WillPatching.com

I jerked awake as a lightning bolt ripped through me.  A hideous face loomed above me, seeping into my consciousness.  Jet black eyes bore into mine from its hairless, cadaverous skull.

I shuddered and squeezed my eyes shut.  After a moment that seemed eternal, I cracked them open.  The apparition was gone.
     
Was I dreaming?  Everything was unreal as I staggered to my feet.  I was no longer in control of my own body as I drifted across the road. 
     
All around was chaos and noise.  Sirens, blue lights, screaming, moaning and shouting.  The stench of gasoline sharp in my nostrils, and a more ominous odor I couldn’t quite identify made my spine shiver.
     
My stomach churned.  Bile surged into my throat.  Gasping, I reached for a cigarette.  A moment of lucidity stopped me from lighting up.  Gas fumes could make it my last.
     
I had to be sure the horrible thing had gone.  Struggling to make my eyes function, I forced myself to register my surroundings.  A freeway that looked like someone had dumped a vehicle scrap heap on it, with mangled cars and trucks all around.
     
As I leaned against the side of an ambulance I wondered; what am I doing here? 
     
A rush of memories jumbled into my mind.  Dashing out of the hospital after I finished surgery.  The feeling of elation as I sped through the countryside in my brand new Jaguar.  The needle hovering at 90mph.  Hurtling effortlessly down the freeway: just another successful man, heading home, hurrying to meet his beautiful wife and precious daughter for a well earned break.
     
The poorly rich had paid for my wonderful car.  My ‘mid-life crisis’ as Sue called it.  Then she had told me I must have a death wish for driving like I do, and urged me to take some advanced driving lessons.  As if I need extra tuition - I’ve been driving for twenty-three years and never had an accident.
     
Something went wrong tonight though.  A storm had blown up, whipping the trees into a frenzy.  The road was slippery, and the rain blackened a moonless night.  Yet I felt immune to the outside world in the luxurious leather womb of my car. 
     
I shuddered as a video played in my mind.  The huge branch tumbling in front of me.  The slithering of the car, snaking out of control.  The central barrier flashing in front of me.  The dazzling headlights of the traffic bearing down on me.  I remembered putting my hands in front of my face as if to fend of the truck as it smashed into my car.  My hood buckling up in slow motion and the windscreen crazing before my eyes…
     
My next memory was that dreadful shock and awful face.  Where is he?  What is he?  I desperately peered around me and stumbled away from the ambulance.  I don’t believe in ghosts: I’ve seen too much death at close hand to have any belief in an after life. 

Yet, if Death has a face, I’ve seen him tonight.
     
I shook the thought from my mind, as I took in the carnage around me.  A woman was lying beside a car in a pool of blood and I went into action without thinking.  A paramedic joined me as I felt for a pulse.  Nothing.  I laid my hand on her chest and was about to start CPR as the paramedic shouted to a colleague, “Over here, she’s alive!” 
     
He stared at me, amazed, “I don’t know how you did that sir.  I was sure she was dead and was about to cover her with this.”  He pointed to a blanket.  I felt again for the flutter of her pulse, and there it was.  It was incredible, as if by touching her I had brought her back to life. 
     
“I’m a surgeon,” I explained, which was no explanation at all.
     
Some of my colleagues laugh about the ‘God complex’ affecting many of us at the top of the medical profession: the overarching ego and belief that we are truly givers of life.  For the first time I could believe it as I went in search of another crash victim.  This is my role in life.  Helping others and saving lives. 
     
I moved off to tend a gray and lifeless lorry driver slumped in his cab, but icy tentacles slid through my body as I glimpsed a familiar apparition, moving wraith-like behind the wreck.  I trembled as I remembered that face. 

Death incarnate?  Working his way through the mangled remains looking for victims?  Don’t be so stupid, I thought.  Just get on with it. 
     
Clambering up the side of the cab I almost slipped on a slick of blood.  By rights the driver should have been dead, but he started to gurgle as I found a pulse in his neck.  The paramedic appeared beside me again, yelling for a gurney as I eased the man out of the cab. 

“He’ll be fine now.”  I was surprised how much I meant it.  I just knew it to be true, as if all my medical experience was concentrated in my fingertips tonight.  Perhaps this is how a faith healer feels.
     
It must be the shock, making me think like this.  A ghost, Death incarnate, faith healing and the like.  None of which I would have given a moment’s thought to before.  As I went on to the next patient I heard the paramedic whispering to another, “That guy is incredible.  It’s as if he’s resurrected two dead bodies already!”
     
Curiously, this comment only made me smile as I thought of my colleagues and the God complex.  My good humor immediately deserted me as I moved on to where I had seen Death carrying out his unholy job.  Sure enough another body, spilled onto the floor, limbs twisted into grotesque positions.  A lovely lady cruelly tossed aside like a broken doll lying in a gutter full of blood. 

That was the smell that I’d recognized earlier.  Human blood has an earthy, metallic odor that is normally instantly recognizable.  Earlier, my shocked state of mind had stopped me registering, but now I was in my element as I went to work.  Two paramedics materialized beside me.  As they carefully lifted the lady away, a shiver ran through me.
     
Death again?  He appeared to be floating through two cars locked together, as if in some macabre embrace.  I wrestled a door open and started working on the mother and two toddlers inside the wreckage.  My hands moved speedily, examining and probing the wounds.  It seemed like no time at all before two firemen were lifting the family out. 

One of them crossed himself and murmured, “God knows how they survived.  I’ve never seen anyone pulled alive from a wreck like this before.”  He looked at me quizzically, but I needed to move on.  I had to stop Death from harming anyone else.
     
It is strange how shock affects us differently.  Here I am, a highly skilled surgeon, acknowledged as brilliant by many, a man of science, an atheist, desperately trying to find a manifestation of death. 

Could it just be the after effects of my accident?  I tried to rationalize things and focus on the misery around me.  Still, it was the urge to find him that propelled me forward.
      
As I spotted him I started trembling violently.  My hands shook and my teeth rattled as I approached.  The awful creature was crouching over a man lying in the road.
     
Surely he must be human? 

Again I rationalized, yet felt terror in my soul.  Forcing myself on, I cursed under my breath to keep my courage up.  What is wrong with me?  It has to be shock.  Doesn’t it?
      
As I crept up on him I saw him rip the injured man’s shirt open.  I knew something terrible was happening but couldn’t move the last two paces to reach him. 

The wounded man was unmoving and, although his head was obscured, he seemed familiar.  His car was embedded in the front of a truck, and it immediately made me think of mine.  I shut that thought out, not wanting to face reality just yet.  Sue was going to be so mad at me.
     
The macabre figure looked up and shouted for a colleague to bring a cardiac machine.  I stepped back thinking how strange the light must be.  He wasn’t so weird after all.  In fact hideous was an over-reaction too.  Ugly for sure, but not hideous.  Sadly, he just looked anorexic, with his gaunt face warped by stress.  I sighed as I moved forward to help him and the other paramedic, but then stood paralyzed as they tended the man.
     
The paramedic shouted, “Clear!” as he worked the paddles against the man’s chest.   The body arched as the volts surged through him.  There was still no pulse.  Twice more they tried but the shocks had no effect.  “This one’s definitely dead.”     

I forced myself to look at the corpse’s face, dreading what I knew was there. 

As I stared into my own dead eyes I was suddenly wrenched back into my body.  I re-lived that close up view of Death, only this time I could see him clearly for what he was: just an over-stressed paramedic faced with yet another violent and unnecessary fatality.  
     
As blackness closed in I heard him speak.  “God knows how, but it looks as if all the other victims will survive.  This is the idiot they reckon caused this mess.  Driving like a lunatic by all accounts.  Must have had a death wish. He’s probably better off dead”