Daniel Cruz stepped half a pace forward, trying to salvage their authority with a dismissive wave of his hand. "Hey, relax, Medic. We were responding to a 911 call. The witness on the hill said he was attacking her. How are we supposed to know?"
Down on the asphalt, Adrian heard Jason Rivera’s voice. Through the searing, suffocating agony in his eyes and airway, he forced himself to lift his head half an inch off the grit, his voice coming out as a raw, strangled rasp that tore at his scorched vocal cords.
"Jason..." Adrian gasped, his eyes squeezed tightly shut, tears streaming down his temples. "I’m Dr. Adrian Foster... ER attending at City General... I saw her go down... syncopal collapse, pulseless and apneic... I started thirty-to-two immediately... Check her rhythm, she probably went into V-fib..."
At the sound of the name and the unmistakable clinical shorthand, Jason Rivera froze mid-motion as Maya yelled, "Pads on, analyzing rhythm—clear the patient!"
Jason took his hands off the woman’s chest and leaned two feet to his left, looking closely down at the side of the handcuffed man’s face beneath the sheen of orange OC resin and sweat.
For fifteen years, Jason had wheeled critical patients through the ambulance bay doors of City General Hospital. Dozens of times, the calm, brilliant physician waiting in Trauma Bay 1 to take handoff of his dying patients—the doctor who always treated the street medics with total respect, who knew their names and bought coffee for the night crews during winter surges—was Dr. Adrian Foster.
The blood drained from Jason’s face, replaced instantly by a flush of outrage so intense his hands shook inside his nitrile gloves.
"Dr. Foster?" Jason breathed, horrified. Then he whipped his head up to look at Greg Lawson, his voice dropping an octave into a cold, lethal register that made even the onlookers flinch. "That’s Dr. Adrian Foster. He’s a senior emergency room attending physician at City General. I’ve worked with him for ten years. You just pepper-sprayed and handcuffed an ER doctor in the middle of resuscitating a patient. Do you have any idea what you’ve just done?"
Greg Lawson didn't answer.
For the first time since Unit 412 had pulled into the park, the swagger vanished completely from Lawson’s posture. His face went the color of wet drywall. Behind him, Daniel Cruz’s mouth opened slightly, his eyes darting frantically from Adrian’s bruised wrists, to the defibrillator pads wired to the unconscious woman’s bare chest, and then up to the horrified circle of witnesses.
Chapter 7: Shock Advised
"Shock advised," the clear, synthetic voice of the HeartStart defibrillator announced over the quiet of the park, accompanied by the high-pitched, rising whine of the capacitor charging to two hundred joules. "Stand clear of the patient."
"Clear!" Maya Lin called out sharply, sweeping her eyes from head to toe of the patient to ensure no one was touching her.
She pressed the flashing orange shock button.
A sharp electrical snap clicked through the pads. The woman’s shoulders and torso jerked upward off the pavement for a fraction of a second in an involuntary muscular contraction before settling back down.
"Right back on the chest!" Maya instructed, and Jason immediately resumed thirty seconds of compressions while the monitor re-evaluated the electrical activity of her myocardium.
Thirty seconds later, they cleared again. The monitor analyzed the jagged waveforms dancing across the LCD screen—persistent ventricular fibrillation that hadn't quite converted on the first pass.
"Shock advised. Charging. Stand clear."
"Clear!" Maya pressed the button a second time.
Once again, the woman’s body jolted as two hundred joules of biphasic current depolarized her chaotic heart muscle, giving her natural sinoatrial pacemaker a split-second chance to reclaim control.
For five tense seconds, the only sound in the grove was the rustle of the maple leaves and the heavy, raspy sound of Adrian trying to breathe through his swollen throat on the pavement four feet away. Everyone—the joggers, the medics, and the two pale, frozen police officers—stared at the green waveform on the monitor screen.
Beep... Beep... Beep... Beep...
A clean, organized narrow-complex QRS wave marched steadily across the display at ninety-two beats per minute.
"No shock advised," the machine announced. "Check pulse and breathing."
Jason pressed two fingers against her carotid artery, while Maya watched her chest wall. Suddenly, the woman in the blue jacket drew in a sudden, shuddering, spontaneous breath on her own, her eyelashes fluttering faintly as a soft groan escaped her throat and a faint flush of pink began returning to her cheeks.
"Strong radial and carotid pulse! Ninety-two and regular! She’s breathing on her own, we have ROSC!" Maya announced, referencing Return of Spontaneous Circulation as she fitted a non-rebreather oxygen mask securely over the woman’s nose and mouth at fifteen liters per minute.
Jason let out a long breath, verified the pulse one more time, and then turned on his knees toward Adrian, who was still lying on his side on the asphalt in handcuffs.
"We got ROSC, Dr. Foster!" Jason said, making sure his voice carried clearly to every single person standing within fifty yards. "Her heart is back in normal sinus rhythm and she’s breathing spontaneously! You saved her life, Doc. Her downtime before compressions was zero because of you. If you hadn't started high-quality CPR the second she dropped, her myocardium wouldn't have responded to the shock—she would be dead on this pavement right now."
Adrian couldn't speak. He gave a tiny, agonized nod against the ground, his chest tightening with a mixture of overwhelming professional relief that his patient was alive and a crushing, suffocating wave of humiliation and physical torment. His eyes felt like they were being seared with hot pokers, and his wrists were throbbing against the steel cuffs.
Around the perimeter, the dam broke among the witnesses. Now that the medical crisis was stabilizing and a veteran paramedic had validated what they had seen with their own eyes, the bystanders lost all fear of the two uniforms. Their voices rose in a chorus of furious condemnation.
"We tried to tell them!" the woman in the pink leggings yelled, pointing an accusing finger at Lawson and Cruz. "She collapsed right in front of him without warning! He didn't touch her until she hit the ground!"
"He was counting compressions out loud!" another jogger shouted. "He told me to call 911! He was saving her life and you two ran up like maniacs and sprayed him in the eyes without asking a single question!"