Tae 21 - A final post ... maybe

Tae wrote:

A slow, humid Friday night - or so I thought.

Hanging out near a strip of long-closed malls, my partner and I are talking a mile-o-minute - the result of many Coffee Connection mocha frappuchinos, cigarettes, and some Ritalin we confiscated from the previous night's suicide attempt. The silly shit took most of his 'scrip - ignoring the more effective, but less thought-of bottle of Prestone anti-freeze sitting in his garage.

"Why are you doing this to me - 'cause I tried to kill myself?", the guy wails, as we struggle to cuff him to the stretcher's hand-rails.

"No, we're doing this because you're too stupid to correctly kill yourself, and you got _us_ involved." I snarl as I finally get the handcuff on him. Ahh... Each ratcheting 'click' is music to my ears as I make the cuff tighter and tighter.

"So, what do take the Ritalin for?" my partner asks, as he searches for a suitable vein in the patient's forearm to start an IV.

"I have dyslexia and ADD - attention deficit disorder - you know what it means, asshole?" sniffs the patient.

"Yeah - it means you suck at Scrabble."

_That_ got us a howl of anger - and a few lame-ass yanks at his cuffed hands.

But I digress...

I was feeling pretty on-edge with all the Ritalin I took. The last cigarette I had tasted real bad, and I dry-heaved a little. Prime.

"Medic 1 - respond with Ambulance 3... Mass Turnpike - westbound, near exit thirteen ... for a roll-over. Called in by the State Police."

"Medic 1 has it," I answer.

Yee-haw ... a call.

As we pull out of the parking lot and onto the highway, I noticed how unusually _sharp_ everything looks. Great stuff, the 'ol vitamin 'R'.

"So, whaddya think - bullshit?"

"Nah, lookit - it's three in the morning on Saturday, it's foggy, and it was called in by the Staties. It's prolly legit."

We rapidly approach the on-ramp toll booth to the Pike.

The toll-booth guys hate us - 'cause we scream through the gates, honking the air horn impatiently if they take too long to raise the gate-arm, and with all of our emergency lights and strobes, we look like nothing less than a fucking UFO come to bring 'em back Elvis and whisk away their children to conduct experiments - bless their pointy heads.

The toll-collector du jour literally sees us coming from a mile away, and raises the gate-arm well in advance. It should be smooth sailing...

"Hey - watch this," my partner yells.

He steers as if to enter the toll-booth with the raised arm, but at the last moment, veers into another one - coming to a complete stop. Siren still wailing, he calmly takes the ticket the dispenser spits out, and waits for the arm to rise completely before proceeding. The toll-collector is livid. We squeal away.

Our laughter is high-pitched - hyena-like, and definitely not normal. Whether it's the Ritalin coursing through our veins or just another indication that we're slowly losing our sanity, it doesn't really matter. We still get paid the same. The overhead street lamps come farther and fewer apart, until eventually the road ahead is dark - the only illumination coming from our headlights and strobes. The flashes of light are brighter than usual due to the strobes bleeding and diffusing into the fog. I dry heave once more.

Eventually I see the flashing lights of other emergency vehicles in the darkness ahead. We slow down, and come to a stop at the first of a string of road flares laid down to shunt traffic to the right-most lane.

My partner and I get out and move to the rear doors of the truck to get our equipment - only to stopped by a trooper.

"You won't need those," he waves at the equipment bags, "there's nothing you can do for them."

Taking in the entire scene - which was difficult to do because of the darkness, I see a car which was rear-ended and off to the left side of the highway, just touching the cement jersey-barrier. Standing next to the car are three college-aged kids - huddled together and looking pretty pale. They're all okay.

The next car - about a hundred feet further down the road, is completely unidentifiable to make or model. Little round pebbles of safety glass surround the car - which is sitting on it's roof. Steam rises from the engine as radiator fluid trickles onto the road - a sizable puddle already formed. A little further down from the car, I see a body.

Partially covered with a blanket, I see it's a woman - late twenties would be my guess, her facial bones so shattered that her nose has been pushed-in and is flush with the rest of her face. Lifting a corner of the blanket, and I see that her abdomen was torn open - internal organs splayed out on the road, and a foot-long loop of intestine sits on her chest. My guess was that when she was ejected from the vehicle, she landed in such a way that her body was snapped in half, opening her abdomen, and forcing her legs to bend up to touch her back. The closest thing I can imagine would be one of those Indian fakirs - able to hook both legs around their necks. Gross.

"There's another body about fifty yards further down," says the trooper, "the driver."

Walking further down, another blanket-covered body. This one - a early-twenties male, is lying on his back. His face is also distorted - a mottled purple and white. His eyes are wide open, with an expression of total surprise. I can see brain-matter coming from his ears, mouth, and nose, with a still-widening, still-steaming pool of dark blood surrounding his head.

"So, just what exactly happened here?" I ask the trooper.

"Well, as far as I can tell, that first car - the one with the three kids, was traveling pretty slow. The other car must've flew up behind them and rear-ended them. Then it rolled-over a whole buncha times, and the woman was thrown from the car. And then the driver - that guy, crawled out of his car -"

"Wait a minute - the driver didn't die on impact?"

"No, he survived the crash and was standing over his friend, when this _other_ car came flying up the highway, ran over the already dead woman, and hit him. At least that's the story I got from the kids."

Jeezus.

"So, where's the third car?"

"About another hundred yards from the guy's body. The driver's okay, but pretty shook-up."

Seeing as how there was nothing for us to do, we started to walk back to our truck. As we walked past the woman's body, I noticed a line of glistening slickness from the woman's body traveling up the highway about ten yards - body fat.

It was definitely one of the most gruesome scenes I'd been to. I needed to have a smoke - something to heighten the already freaky scene. I reached into my pack - empty. Shit.

As I passed by the college kids, still huddled near the jersey-barrier, I asked them if they had any cigarettes. Looking confused, they answered 'no'. Shit.

Just as I was getting into my truck, I heard some yelling. I turned around to see the cops yelling and waving their flashlights at a pickup truck. The driver was a tad confused as to which way the flares were directing him, and was beginning to drive across the flares - heading towards the woman's body.

He stopped in time.

- Tae

ObT: A couple of days later, I read an article in the newspaper about the accident. It seems that a free-lance photographer had driven by the accident, and took pictures of the scene. Of the fifty or so pictures he took, he only sold two to the papers - the others being too graphic in nature to print.

A couple of days after that, I read another article in the paper. It seems that the third car in the accident was really the fourth. True, he did run over both bodies - but only after the _third_ car ran over the woman's body and killed the guy.

Wanna take a guess who was driving the third car?

The guy who took the pictures.

He'd struck both people, kept on driving, turned _around_ and came back down the Pike. He stopped, made no mention that he'd hit the two people, and proceeded to take pictures. What balls - and all for a lousy fifty bucks.

I woulda held out for at least a c-note.

(Originally posted on 4 Jul 1996)