Free Biblical by Christopher Galt

episodes, Macbeth noticed that the service number on his ID shield started with a one, instead of a four, five or six, denoting that he was a fully trained paramedic rather than an EMT.
    “What we got?” asked the black guy. Macbeth stared at him blankly, noticing he had a beard of black stubble strips, separated by shaved bands, giving the impression of a tilled field. Cornrows. Why did he do that? thought Macbeth. Why do people do that? Whenever he was in this state of detachment, Macbeth found the tiny orthodoxies of everyday life bizarre; inexplicable.
    “What we got?” repeated the paramedic from under a frown. “You are a doctor, aren’t you?”
    Macbeth nodded. The world started to make sense again, to settle into its accepted groove, and he knew the episode was ending. Still, his own voice sounded alien to him as, with the emotional content of a weather report, he ran through the facts.
    “One fatality on impact: the jumper. He took the priest with him. Father Mullachy doesn’t seem to have significant head or neck injuries but he’s suffered a major high-energy thoracic trauma with multiple costal fractures and costochondral separation. I heard crepitus during palpation. Reduced breath sounds on the right and significant tension hemopneumothorax, causing tachypnea and subcutaneous emphysema around the neck, which I’ve eased with an improvised chest tube. Suspected additional subpulmonic pleural effusion. Other significant injuries include an ilium wing fracture and probably other pelvic damage.”
    “Okay, we got it from here,’ said the paramedic. The EMS men put a cervical collar on the priest and placed an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth. Holding him as rigidly as they could, the paramedics eased him off of the other man’s body and rolled him onto his side, slipping the long spine board beneath him and strapping him to it.
    As Macbeth viewed it all, he still felt detached from everything that was happening, the lack of feeling from his episode lingering. He watched as the EMS crew ratcheted up the gurney. The young priest looked at Macbeth, his earnest, pleading eyes now glossed with tears.
    “What kept you?” the younger cop asked the paramedics.
    “The traffic was crazy. Backed up all the way here. Couldn’t get moving, even with the sirens and lights. Don’t ask me why the traffic got snarled up this time of night.”
    Macbeth looked up at the night sky.
    “It’s a full moon …” he said. “That’s why …”

8

JOSH HOBERMAN. MARYLAND
    Hoberman knew little about military ranks, but he knew enough to recognize that the eagle on the officer’s epaulette marked him as a full-bird colonel, just as the Asclepian Staff at the center of his Air Force wings identified him as a doctor.
    “Hi, Professor Hoberman. Thanks for coming at such short notice and at such an ungodly hour. I’m Jack Ward, Director of the White House Medical Office and Personal Physician to the President.”
    Hoberman nodded, a little lost for words. He stood with the Air Force doctor in front of a rustic chimney breast of rough-hewn rock that formed the centerpiece of what was, basically, a sprawling wooden cabin. Their surroundings were purposefully bucolic and homey, and had the feel of some upscale but out-of-date summer camp. The name Naval Support Facility Thurmont certainly did not fit with them, which was why they were unofficially but much better known as Camp David.
    Bundy and Ryerson had shown Hoberman from the helipad to the Aspen Lodge, the President’s quarters, and Ward dismissed them with a “Thanks guys.”
    Once they were alone, Ward shook Hoberman’s hand with what the psychiatrist imagined was military firmness. Maybe, he thought, they had drills in handshaking at West Point or Maxwell or Colorado Springs or wherever the hell these people learned to do things like use the right fork or kill people with a paperclip. Ward was annoyingly, predictably, stereotypicallyhandsome, lean and