I had not frozen.
When you spend twelve years as a volunteer search-and-rescue paramedic in the Clear Creek drainage before taking a desk job in marketing, your hands remember what your brain wants to panic over.
I ripped her cashmere lapels open, popping two mother-of-pearl buttons that skittered across the gravel into the ditch.
I checked the airway.
Clear.
I positioned the heel of my left hand over the lower third of her sternum, locked my right fingers over my knuckles, straightened my elbows, and drove forty pounds of linear downward pressure into her thoracic cage:
The cartilage of the third rib yielded with that familiar, sickening pop that signals effective depth.
*One-and-two-and-three-and-four…*
One hundred compressions a minute.
The gravel dug through the denim of my trousers into my kneecaps.
Commuter traffic blasted past us at seventy miles per hour, the vacuum of the semi-trucks tugging at my shirt, the smell of burnt rubber and raw mountain dust choking my lungs.
