Elena Rostova pressed the cold silver bell of her Littmann stethoscope directly against the vibrating steel safety rail of the catwalk.
The sound that traveled up the binaural tubing was not human. It was the crushing, rhythmic heartbeat of twenty tons of industrial cast iron: thud-SHSHSH... thud-SHSHSH...
Four hundred and twenty seconds flashed in glowing red nixie numerals above the paper feed. Exactly seven minutes.
Elena took a slow, measured breath through her mask. For eight years, she had worked the midnight-to-eight shift in the emergency department at St. Jude’s Hospital.
She knew the acoustics of trauma. She knew the dry, plastic click of an ambu-bag valve, the high-pitched squeal of a defibrillator charging, and the erratic, frantic fluttering of a dying heart. She had learned long ago that in a crisis, panic was an indulgence that killed people.
When her younger brother Pasha had died after administrators forged a Do-Not-Resuscitate order on his chart, Elena had promised herself she would never let another bureaucrat dictate the terms of life and death.
“The rhythm is steady,” Elena yelled over the thunder, keeping her hand pressed against the stethoscope tubing. “One hundred and sixty-six strokes per minute.”
“That gives us a mechanical diastole of zero point one eight seconds between each platen compression. If you step during the stroke, the vibration will throw you off the grating.”
