Day 2,256

I thought it was dead.

I thought it was dead.

That was all he said, muttered under his breath like a deathbed confession... which it was. By the time we realised this he was too far gone to save and we were already on the precipice of discovering exactly what killed him. It had been so close by all this time that our eyes had tuned it out, blurring it into the foliage we found him crawling out of.

We thought he was suffering from nerve damage caused by head trauma and, judging by the amount of blood he'd already lost when we arrived, hallucinations as well. There were tyre tracks leading off to the opposite side of the road, smoke coming from further in which led us to think he'd swerved to avoid a deer, gotten out to check and it hadn't been as dead as he assumed.

Deer are surprisingly difficult to kill with a car.

He seemed to be recovering as we were loading him into our ambulance, vitals stabilising and generally in much better condition than we initially assumed. It's so easy to forget that the human body often peaks before it dives, a terminal patient will perk up and chatter away, the comatose will blink and smile and then they just... go.

When he went, it wasn't peaceful. He managed to break free from the gurney and leap out into the foliage, clawing at the ground and screaming at us to run while we still can and then - snap - he dropped like a puppet without strings.

Something in me refused to move, something in the back of my mind was desperate to run and in all my years as a paramedic I've never felt anything like it before or since. Seeing his lifeless body shoot away deeper into the undergrowth followed by all those guttural chewing sounds forced me to move, barely remembering to snag my partner's arm before slamming all the doors shut and flooring it out of there.

In the end we said we couldn't find the driver. It felt like a safer, saner thing to say than whatever we'd witnessed. The police searched for days and lost one of their own along the way. Neither were found and no more have been lost since.

I know it's just a matter of time before we get called out there again.

Another empty car, another dying driver.

Maybe one of us for good measure.