Infected (Book 1): The Fall Read Free

as she rocked back and forth, whimpering. Lawrence walked up to her and took off his shirt.  He gently wrapped it around her quivering body as he quietly told her that nobody was going to hurt her anymore.  The shirt was enormous on her, but it served its purpose.  It restored a small fraction of the dignity that had been ripped from her.  That was Lawrence.
    I watched as he shuffled to the front door. He stopped at the entrance and reached for the handle, which was a six inch vertical piece of metal bent ninety degrees so the part you grabbed was parallel to the door.  It was probably chrome plated at its inception. Forty years of use had worn the shine away: it no longer had a luxurious silver luster.  After the plating wore off, the handle showed its true identity to be nothing more spectacular than aluminum.  Granted, it was a hardened alloy, but it was aluminum never the less.  Lawrence grasped the handle and pulled the door toward himself, ringing the bell as it opened.
    The motion was counter intuitive.  Psychologically speaking, entering a business should be as uncomplicated as possible. A person’s forward motion should be enough to push the door inward, making entrance effortless while subliminally making the customer feel welcome.  The architect who designed the café had not paid attention in freshman psychology.
    As Lawrence’s bulk filled the doorway, I could see that the five day stubble he normally sported had grabbed onto part of his early lunch as it had began a downward plummet from his mouth to the ground. He approached the table where I was knelt down and his face changed.  It was only a slight widening of his eyes, but I caught it. My life depended on catching minor changes in people.  Minor changes often give away secret intentions.  If a person planned to fight, he tended to tense up, fingers would curl and uncurl, his head may roll slightly as he subconsciously loosened his muscles for the ensuing struggle. A person breaking eye contact while recounting an event denoted he was about to tell a lie.  Lawrence’s change in visage denoted disbelief.  He didn’t realize the gravity of the situation prior to walking through the door.  
    Lawrence slowly knelt down next to me.  It was a feat I had seen a hundred times as he prepared to treat a patient.  Each time, I wondered what kept his knees from blowing out.  The force on them was tremendous, but they never failed him.  He began the minute and a half of tricks he had at his disposal. Once they were completed, he would go back out, roll the gurney in, load up the patient, and be off to the hospital.
    As he knelt, I recounted to him what I had observed.
    “This looks bad,” he muttered.  As he felt for her pulse, he shook his head back and forth. “This is not good, she’s burning up.”  Finally his fingers settled on a place at the junction of where her neck and jaw met.  He looked at the scarred face of his digital watch and silently counted her pulse. After thirty seconds, he removed his fingers from her neck and reached into his black nylon med bag and brought out a stethoscope and blood pressure cuff.  
    He placed the cuff around her right bicep and fastened the Velcro at each end to maintain its circumference around her arm.  His finger and thumb gave a quick twist to the pressure relief valve, closing it off so the cuff would retain all the air he was about to pump into its rubber bladder.  Several quick squeezes of the rubber bulb inflated the cuff to the point it crushed her brachial artery, preventing blood from passing through.  He gave another twist to the pressure relief knob, this time opening it just enough to allow a slow stream of air to exit the bladder.  His eyes tilted up to the right as he carefully listened through the stethoscope for the sound of blood beginning to pass through the artery again.  His eyes shifted slightly, which I took to mean he had detected the systolic blood pressure.  A couple