Virginia drew down hard on the end of her smoke, and with a practiced finger flicked the butt far into the street. She still had the muscle memory even though she hadn’t smoked a cigarette for probably fifteen years. She made a beeline for the bathroom, her head spinning wildly with both nicotine and emotion. A sudden cold sweat and she just made it to the toilet to violently empty her gut. Staring down at the bowl through the blur of tears with acid dripping from her mouth and nose, Virginia elected to switch over to her default emotional setting. Absolute numbness. A necessary, and well-honed skill in her line of work. She counted to ten, took a deep breath and washed her face and hands.
She didn’t wait around to talk to any of the senior brass who’d come to comfort her. Instead, she knew the best thing for her was to get back into her ambulance, and work another day. Few things were a better distraction than the problems of people whose medical conditions or injuries were in the process of very nearly killing them.
Virginia climbed into three-two-six, started the engine and drove out the large roller door. She knew the way to Maspeth in Queens well. She took Flushing Ave, skirted the top of Bushwik and around the back of the Newtown creek area. She was in a detached daze as she drove the familiar roads. It was as if she was now watching the events in front of her eyes from afar, completely separated from reality as her mind struggled to compartmentalize the events of the last 24 hours.
It was because of this that her reaction time was so poor when she spotted the oncoming garbage truck. She wasn’t moving fast. It was a quiet road and she was set in a sort of mental autopilot, lazily making her way to the fire station on the other side of town. The garbage truck wasn’t moving fast either, but it was moving fast enough.
Three seconds before the collision, she spotted the driver take the corner wide. She jammed on the brakes, but it didn’t matter.
The garbage truck collided with the passenger’s side of the ambulance. The truck was probably going less than fifteen miles an hour, but it had momentum.
Her world spun wildly, as the ambulance was thrown in a two-hundred-and-seventy-degree arc. She felt the rear tires of the ambulance edge off the gutter, across the pedestrian strip, and nearly head into the Newtown Creek.
She had enough aptitude remaining to jam on the brakes and then pull up the handbrake. The ambulance’s tires gripped the blacktop, coming to a complete stop.
Virginia expelled a deep breath. Her heart hammered in her chest and adrenaline surged through her body. Her eyes were wide with fear, but she was alive.
What the hell just happened?
To the side of her she heard the 600-horsepower turbo diesel powerplant of the garbage truck grunt, as it edged closer to her.
Her head turned around with a snap.
It all happened so slowly, her mind, unable to make sense of the strange events, struggled to accept the inevitable.
Her eyes locked with the driver of the garbage truck, whose face was set with unnerving resolve. She heard the engine whine as the driver shoved the gear into low and slowly drove toward her.
Virginia reached for her door handle. It moved, but the door wouldn’t open because the first hit had damaged the locking mechanism. Her eyes darted to the passenger seat.
It was too late.
Her passenger’s wing mirror was suddenly filled with headlights, bullbar and Mack grille, and all she could hear was the wind up from a 600-horsepower turbo diesel powerplant. She saw the front heave up under the torque of the motor, and then the bulk of the machine as it swayed out and away as the wheels steered harshly in toward her ambulance.
In the time before the impact Virginia’s mind ran through the list of possible options and outcomes. There was no mistaking the intent behind what was about to happen. No accidental take-off or underestimation of braking distance was at play here, someone was about to plow in to her as hard as possible.
A garbage truck weighs between thirty and fifty thousand pounds depending on how full it is, add to that the torque from the Mack engine within and you’ve got a crushing tidal wave of kinetic energy. She figured that the brake force created by her Dodge P4500 quad cab chassis was no match, at best she might slow his progress a little. From her experience on the road, Virginia also knew any diagonal impacts in a motor vehicle crash were by far the most lethal. Vehicles are engineered to withstand frontal and rearward assault, and to some extent are reinforced against a direct side impact, but the shearing forces of the diagonal hit threatened to tear her very heart from her aorta.
She pulled her body to the right and braced on the steering wheel in an attempt to prevent being knocked unconscious. The truck rammed into the side of the Ambulance, unleashing an expulsion of smashing energy through the chassis and her body. The safety glass from her window cubed and shattered into the left side of her face with the violence of the impact and the ambulance reared up underneath her, bucking wildly as the roar of the truck’s diesel powerhouse again filtered into her perception.
She was now being shunted brutally across the sidewalk and into the rusted rail fence that would either crush her in the cabin, or give way — allowing her to freefall twelve feet into the freezing Newtown Creek below.
It was the latter that occurred; the posts tore easily from the clay at their long-eroded bases and the rail fence went free as her ambulance was shoved through. Virginia felt the floor rise up and around to her left as the van tipped over the edge and rolled, passenger side first down the steep embankment. A moment of weightlessness during freefall preceded the crushing impact and deafening roar as the inverted Ambulance landed flat on its roof in the water.
Virginia was jolted head first toward the ceiling. Her head clashed with the B-pillar, knocking her unconscious.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Virginia was shocked awake by a torrent of freezing water that surged throughout the sinking ambulance. She was hanging upside down from her seatbelt which had been tightened by the safety pre-tensioners during the initial impact. The ringing in her ears was overcome by the noise of the swirling eddy that was gushing in an ever-widening stream where the dash met the windows. The smell of the burning oil and engine fluids that streamed from the vents in the console around her, and the vibration and sound of the faltering V8 from under the sinking hood all confounded her brain.
It took her a full five seconds to orient her mind to the sensations and visual images of her surroundings, and another five to formulate the linear thoughts required to react. She was trapped, in a vehicle, sinking fast. There were only a few options left to her and her failure to utilize them immediately would result in her death.
The fingers on her right hand scrambled for the release on her seat belt. It didn’t matter. The damned mechanism was jammed. She frantically tried it again but didn’t get anywhere. Water was already rushing up to her downward facing head and she needed to tilt her head just to keep breathing.
She’d been to thousands of motor vehicle crashes. There was nothing entirely alien about her environment. No reason she needed to panic — except this time it was her life at stake.
Her training kicked in.
She steadied her nerves by focusing on priorities. Right now, the first one was to free herself from the seatbelt. Without that, nothing else mattered. She would drown in the next few minutes. But the mechanism had jammed.
So, how could she free herself?
Her mind came up short. Instead, she returned to her training. More importantly, how would she free someone else trapped in the same position?
Scissors!
Her right hand moved up to the small holder on the inner thigh side of her cargo pants, removing her trauma scissors. She withdrew them and used her straight left arm to brace against the remaining dashboard to slow her fall, with her left elbow locked and wedged against the roof of the cabin she cut the seatbelt.