I'll Cover You

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RENT – I'll Cover You (Reprise)

Her ribs fractured instantly.

Connor felt them, beneath his hands, snapping like twigs when he started chest compressions. Delicate. Fragile. He had felt it when her heart slowed to a stop. Her fingers going slack over his hand.

Blood was still pouring out over his hands every time he pushed downward on her chest. Splattering over his arms, bright red, arterial and angry. So much blood.

The faint sound of sirens reached his ears. Distantly, he knew there were still people around him. The airport security had never left, though he thought a couple of them might have gone in pursuit of whoever had stabbed her. Some of them were surely still just civilians, her fans, looking on in horror.

No, he was barely conscious of anything except for her, pale and lifeless beneath him. Dead. He kept compressing at a perfect one hundred beats per minute, waiting for the ambulance to arrive.

"Sir, please step away," Connor must have blanked out longer than he thought, because when he looked up, he saw the flashing lights. An EMT was addressing him, knelt down across from the scene.

"I'm not stopping," he said through gritted teeth. Something in his voice must have frightened the man, because he flinched and held up his hands.

"You're doing a great job, but I have to get her onto the stretcher," he explained diplomatically. Connor glanced behind him to see that they had already wheeled the stretcher over from the back of the ambulance. One of the airport security personnel was explaining to the other EMT what had happened.

Connor paused his compressions and scooped Taylor up into his arms in one swift movement. The EMT in front of him cursed and stumbled out of the way as he deposited her onto the stretcher and strapped her in. Then he climbed on top of her, his knees on either side of her torso, and resumed CPR.

Both EMTs stared at him in shock for a beat before they started to move, loading the stretcher into the back of the ambulance with him still on top of it. One of them was speaking into their radio, "Dispatch I have a trauma alert inbound, ETA 10 minutes."

The back door of the ambulance slammed shut, leaving him alone with Taylor and the first EMT. A few seconds later, the sirens resumed their wailing and the ambulance pulled away. The EMT wasn't paying him any mind now, focusing instead on his patient, moving around him to connect her to the monitor.

"Can you stop for just a second? I have to do a pulse check." He sounded hesitant, even now.

"I'm not stopping," Connor repeated, his LED flashing red. "She has no pulse aside from the one I am giving her. Currently asystole."

The EMT looked at him dubiously, then finally seemed to notice the LED flashing on his temple. He frowned. "Alright, fair enough. Keep going."

Instead, he busied himself trying to put in a working intravenous line so that he could start pushing medications. They both leaned as the ambulance took several sharp turns, the supplies in the cabinets rattling.

"Still asystole?" He asked once he was securing the line with tape. Connor just nodded, bracing himself as the ambulance careened around another corner. "Pushing epinephrine."

He pulled out a small cardboard box and opened it, dropping two halves of a syringe into his hand. He screwed them together and pushed the medication, flushing it with saline. After a couple seconds, he asked, "Anything?"

"Still no pulse." The ambulance was rolling to a stop now. The door opened and the stretcher was being rolled out onto the concrete. There were people there, waiting to receive them, joining them as they wheeled in through the automatic doors to the emergency room.

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