Words Per Mile

By Callie Ann Marsalisi

“Ambulance nine, ambulance nine.”

“Nine here.”

Dispatch gave an address, punctuated by staticky pops.

“Sixty-eight year old male, wife thinks he’s having a stroke, suddenly nonverbal with right-sided weakness. Last known normal was 1:15pm.”

I looked at the clock on the dash. It was 1:22.

“Nine, received.” We hit the road.

“They didn’t mention anything about directives,” Parker said as he rounded the corner into the neighborhood.

I looked at the directives band on Parker’s wrist, the yellow triangle winking at me from the metal plate as we bumped along the potholes road. We’d never talked much about his family situation.

“She probably didn’t tell them over the phone,” I replied.

“You have your tranquilizers?” he asked as we pulled into the gravel driveway.

“Yeah,” I said. He nodded and patted the pistol at his own hip.

We tromped up to the front door and I knocked. “EMS!” I called.

The main door was open; only the glass storm door separated us from the interior of the house. I couldn’t see anyone and was about to open the storm door myself. Then, a short-haired woman in jeans and a man’s oversized shirt ran to the door. As she opened it, I saw two rubber bands on her wrist.

“He’s still not talking,” she said. “And he won’t even look at me.” She spoke to us over her shoulder as we followed her to the back of the house. “I didn’t even hear anything, I just got up to heat up some lunch in the microwave…”

She was trying to walk quickly without making it look like she was walking quickly, and talking rapidly to make it seem like she wasn’t yelling. I could see her bringing her hands together and apart in front of her, like she wishing she had something to hold onto. I was sure Parker had noticed all of this, too, even just in the fifteen seconds it took us to walk through the entire house. We’re trained to keep an eye on people’s behavior.

The three-season porch has ugly orange carpeting and windows that were in need of a good cleaning. I hadn’t seen a cat, but the couch had clearly shared a home with one. There was a large corduroy recliner in the corner furthest from the TV, and that was where our patient sat. An older man, losing his hair, overweight but not more so than the average person you’d see on the street. Large, hairy hands limp on the arms of the chair. His face drooped to the right—in fact his whole body hung that way. His eyes were closed. The front of his shirt was wet.

“He threw up,” the woman said. “I didn’t think he would choke on it, and I was afraid to move him…”

I dropped my bag and went to check the man’s vitals as Parker set up the stretcher. “You did the exact right thing by calling us,” he said.

There was no bracelet on either of the man’s wrists. No directives. I felt for a pulse.

“His name is Richard,” the woman said. I could feel her eyes on the back of my head. “I’m Amelia.”

“Amelia, does your husband have any medical conditions?” Parker asked.

“Well…” When Amelia closed her eyes to think, I looked at Parker and shook my head slightly. The patient had no pulse, and his skin was already growing cold. Parker raised his wrist slightly, letting his directive bracelet slide out of its sleeve, and I shook my head again.

“He has high blood pressure, and tooth fillings,” Amelia said, looking at Parker again. My partner’s hand, which had been straying down to his holster, stopped. “He’s got cataracts, and he’s allergic to allergy medicine, isn’t that…?” The corner of her mouth lifted slightly, and she looked from me to Parker back to me again.

When I started to stand, she began speaking faster. “We think he’s had a stroke before, a little one maybe, but he didn’t go to the doctor because what could the doctor have done at that point, really, and it’s so expensive…” She trailed off, knowing what I was going to tell her.

“I’m sorry ma’am, but…”

The recliner creaked behind me.

Goddamn, that was fast.

Parker and I were equally quick on the draw. As the thing that had once been Richard began to stir and open its eyes, it had the muzzles of two tranquilizer guns pointed right at it. The face still drooped as the thing snarled at us and began to rise.

The solid black of its eyes told me everything I needed to know. Two almost-synchronous pops and it fell back into the recliner, two colorful darts blooming in its chest. I’d like to think mine was first.

After a moment of silence, I grabbed my bag off the floor and thumped it down on top of the stretcher. While Parker comforted Amelia, I began preparing a syringe. It felt cruel and animal to do this all so quickly, but even with two darts, we probably only had about forty seconds with a patient his size.

“Ma’am, I’m sorry…ma’am…ma’am!” I heard Parker say before two hands grabbed onto my arm. I looked up at Amelia, who was holding onto me with a white-knuckle death grip.

“Wait! Wait!” she was saying, her own eyes nearly popping out of their sockets as she stared into mine. “He has a directive! I swear he does!”

“I need to see a bracelet with his name on it, ma’am,” I said, trying and failing to pull my arm free.

“He…” She released me and dove to her hands and knees on the floor next to the recliner. “He’s been taking it off because it’s gotten too small.”

Parker and I both nearly jumped to pull her away from the thing in the recliner, but before we got to her she’d leapt to her feet with the bracelet clasped in her white-knuckled hand. As she handed it to Parker, I could see the blue square.

“It’s his,” Parker said. “Let’s make this quick.”

With little concern for further injury, we lifted the thing from the recliner, laid it on the stretcher, and began to restrain it. I covered its eyes. They were less agitated when their eyes were covered. As Parker began to wheel the stretcher out, I looked at him and he gave me a nod. He could handle it on his own for now.

“Did he have somewhere he wanted to go?” I asked Amelia.

She stared, light eyes looking right through me, and put her hand over her mouth. Only now, with no questions to answer and no tasks to take care of, did she start to well up. She took a step backwards, away from me, and I caught her elbow to stop her from falling back into the recliner.

She collapsed forward into me, and I patted her back awkwardly. I wasn’t used to being alone with people. Along with them in their houses, with their Formica countertops and ugly carpet and dirty windows and the cold leftovers tossed onto the coffee table, fork fallen onto the floor. I could look over Amelia’s head at the painting of flowers, signed and dated, that hung on the wall behind her. The room smelled like dryer sheets.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” I said, patting her again.

“I didn’t…” She pulled back enough to look at my face. Her cheeks were red, and her hair fell in front of one eye. “I didn’t mean to yell about the bracelet. I just, we both have them, we didn’t know if it would ever come up, he didn’t go to college himself but he always liked the idea of donating his body to science and…”

I saw her shoulders cave, and her jaw tense, and I knew what she had stopped herself from saying. And we needed the money.

Just like all of us, she needed the money. He needed the money. And it’s so abstract at the time you sign the directive. No one thinks they or a loved one will be one to turn. Other unfortunate strangers become zombies. Not you or your husband,

“Did he have somewhere specific he wanted to go?” I asked again. There was a box of tissues on the coffee table. I handed her one.

She wiped her nose and shook her head. “We didn’t know much about…that stuff.”

“Let’s go to the university,” I said. “It’s nearby, and there will be people you can talk to there, too.”

She nodded. Relieved, I tried to be clear but gentle with my directions.

“Get your wallet, and his, and take your house keys. We need to go to the university now. You can ride in the front of the ambulance with my partner.”

“My purse and keys are by the front door,” she said. “His…” She swallowed. “His wallet is in his pocket. It’s always in his pocket.”

I swept my gaze around the floor to make sure no wallet had fallen in the last half hour. “Okay, let’s go.”

I told Parker that we were going to the university, and he radioed it in. While he and Amelia rode up front, I sat in the back of the ambulance with the thing. Not because it needed to be watched, but because there wasn’t room for three of us up front. Like all older ones, this thing was fairly quiet once it awoke, especially because it was blindfolded. It was a popular misconception that zombies relied primarily on their sense of smell. Humans don’t magically develop canine olfactory receptors after they turn, and the creatures were primarily driven by prey that they could see.

At least, as far as we knew. There was always a need for more research, which is where people like Richard and Amelia came in. As we’d talked to her, I’d noticed that she also had a blue square on her bracelet. That was common, for couples to have the same directive.

I often wondered if it felt noble, having the blue square on your bracelet. If I turn, donate me to science. Let my death mean something. Not to mention that your next of kin received a small sum of money in return. Not a life-changing amount, but certainly enough to mean something. A new washer and dryer. A week off work. Groceries for a while.

Two months into my career as an EMT, I’d changed my own blue-square bracelet out for one with a red circle. This meant that after my death, those around me would follow the same protocol as they would if I had no bracelet at all. If I turn, kill me. No money for my family, but at least I wouldn’t have to spend months or years as one of those things.

I thought again about the yellow triangle on Parker’s bracelet.

We brought the thing that had been Richard into the university lab, and left Amelia in the much more capable care of one of the counselors the lab employed.

The rest of the day was largely uneventful, mostly frequent flyers and one car wreck with no serious injuries. It was a week before we had another turning.

It was one of those calls that you try hard not to remember the details of. A twenty-year-old woman versus a faulty garage door spring, her left arm and part of her skull crushed. It took some time to get her out and onto the stretcher, the whole time with her mother breathing down my neck.

“Is she dead?” she asked in my ear. Her voice was raspy, but not from emotion. Since we had arrived, the only expression I’d seen on her face was the sort of glare reserved for car salesmen who were trying to scam you.

“I’m sorry to say your daughter is deceased, ma’am,” I said. I’d known that before we’d even stepped out of the ambulance. Injuries not compatible with life.

“She has a yellow triangle,” the woman screeched. “I went with her to get it.”

I was nervous about pulling my pistol with her hovering so close to me, but I kept my hand near it. It was possible that the woman had been with her daughter when she signed her first directive—the youngest recorded zombie ever was eight years old, so unfortunately even children were often made to assent to one of the three directives. But it was also possible that this young woman had never had one, or that she had changed it later. Or that her mother was lying.

I was grateful to have been paired with Parker again. He kept his cool as the woman hovered around us and the body of her daughter. I saw him check her wrist, the one the mother and I couldn’t see, and shake his head microscopically. A timer inside the house beeped, and the mother turned her back to us for a moment. When she did, Parker held up his hand, his thumb and first finger making a circle. I nodded.

“I need to get the oven,” the mother said.

“We won’t move,” I told her. She nodded, looked over her daughter again, and stepped inside. When she was gone, Parker knelt down to the bag at his feet and started preparing a syringe. The timing couldn’t have been better—even as he stood up, the body was starting to twitch.

Watching someone with severe injuries come back was almost easier than watching someone who had died more peacefully—the damaged, moving bodies looked less human and somehow then less terrifying. The girl’s crushed arm flailed unnaturally against the restraints.

She was secured tightly and was no risk to us. We waited, Parker with syringe in hand, for the mother to come back.

It took her only a few seconds. “She’s moving!” she yelled as she crossed the yard towards us.

“Ma’am, this isn’t your daughter anymore,” Parker said. “You can look away if you want, but I need to inject her according to her directive.”

“According to her directive?” the woman asked. “She’s a yellow triangle! You don’t believe her mother?”

“I have to follow the directive on the bracelet, ma’am,” Parker said, seizing and lifting the young woman’s wrist enough to show the red circle on her bracelet.

If I turn, kill me.

“That’s not what she wanted!” the woman’s mother yelled. “She was supposed to be a yellow triangle, I don’t know why she’s wearing that one. It must be old.” She must have known that we knew better than anyone that a person couldn’t be wearing an old bracelet—a person couldn’t even own more than one bracelet at once.

“I promise she won’t feel any pain,” Parker replied.

But we both knew it wasn’t the pain that the mother cared about. It was the money. The money that a yellow triangle promised.

I was worried I’d be forced to restrain the woman, but once she realized a physical confrontation was a possibility, she huffed and stepped back and allowed Parker to plunge the needle into the young woman’s side. The thing thrashed and spasmed for a few seconds more, then seemed to deflate on the stretcher. Normally, I swore I could see the evil spirit sigh out of the person’s mouth, but this time there was no identifiable mouth to watch.

We brought the body and the mother to the closest hospital, then parked the ambulance in the lot and sat for a while, eating whatever the ER vending machine had had to offer. I twisted a bottlecap between my fingers and thought about the woman rasping in my ear.

“She was supposed to be a yellow triangle.”

“Do you think this one will be investigated?” I asked Parker.

He shook his head, his gaze still fixed on some indeterminate point in the lot in front of us. “Nah,” he said. “They really only investigate it if the victim is actually a yellow triangle. Otherwise, they can’t open a case without any evidence of wrongdoing. And everything points to that being an accident.” He pretended to toast his soda bottle against mine. “No extra paperwork for us.”

“It’s disgusting,” I said. “I mean, lying about a blue square is one thing, but lying about a yellow triangle? Doing that to your family member, for money? I…”

I deflated when I remembered the bracelet on my partner’s own wrist. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him touch it.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Lying about a directive is a selfish, piece of shit move.”

In my periphery, I caught the flash of yellow on his wrist and suppressed a shiver.

“You can look at it,” Parker said. “It’s not like it’s embarrassing or anything.”

It’s embarrassing for us as a society, I thought as I turned to look at him. He held up the bracelet for both of us to look at.

Having a yellow triangle meant a very large sum of money for your family when you died. Still not life-changing for everyone, but for some people, enough to mean a world of difference. Your heaving, living corpse of a body would be sold, but not to science.

Politicians claimed that the opening of the game farms had coincided with a drop in violent crime nationwide, but anyone who knew how statistics worked knew we didn’t yet have enough data to be sure. And I think most of us were disgusted but unsurprised that, out of the ten years since the turnings had started, the game farms had been open for eight of them.

It surprised me that any EMT would have a yellow triangle directive, but then again, I knew very little about Parker. He was excellent at his job, both on the medical and personal side, and he was nice enough when I told him what was happening in my life, but he talked very little about himself. He didn’t wear a wedding ring, but we weren’t really supposed to wear jewelry on the job. I was pretty sure he didn’t have any kids.

“Look,” he said. “We all do the things we do. We can judge other people all we want, but that doesn’t change them.”

I dropped my empty soda bottle on the floor by my feet. “Aren’t you supposed to say, ‘We all do the things we do, and we shouldn’t judge other people’?”

He raised an eyebrow at me. “That’s a bit of a fantasy, don’t you think?”

Before I could reply, the radio crackled to life.

“Ambulance nine, ambulance nine.”

Parker tossed his soda bottle at my feet and picked up the radio.

“Nine here.”