched her eyes permanently closed and then would send her over to D building for her recovery and possible internment. Apparently, this wasn't the first time she tried to kill herself. The officer had found the gun on the bed next to her when he arrived. "I guess you could say she missed, he said. The bullet went through her right temple, skimmed over the front of her brain, and the force of the shot exploded everything outward as it passed.

We cleaned our equipment and washed ourselves up as best as possible. We were real lucky this time. Our uniforms survived surprisingly well, I thought. My partner looked at me and frowned, then said, "it sure would have been nice if they had told us she was alive, I thought I was gonna piss myself.