“What’s it going to be, Mags?” Roger asked as he looked at her, to the drive-thru menu, and back again.

“I’ll take two hamburgers and a small fry,” Magdalene replied.

She really would have loved to order those burgers rare, but she knew fast-food restaurants, even the ones who proclaimed to cater to your wishes, didn’t do rare. They spouted nonsense about laws and health risks, but she’d been eating her food as raw as possible since she was a kid, and she’d managed to survive it.

A squelching noise came over the airwaves of their radio as Roger started yelling their order at the speaker. The poor drive-thru guy would be lucky to have eardrums left by the time Roger finished. No matter how many times she tried to explain he didn’t have to shout at the speaker to be heard, Roger insisted on doing it.

Roger had been the type of guy she hated when she worked the drive-thru as a teenager. It had been the shortest job she ever had, and the only one she’d walked out on. Some asshole had shouted his order at her before pulling forward to discover his fries weren’t quite ready yet. She’d forced her politest smile while she asked him to please wait in the parking lot and informed him someone would run his fries out to him as soon as they were ready.

He’d replied by calling her a stupid bitch. Still smiling, she’d squeezed his strawberry shake until it exploded in his face and tossed the empty cup into his lap. He’d still been sputtering and shouting obscenities at her as she calmly untied her apron, pulled off her hat, and walked out the door. She could have desperately used the money back then, but she hadn’t bothered to collect her last paycheck.

“You don’t have to shout,” she said again as Roger sat back in his seat.

“I wasn’t shouting,” he replied, and she shook her head.

She kept telling him to get his hearing checked. Too much time listening to sirens had probably damaged his hearing, or maybe his ears required a good cleaning. Either way, he refused to have them checked, and she wouldn’t nag him about it.

Roger had been her mentor since before she’d become an EMT. He’d been her savior through paramedic school and developed into the father figure she’d never had during the four years they’d worked together. With his graying brown hair and the lines etching his face from years of stress and too many years smoking before he’d kicked the habit, Roger looked his fifty-two years.

Over the past year, his fondness for fried food had caused his lean body to take on a bit more paunch in the belly. However, for the amount of crap he ate, he remained surprisingly on the thin side. Despite the years catching up to him, when Roger smiled, it lit his face and made him appear twenty years younger. Maggie loved that rare smile.

The radio made a loud squelching sound again as they pulled up to the first window. The pimple-faced teen leaning out to collect their money winced at the noise and instinctively jerked back. He stayed a safe distance away and stuck out his hand for Roger to pay him. The kid took the money and turned to push the buttons on the register.

Since they were on their dinner shift, Maggie leaned over to turn the radio down a little, but a frantic burst of words spattered the airwaves like gunfire before she could touch it. She froze as she listened to the rushed words of multiple victims and ambulances needed. Her stomach rumbled in protest, but before the next words came out, she already knew her overcooked burgers were going to have to wait.

“It’s too early in the night for this shit,” Roger muttered as he turned on the lights and siren. The kid snatched his hand back so fast the money tumbled to the ground. “We’ll be back!” Roger shouted out the window as he expertly whipped the ambulance around the car idling at the window in front of them.

Once on the road, vehicles moved out of their way the best they could on the crowded Boston streets. Maggie kept alert for anyone who might think it would be fun to race an ambulance or run a red light, but thankfully, the other drivers decided to obey the laws. Their luck of not having to dodge any wayward cars didn’t stop her growing certainty this was going to be a bad night.

The first star wasn’t out yet, and already they were getting a call for multiple victims. Roger was right; it was far too early in the night for this.

Roger turned a corner, and numerous police cars parked at the mouth of an alley came into view. Yellow tape hung across the entrance to the alley, officers gathered at the end of it. They looked unusually subdued as none of them spoke to each other.

They were the first ambulance to arrive. Roger pulled to the curb and parked it in front of a nondescript, brick building. Plywood covered the windows on the first and second floors of this building and the one next to it. Wooden boards were nailed across the front entrance, blocking the metal door behind it.

Why would multiple people gather between abandoned buildings? Even as she questioned it, she knew the answer. Whatever lay beyond that tape was probably the result of a drug deal gone way wrong.

Maggie opened her door and hopped out. Usually, her adrenaline would be pumping to get to their victim and possibly save a life. She felt none of that normal rush though. Instead, her dread only grew as the officers looked over at them. Their faces were abnormally pale in the flashing lights, and no one called or waved a greeting to them.

An intuitive sense they were walking into something that might make the Wolfman run grew within her. Instead of rushing to gather their supplies, her legs locked into place.

“You’ll need the stretcher,” one of the officers called to her after a minute.

His voice snapped her out of the strange paralysis holding her. She nodded to him before hurrying around to open the back doors. Roger met her on the other side, and together they removed the stretcher and medical bag. They carried their equipment over to one of the police officers guarding the alleyway. Maggie recognized Officer Harding immediately.

Harding pulled aside the yellow crime scene tape before they reached it. She and Roger ran into Harding often, and Roger’s bowling team competed against Harding’s. Never had the officer’s pudgy face been flushed or had she seen him sweat, not even in August. Now, Harding’s brown eyes held a note of distress she’d never seen in the middle-aged man before.

She’d assumed Harding had seen it all after nearly thirty years on the force, but whatever he’d seen here tonight bothered him enough that his normally perfect uniform was marred by the hat sitting crookedly on his head. Beneath the hat, his usually neatly combed salt-and-pepper hair stuck out on the sides.

“Roger, Mags,” Harding greeted in a voice hoarser than normal. His breath came out in puffs of air as he spoke. “I’m not sure what happened here, but it’s bad.”

“Survivors?” Roger asked.

“Yes, but don’t ask me how.”

Maggie frowned at that response and glanced toward the alleyway. Blood didn’t bother her; in fact, it had always held a strange fascination for her, and she’d never been squeamish. Both of those things had led her to this career. She also liked helping people.

She’d probably still be bouncing from one hated job to the next if she hadn’t witnessed a car hit a woman one day while walking home. The scene repulsed the other witnesses, but Maggie ignored the blood and the jutting leg bones to care for the woman until an ambulance arrived.

Roger had been working that ambulance. Impressed with her ability to handle what she’d seen, and to tie a tourniquet the best she could based on what she’d watched on TV, he’d given her his number. Roger told her to call him if she ever decided she might like to try her hand at being an EMT.

She’d called him the next day and enrolled in an EMT program the following month. She’d hated school while growing up and vowed never to return after she graduated, but she’d plunged into EMT training. Roger helped her get a job with this company when she finished. He trained her, and when she’d applied to paramedic school after a year of being on the ambulance with him, he’d tutored her through it. Never once had she regretted her decision or been spooked while on a call. She had the unreasonable feeling that might end tonight.

Glancing nervously at the alleyway, her nose twitched when she detected the coppery tang of blood and the faint hint of garbage on the air. A lot of blood odor wafted out of that alley.