Sometimes you think you’re asking the right questions and all you get in answer is nonsense.  The problem with my job is that it happens when you’re dealing with emergency situations.

There are tons of protocols, from determining trauma to dropping off the already dead, and even if they’re set in policy and procedure manuals there’s still an etiquette.  I mean, it’s not codified anywhere, but for some of us it’s the need to live life blatantly and fully because we don’t care about leaving that pretty “nothing much happened” corpse, and for some of us it’s because, “Please,” and “Thank you,” make a heck of a lot of difference when for anything less than that you see the worst.

This job deals with extremes.  You get the superstitious types (just about anyone who continues to claim the full moon brings out the loonies is one of ’em) and you get the disbelievers.  (I won’t call them skeptics – “skeptic” implies someone who, if you could show them some proof, would change their minds.)   Every once in a while you get someone who slides from one side of the scale to another.

And you get a whole heck of a lot of witches.

It makes sense, I guess.  It’s a helping profession, and a lot of them feel they need the karmic boost.  Alright, that’s my cynical side.  It’s a way to take their healing qualities and put them to good use.   We don’t talk about it.  We’re not casting hexes on the boys who run off after finding out that pulling the trigger is nothing like it was in the video game or on television.  We’re not slathering herbs and chanting over someone who is bleeding out on the sidewalk.  Medicine and healing may not be the same thing, but there is definitely a code.

Do I have a healing altar where some of the patients I transport have a place?  Heck yeah! Do I tell them?  Best thing is that I can say I am praying for them.  That’s a fairly socially acceptable phrase and still true.

But this is about a fellow I’ve met twice in the last month.  A fellow named “E.”

This is about a couple of run reports I couldn’t be honest about, because “lacerations from Dragon” (or any kind of beast in the midst of a city that isn’t a dog or illicit big cat) just doesn’t help the hospital.  Snakebite?  Sure.  Sharkbite? Yep.  Scorpion, dog, spider, any of these things and there’d be a protocol.    “Poisonous festering wounds from mythical creature” just doesn’t have a place in modern medicine.

And the couple of hundred thorns poking out like quills from a plant I couldn’t identify?  That didn’t help, either.   Pertinent history?  “Had wandered off into another dimension.”  Again, not something one wants their supervisor to review, and not something your local emergency room is likely to be able to handle.

I’ve heard weird things, and usually you just have to ignore them.  Man who appears to have two hearts, at least according to your stethoscope?  Smiling lady on whom you simply can’t find a pulse?  Both of those were just last week.  “We don’t deny emergency services to the undead,” I said to my partner as I shut the doors, just like it was a company motto.

After all, the only type of person we ever say is missing their brain is usually a supervisor.  I don’t know what it is that takes someone from field to desk besides a thinking-ectomy, because it isn’t like they haven’t had to put up with the same things we do.  The smells.  The SUVs that think they can climb up on the sidewalks or emergency access lanes because they could afford the downpayment on their inexcusable vehicles.

Not that I have an opinion.  I try not to have opinions on the job.  I just try to save lives, and an opinion there makes you a devil.  Well, at least a demon.  Anytime you get to choose a life or death, you become something inhuman.  So my job is to save them all, like I was some Pokemon trainer looking for a record.

(“I choose you, man face-down in street!”  Only then we can’t have them fighting battles.  Maybe the Pokemon reference doesn’t work.)

He was cute, this “E” guy.  Kind of dorky in that probably-doesn’t-talk-to-girls-a-lot fashion, but there’s only one cure for that!  (Talk to girls, duh.)  Dazed and confused, but who isn’t after a major car accident?   A hit-and-run, at any rate.  Maggie, who doesn’t run the coven but has enough ego for it, said it was something else.

Yeah, she said it was a Dragon.

It’s funny.  I never thought I’d be the skeptic, but that was a big, big idea to swallow down, and I just couldn’t bite into it, you know?  I mean, not that I’d know a fewmet from any other kind of turd.  Again, my assistance rotation didn’t take the idea into account, and that might have to be done at a veterinary school, anyway.

When I ran into him the second time, along the same stretch of road, I knew it wasn’t just, well, fate.  It was Fate with the capital “F” for me to meet the guy named a capital “E.”  Something crazy like that.  He had…well, he looked like he’d been through an explosion, which, given that the building was burning (it had been some kind of ethnic restaurant – you know, the kind that was probably pretty good because the people of that ethnicity ate there, but you always felt kind of uncomfortable going into because, well, everyone might like food but you don’t know how to pronounce the stuff on the menu and you don’t feel like you belong) was possible.  It didn’t explain the cuts.  It didn’t explain the thorns – we thought maybe like splinters for a while, but there wasn’t any obvious cause.  I gave an instant to think about the poor nurse who was going to have to start pulling them out.   No one ruled out internal bleeding or any number of other curiousities, but I had a feeling that just like that car accident (Dragon accident, whatever) he was going to pull through fine.

I knew to call Maggie.  That much I could do.  And, well, I’ll make sure to give him my number if I’m right.  Fate, I tell you.  I just have a feeling about this.