Dead Man's Grip

dazed. There was no sign of any other emergency vehicles here yet.
    She raced the ambulance past the line of vehicles, on the wrong side of the road, keeping her eyes peeled for anyone who hadn’t heard them coming. Then she braked, slowing to a crawl, killing the siren, and halted in front of the lorry. Her stomach tightened and her mouth felt suddenly dry.
    The digital display read six minutes, twenty seconds – the length of time taken to get here from when the call came in. Comfortably inside the CatA eight-minute target. That was some small relief. Phil Davidson switched the emergency lights to stationary mode. Before jumping down from the vehicle, both of them briefly absorbed the scene.
    The woman standing near the Audi, who had wavy blonde hair and was wearing a smart raincoat, was holding a mobile phone some distance away from her head, as if it was a ball she was about to throw to a batsman. Smashed and upturned tables and chairs lay around the car, but there was no immediate sign of any casualties there, and no one, apart from a youth in a cagoule, who was photographing the scene with his mobile phone, seemed to be taking any notice. The concentration seemed to be around the rear wheels of the lorry.
    The two paramedics climbed out, looking around carefully,
continuing to take in as much as they could and making sure there was no danger from any passing traffic. But everything had very definitely stopped.
    A short, stubby man in his mid-forties, in jeans and overalls, holding a mobile phone, hurried towards them. From his pallid face, wide staring eyes and quavering voice, Vicky could see he was in shock.
    ‘Under my lorry,’ he said. ‘He’s under my lorry.’ He turned and pointed.
    Vicky noticed, a short distance further along, a bicycle lamp, a saddle and a reflector lying in the road. Then, near them, was what looked at first like a length of denim tubing with a trainer attached. Her gullet constricted and she felt a rush of bile, which she swallowed back down. She and Phil hurried through the rain towards the rear of the sixteen-wheel articulated lorry, gently edging back the crowd to give them space.
    A young woman was kneeling under the truck, but moved out the way for them. ‘He has a pulse,’ she said.
    Nodding thanks, both paramedics knelt down and peered under the vehicle.
    The light was poor. There was a stench of vomit from somewhere nearby, mixed with the smells of engine oil and hot metal, but there was something else too, that sour, coppery tang of blood that always reminded Phil Davidson of going into butcher’s shops with his mother, when he was a kid.
    Vicky saw a young man with short, dark hair streaked with blood and a lacerated face, his body contorted. His eyes were closed. He was wearing a ripped anorak and jeans, and one leg was wrapped around the wheel arch. The other was just a stump of white bone above the knee surrounded by jagged denim.
    The anorak and layers of T-shirt around his midriff were ripped open and a coil of his intestines lay in a pool of fluid on the road.
    Followed by her colleague, Vicky, who was smaller, crawled forward, beneath the lorry, smelling oil and rubber, and seized the young man’s wrist, feeling for a pulse. There was a very faint one. The two paramedics were getting covered in oil, road grime and blood, which was soaking into their trousers and elbows and coating
their gloves, turning them from blue surgical coverings into bloody, grimy gauntlets.
    ‘ Fubar Bundy ,’ Phil Davidson whispered grimly.
    She nodded, swallowing acrid bile. It was a term she had heard before, at the fatal accident she had attended previously, only a short distance from this location. The gallows humour of the paramedics – one of their mental survival mechanisms for coping with horrific sights. It stood for: Fucked Up Beyond All Recovery But Unfortunately Not Dead Yet.
    With internal organs exposed and on the tarmac, there was very little chance of the victim’s survival. Even if they got him to hospital still technically alive, infections would finish him off. She turned to her more experienced colleague for his guidance.
    ‘Pulse?’ he asked.
    ‘Faint radial,’ she replied. A radial pulse meant that he had enough blood pressure to maintain some of his organs.
    ‘ Stay and play ,’ he mouthed back, knowing they had no option, as they couldn’t move him because his leg was trapped in the wheel. ‘I’ll get the kit.’
    Stay and play was one step