Not Looking Good (continued) by rabidsamfan

The characters etc. belong to Universal. This is just fanfic.

Roy DeSoto couldn't sleep.

Heaven only knew he was tired enough, but he couldn't keep a lid on the coughs and sleep too, and he didn't want to keep the rest of A shift awake. Especially not Johnny, who had melted into his bunk like an overheated candle the moment he'd gotten horizontal. Besides, the fever was making everything feel kind of strange and remote, and it was an interesting sensation. He kind of wanted to enjoy it for a while.

He closed his eyes and listened to the platterings of the rain, now comfortably outside, and the occasional hiss of tires on wet pavement outside the station. A bunk creaked when one of the others turned in their sleep, and the first fluting notes announced that Chet was sleeping on his back again.

It felt strange to be lying awake in the dorm. On the rare occasions when sleep eluded Roy at work he usually took himself to the kitchen and watched TV, or read a little. Sometimes he even caught up the log. But tonight he lacked the energy to decipher Johnny's scrawled notes, even though the day's events were going to take hours to record.

How many runs had they been on? He tried to think his way through the day. They'd been called out with the engine on the first run of the morning, so soon after shift change that Johnny was still fussing with his shoelaces while Roy drove the squad to the site of the MVA. And then they'd been called from Rampart, to help 85s with that man who'd been trapped in his toolshed by fallen shelving. That hadn't taken long – they hadn't even needed the ambulance – but on the way back to the station they'd been called again to another MVA with minor injuries.

He couldn't remember which run had come next. There had been so many of them. A child choking on a misswallowed hot dog; an old man with chest pains; a lady who had cut herself on a broken glass while she was doing dishes and fainted while she was calling her family doctor; three or was it four? -- calls up the canyons to check over people who'd been caught in rockslides or mudslides. They'd been caught themselves by falling rocks while they were trying to talk down the two idiot teenagers who had decided to climb up a cliff in the rain. Small rocks, fortunately, though they'd done a job on the front of the squad and Johnny's hand. Good thing he'd had his gloves on and nothing was actually broken. Good thing it had been Joe Early looking at it and not Brackett, who would have gotten his back up and insisted on doing the "doctor knows best" routine when Johnny started wheedling to be allowed to stay on duty. Roy would never have been able to squeeze through the culvert the little boy had crawled into after his dog.

Two more MVAs, and damn all good it did to have a paramedic at either one of them. You'd think that people knew better than to speed in the rain. And the second guy had managed to take out another car with him. They'd done their best with the other driver, but they'd known all the while that they weren't doing much more than buying him enough time for his family to get to Rampart and say goodbye.

The guy with the BB gun. That one stood out. He'd known the parking garage where he'd started shooting at people like it was his own private playground, and it'd taken five cops to help corner him. Thank goodness for turnout coats and helmets – the cops had collected a lot more bruises than the paramedics had. But it hadn't been much fun getting winged, even by a BB, and Roy was pretty sure that only the safety goggles from the back of the squad had kept Johnny from spending yet another night at Rampart, not that Johnny had said anything about the crack in the lens afterwards. Probably because when they'd finally block tackled the guy and got the BB gun away from him he'd turned out to be out of his head with a malarial fever and scared shitless that they were going to haul him back to the POW camp he'd escaped from in 'Nam. Who could stay mad at a guy with those kinds of problems?

Roy shifted position and swallowed hard against another round of coughs. It was getting easier to keep them at bay. The codeine must be working. He settled back and went back to counting runs, like some kind of strange sheep.

Two false alarms, one hand caught in a vending machine, the do-it-yourself plumber who had cut his head open on the underside of his kitchen sink somehow, and his wife the do-it-yourself home nurse who had tried to close the cut with superglue because she'd read about it in a magazine somewhere and got herself stuck to her husband's scalp. The little girl who had called because the mama was having babies, only the mama turned out to be a cat. The OD in the park that had been called in at least two days too late for anyone to do anything.

The angina attack at the Italian restaurant. That one stood out too, but only because by the time they'd hauled their equipment inside and set up the scope they'd both been so hungry that the smells coming from the kitchen had been sheer torment. Both their stomachs had started growling so loud that even the patient had had to smile once they'd done something about the pain. And the guy who owned the restaurant had shoved a paper bag into the squad before Roy could get set to follow the ambulance and Johnny. Two big veal parm subs, and when Roy protested that they weren't supposed to take things like that the restaurant owner had said it was his contribution to keeping the rest of the city safe from hungry firemen. Dix had duped Dispatch by delaying the refill on the drug box just long enough for them to wolf down the bounty, and she'd stuffed candy bars into their pockets when they'd got another call anyway. Conscience money, she'd called it, because she wanted to go home and get some sleep with a clear conscience.

Sleep. Roy settled deeper into his covers and let his breathing even out, no longer sure if the memories that were coming to him were from this shift or his own imagination.

The sinkhole that had swallowed a car. The driver had been lucky, and so had his girlfriend, and all it had really taken was getting the doors open with the jaws and a quick exam back up top. Of course they'd been soaked to the skin, and that had aggravated the tickly throat Roy had had all day. They'd actually made it back to the station and changed afterwards, for all the good it had done. Johnny had started some coffee, and Roy had sat down to start filling in the log, but they'd barely got anything done before the tones had called them out to help 48s try to find the two kids in the storm drains.

Neither he nor Johnny had believed they were going to find anything when Hookrader sent them down along the drainage ditch. Hell, if the squad hadn't been forced off the road by a hydroplaning idiot, they wouldn't have found anything. But while Roy was busy trying to find the side mirror that had been clipped off when they didn't quite miss a telephone pole, Johnny had heard a cry from the dark, stinking ditch beside them...

Memory became dreams and then faded away in the face of deep exhaustion. There was still a long time till morning.

Roy slept.