Chapter Thirty-Five
472 Words
The ambulance shrieked through the streets, sirens slicing the air into ribbons.
Inside, Leia lay strapped to the gurney, her body a waxy, gray imitation of itself under the flickering ceiling lights.
The lead paramedic — a woman with cropped blonde hair and hands that never shook — barked out orders with mechanical precision.
“BP’s seventy over thirty. Heart rate’s spiking — get another line in her!”
The younger medic scrambled, fumbling with a second IV line, gloves snapping, hands slipping against the polished metal.
Leia’s chest rose and fell in shallow, stuttering jerks beneath the oxygen mask forced against her face.
Every breath rasped like sandpaper over an open wound.
The older medic leaned close, voice low and clinical, steady only from exhaustion.
“Stay with me, Leia. Stay with me.”
Leia didn’t respond.
Didn’t blink.
Didn’t even twitch.
Only the machine’s slow, irregular beep marked that she hadn’t already slipped away.
⸻
The ambulance jolted hard as the driver wrenched the rig around a curve.
Leia’s body bucked against the gurney straps, but she didn’t stir.
Didn’t flinch.
Didn’t even register.
Just kept breathing in those tiny, rattling gasps that barely stirred the mask.
⸻
The second IV bag was squeezed manually, forcing saline into dying veins at a desperate speed.
The lead paramedic slammed a thumb against the intercom.
“ETA five minutes. Crash team on standby. She’s circling the drain.”
Static crackled the reply.
The lights above buzzed, flickered.
Leia’s pulse monitor dipped again — the tone dropping into a sluggish, hopeless crawl.
The medic didn’t hesitate.
Grabbed a syringe.
Jam of adrenaline straight into the line.
Leia spasmed.
A pathetic, broken jerk that lifted her from the gurney a mere inch before slamming her back down.
A doll, nothing more.
Her eyes fluttered half-open — glassy, unseeing, fevered.
A garbled, broken sound pushed from her throat.
Almost a word.
Almost.
But not enough.
⸻
The ambulance howled louder as it tore into the hospital bay.
Metal doors hissed open.
Fluorescent lights bled down from the overhang.
The stretcher rattled violently as the paramedics slammed the wheels down and rushed her across cracked concrete.
Hospital doors burst open.
Leia was swallowed by the fluorescent mouth of the ER without ceremony.
“Seventy over thirty!” the medic shouted ahead, voice echoing off sterile walls.
“Unresponsive. Hallucinations prior to collapse. Possible organ shutdown.”
More figures swarmed.
Hands snatched the gurney.
Leia’s wrist vanished under a blood pressure cuff.
An oxygen monitor.
A drip line.
One medic snapped out commands, his voice already moving on to the next emergency.
Leia was just another dying thing in the endless stream.
They pushed her through heavy double doors into ICU triage.
Behind them, the ambulance sat empty.
The stretcher straps hung loose.
No one looked back.
- Writer
