Call of the Alpha - Part 1(3)
“Then what do I do?” she whispered out loud.
The answer was easy, yet a bit scary.
She walked towards the guard rail, her shadow cast in a stretched out sketch of shapes in the flashing orange glow of her emergency lights.
Chapter 2
By the time she had reached the guardrail, something that felt like logic had managed to slip back behind the controls of her mind. She calmed herself somewhat as she looked over into the darkness that rested below the road. There was three feet of relatively flat ground on the other side of the rail, but after that, there was nothing more than a steep drop into brambles, leaves, and an outcropping of rock.
She could see nothing down there except for the meandering shadows that were produced by her flickering emergency lights. It was like looking into someone’s messed up psychedelic trip as she tried to find some wounded shape down there.
That’s because you barely clipped whatever it was, she told herself. It probably didn’t even fall down there after it came over the rail. It probably got up and limped off into the woods.
Jessica looked to her left, to the wall of trees that gradually climbed upwards as that twenty- or thirty-foot drop climbed back up to reach flatter ground. It was easy to imagine any number of animals running around in there, even the nocturnal ones, but she somehow knew that the thing she hit was not galloping through there. It was one of those gut feelings that she often got in the ER—the feeling that meant that something bad had happened or was about to happen, and often she turned out to be dead on.
As if to verify this sixth sense, she suddenly heard a gasping cry from the darkness below. Jessica swallowed down a scream as she took a huge jump back, clapping her hands to her mouth.
“Oh, my God,” she almost screamed out from behind her hands, her voice coming out in breathy alarm from between her fingers.
That noise had decidedly not been from the throat of a dog, a wolf, or any other kind of animal. It had been unmistakably human.
Jessica tried calling out but her voice had dried up in her throat. The world seemed frozen and in her heart of hearts, she hoped that another car would come by and take care of this—to step in and just handle this.
Some nurse you turned out to be, she thought to herself. And besides…you’re the one who hit this person.
“Shit,” she whimpered. This was up to her.
She then leaned over the guardrail and although she could still not see anything at all, she called out, “Is someone there?”
There was silence for a moment and then another groan. Jessica thought there was a word behind that moan of pain but couldn’t be sure.
“Stay there,” she said. “Give me about twenty seconds. I’m going to get a flashlight from my car and get an ambulance on the way.”
She said these things more for her own benefit than that of the injured person in the darkened ditch below. She repeated the steps to herself as she ran back to her car and threw open the glove compartment. She fished around for a moment and found the flashlight. She clicked the button at the end of the small novelty flashlight and saw that the beam worked just fine, the batteries still working.
Next, she popped the trunk open and ran around to the back. There, she retrieved an old first aid kit that had never been used and a blanket. She had tucked it there mainly because her father had once insisted that she always have the kit on hand in the event of an emergency. Although her father had been dead and buried for ten years now, she thought of him and how proud he’d be that she was prepared.
Well, she thought, maybe not fully prepared. After all, it appears as if I’ve hit someone with my frigging car…
She pushed that thought out of her head and then ran through a checklist of other things she needed to do. Going down the list, she then went back into the car, grabbed her cellphone out of the passenger seat and headed back for the guardrail. She brought up the contact number for the front desk at the hospital, bypassing the formality of 911 altogether. She placed the phone to her hear and heard nothing. Frustrated, she looked to the phone and saw that her service indicator showed only a single flickering bar.
Of course, she thought. The one disadvantage to living in the country…no cell service most of the time. Not a huge nuisance, unless you’ve just hit someone with your car on a dark and deserted back road.
Close to tears now, she pocketed the phone and trained the flashlight over the guardrail. She fought the tears back, doing everything she could to bring her training as a nurse to the forefront of her mind. She figured that if she could approach this as nothing more than an extension of a job that she was damned good at, she wouldn’t have any problems.
She steeled herself and started scanning the area below the rail. She couldn’t hear the sounds of pain anymore, but she knew that there was someone there. And the oddest thing of all was that she was also somehow certain that the person was still alive. She hadn’t yet laid eyes on the injured person, but she could literally feel the pull of life from below her.
“Can you please make a noise?” she asked.
There was a response right away. It was a man’s voice, weak and broken. It was frail, but easy to understand. “Yes,” he said. “Here.”
She traced the flashlight beam along the ditch and to the area where she thought the voice had come from. She saw nothing at first—only the deep ditch and the leaves, twigs and other detritus that the forest had deposited there—but then caught the briefest flicker of motion. She stopped the light there and stared down.