Agonal Breath (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 1) (35 page)

A faint glow on the eastern horizon had been growing steadily pinker over the past fifteen minutes or so. The sun was coming up, and bringing a new day along with it.

“Well,” Brandon said, as he hopped up onto the bright yellow wheeled cot that the EMTs had brought out of the ambulance for him, “it sure has been a night, hasn’t it?”

“Ain’t
that
the truth,” Becky laughed, letting her medical crew strap her down to their own cot. “I’ll see you both at the hospital, boys.” And with that, they were both pushed inside the ambulances, a tired-looking EMT closing both sets of doors behind them.

“How’s it going?” said the EMT that was assigned to my ambulance. He was friendly enough, but all business right out of the gate.“My name’s Mike, but you can call me Mrla — everybody does.” He pronounced it
Mar-la.
“I’ll be your EMT for your ride back down the canyon, okay?” Mrla cocked a thumb at the tall, dark-haired young guy next to him. “And this here is Ryan. He’ll be your paramedic, which means he’ll basically be the cab driver while I get all the
real
work done. So, first things first…let’s get you all belted in. Then we’ll be starting an IV and giving you a little fluid…”

My mind began to wander as the two medical pros efficiently strapped and buckled me to their cot. For a minute I got the chills; it took me back to being strapped down to Spiessbach’s operating table, totally at the mercy of the demented doctor and his scalpel. But then I shook my head and snapped out of it.

I had far more important things to spend my brainpower on — like how on Earth was I actually going to explain all this to Mom?

Fortunately, the ride back down into Boulder would give me a lot of time to think.

I winced as Mrla stuck a needle in my arm and pushed a tiny plastic tube into one of my veins, then starting to run what he told me was “a little saltwater” from a clear plastic bag. The inside of my elbow started to go a little numb.

The ambulance began to slowly work its way along the driveway, the same track we’d used to reach the sanatorium a lifetime ago. I felt a squeeze in my other arm. Mrla was taking my blood pressure.

Ryan the paramedic was in the driving seat. Guiding the ambulance carefully along the rough He called out to me over his shoulder. “So, I’ve got to ask…what the hell
happened
to you guys up there?”

Looking through the two oval back windows of the ambulance, all I could see was the flash of multi-colored emergency lights surrounding the angry orange glow that had once been Long Brook Sanatorium.

“I don’t know where to start,” I said at last. “All I can tell you is, nothing will ever be the same again.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Author’s Note

I hope that you have enjoyed “Agonal Breath.” If so, please consider
leaving a review
or rating on Amazon.com. I would be most grateful.

I have spent the better part of twenty years investigating claims of the paranormal, on both sides of the Atlantic. Readers who are interested in that particular story can learn all about it in my ghost-hunting biography,
In Search of the Paranormal,
in which my team and I spent nights looking for ghosts inside a number of very haunted buildings.

The truth is that ghost hunting is a rather boring business, at least for most of the time. Even the most paranormally-active buildings aren’t that way twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week…so there is a lot of waiting around, waiting for things to happen.

That’s not a great deal of fun to read about, and one of the benefits of
writing
about it (whether in fact or fiction) is that the author has the luxury of cutting out most of the boring parts for you, the reader.

Agonal Breath
is not based on any sanatorium or haunted hospital in particular (although I have investigated and written about quite a few, as detailed in my book
The World’s Most Haunted Hospitals
) but there are a number of very similar facilities scattered across the landscape of North America. Many of them lie in ruins now, and are laid out essentially as I have described Long Brook Sanatorium in this novel.

I did not exaggerate in the slightest concerning the cruelty and brutality of the early and mid-Twentieth Century medical treatments for tuberculosis. All of the treatments that I have described in
Agonal Breath
were in common practice at one time or another, and represented the very best efforts of medical science to combat the blight that was TB.

The physicians and nursing staff of the time worked long hours in the fight against that wretched disease, and it was a fight that they were very often bound to lose. One can only shake their head and wonder at how it must have affected them, both physically and emotionally.

Nor has the battle against tuberculosis been won yet. Statistics published by the World Health Organization cite an estimated
nine million
new tuberculosis cases in 2013, and an estimated one million deaths.

Globally, the disease continues to take its toll.

On a rather more pleasant note, most of my characters are entirely fictitious. Marko von Spiessbach did not exist, thankfully, but he came to life when I needed a suitably Germanic-sounding name, which was stolen from my fellow Firefighter-Paramedic Mark Spiessbach. Mark is, I can assure you, one of the nicest and most decent people you could ever wish to meet, and is nothing at all like his war criminal counterpart.

Much the same can be said for Jake Dickes, who jumped at the chance to have a meth dealer named after him in the book. Jake is also a superb firefighter and devoted family man who is nothing like his namesake.

Billy Kraft, on the other hand, is every bit the same in reality as he appears in the book. None was more surprised than I when the grizzled 911 communications center manager shoehorned his way into the scene and started talking (which is pretty much his
modus operandi
in real life) and so I left him in. I’m very happy to report that at the time of writing, he is most definitely not dead.

Much of Boulder County is as I have described it. Where liberties need to be taken in order to serve the needs of the book, I hope that the reader will forgive any inaccuracies. I would like to offer my heart felt thanks to Laura T. for her proofing and copy-editing skills, and to test readers Katy Wheatley, Dr. Catlyn Keenan, Shannon Bradley Byers, and Dibe Hall for taking the time to read the book in advance and to offer feedback, and to Mihai Costea for designing such an awesome cover.

As the ruins of Long Brook Sanatorium burn slowly down into cold ashes and embers, I feel that it is in no way giving out a spoiler to tell you that the dead have not yet finished with Danny, Becky, and Brandon…not by a long shot. There are many more future adventures left for the Deadseer and his new-found friends, as they travel a road of adventure, excitement, heartbreak— and of course, lots and lots of ghosts…

Richard Estep

Longmont, Colorado

September 2015