“Hey! You crazy, drunk bitch!” I shouted. “You just ran into the wrong car!”
She didn’t seem to hear me. Blood streamed from her nose onto her white blouse. Clearly the airbag hadn’t been very kind to her. Her unfocused gaze skimmed over me before she turned away from me and staggered to the middle of the parking lot. She stopped and looked up, spreading her arms as if she was waiting for aliens to snatch her up.
“Hey, lady!” I called out to her. “You need to get back over here right now.”
The woman suddenly let out a scream of pain and grabbed her head. She turned to focus on me for the first time, her eyes wild and wide.
“Help me!” she whimpered.
Drunk or high? I thought sourly. “Don’t worry, I’ll get you plenty of help,” I told her. “Now, step back over to the car, please.”
She didn’t move. Her eyes stayed locked on mine. I could see her fingers digging into her hair as if she was trying to hold her skull together. “Make it stop.” Her voice cracked as if speech was an incredible effort. “Please!”
I stopped about a dozen feet from her. Last thing I wanted to do was tangle with a blood-covered bitch who was high on who-knew-what. “Make what stop? Come over here and have a seat by the car, and I’ll get you some help.”
She took a shaking breath, and for an instant I thought she was going to comply and make my life easier. Then in the next heartbeat her hands fell away from her head, her face went slack, and she dropped like a stone to the ground, hard enough for her head to connect with the asphalt with an audible crack.
“Shit!” I dropped the coffee and quickly closed the distance. Crouching beside her, I rolled her to her back and found a place on her neck that didn’t have blood on it to check for a pulse. Not an easy task. Two nosebleeds in one day? I thought with a grimace. Coincidences like that made me itch. Especially on the same day a demon decided to attack me.
I whirled to signal for Tracy but he was right behind me and already on his radio, calling it in. “No pulse,” I told him. “Tell ‘em code three.”
He nodded and relayed the information as I turned back to the woman, got my hands in proper position, and started giving chest compressions. I took the CPR class every year as part of my in-service training, but this was the first time I’d ever had to do it on a real person.
The woman’s eyes were half lidded, and bubbles of blood formed at her nostrils with every compression. The latest guidelines called for compressions only, no mouth-to-mouth, and I sent up a silent thanks for that. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t want to risk giving breaths, even if I had one of those mask things. It was bad enough that my hands were getting blood on them. I don’t have any open cuts, I reminded myself. I hoped.
I lost track of time, though it was probably only a minute or two before sirens cut through the air.