“I’ve got the pads!” Vance shouted, slapping the adhesive electrodes across her right clavicle and left rib cage:
ANALYZING RHYTHM… DO NOT TOUCH THE PATIENT…
SHOCK ADVISED… CHARGING…
STAND CLEAR.
KABOOM.
The woman’s torso arched six inches off the crushed rock as two hundred joules of biphasic electricity discharged through her myocardium.
RESUME CPR.
I didn’t stop. I went back down onto her sternum with the rhythm of an industrial piston:
One-and-two-and-three…
On compression eighty-two, her lungs took a ragged, violent, unassisted gasp: GAAAASP.
Her eyelids fluttered open.
The life rushed back into her gray eyes like an incoming tide over gray slate.
She looked at me.
She didn’t look at the trooper. She didn’t look at the flashing lights.
Her hand—still trembling with the residual current of the defibrillator—reached up once more, her thumb brushing the blood on my cuff, her eyes locking onto mine with an unyielding, un-appealable authority that made my spine snap straight:
