Story code: ST-000828
Part 3: The Dead Feed
The collar of Maya’s t-shirt bit into her windpipe like a wire garrote. David hauled her backward, his heavy boots tearing up chunks of the dead lawn as he dragged her away from his dying father. Maya gagged, clawing wildly at the fabric choking her. Her fingernails scraped against David’s knuckles, but his grip was fueled by a blind, panicked adrenaline.
“Get off him!” David screamed, his voice breaking. He released her collar with a violent shove, throwing Maya backward.
She hit the baked earth hard, her breath leaving her lungs in a sharp rush. Dust plumed around her face, coating her tongue in the bitter taste of dry dirt. She rolled onto her side, coughing violently, her ribs aching from the impact. Through watering eyes, she looked toward Arthur. He remained exactly as she had left him: completely motionless, his face an ashen, terrifying gray. The ten-second window for compressions had slammed shut.
“Look at her, trying to play the victim now,” Brenda narrated into her iPad, taking a deliberate step closer to capture Maya writhing in the dirt. “This is what happens when you assault an elderly man, guys. The son had to step in.”
Maya pushed herself up onto her bleeding hands and knees, but before she could force a word through her bruised throat, a deafening mechanical roar shattered the neighborhood’s eerie calm.
The blast of an air horn vibrated in Maya’s chest. A massive red fire engine and a boxy white ambulance swung around the corner of Oakridge Lane, their sirens screaming, their strobe lights throwing jagged flashes of red and white across the manicured facades of the surrounding houses. They didn’t slow down for the speed bumps. The ambulance jumped the curb, crushing Maya’s remaining patch of native milkweed, and slammed into park directly behind David’s SUV.
The doors flew open before the vehicle had even settled on its suspension. Three paramedics piled out, moving with a synchronized, explosive urgency. They carried heavy red trauma bags, a green oxygen tank, and a bulky cardiac monitor.
David stepped directly into their path, waving his arms. “Over here! She attacked him! She was on top of him-”
The lead paramedic, a tall woman with a tight, severe ponytail, didn’t even break her sprint. “Move out of the way!” she roared. She didn’t wait for David to comply. She dropped her shoulder and shoved him so violently that he stumbled backward, his shoulder blades bouncing hard against the side panel of his own SUV.
Brenda stood rooted on the sidewalk, holding her iPad up to frame the paramedics’ rush. “I have the whole assault right here on video if you need to see-”
“Clear the area!” the second paramedic bellowed, not stopping to negotiate. He bulldozed straight through the narrow gap between Brenda and Greg. His heavy medical kit clipped Brenda’s forearm.
Brenda shrieked, stumbling back into the mailbox. “Hey! Watch the iPad! You almost dropped it!”
The paramedics descended on Arthur, ignoring the performative outrage surrounding them. It was a flurry of precise, violent medical intervention that made Maya’s desperate CPR look gentle. A pair of trauma shears ripped through Arthur’s khaki polo shirt in two swift cuts, laying his bare, pale chest open to the punishing sun.
“No pulse, starting compressions,” the third paramedic yelled, immediately locking his hands and driving his weight into Arthur’s sternum. The wet crack of cartilage echoed again, far louder this time, but nobody yelled at the paramedic to stop.
“Pads on!” the lead paramedic ordered, slapping the defibrillator patches onto Arthur’s chest. “Charging. Everybody off!”
Maya scrambled backward on her raw knees, pressing her back against the hot metal of the SUV’s tire. The paramedic pushed a button. Arthur’s entire body seized and arched off the dirt, dropping back down like a sack of wet sand.
“Still asystole. Resume compressions. Push epi,” the lead paramedic commanded.
Maya sat in the dirt, her heart hammering against her ribs, her throat throbbing where David had choked her. She watched the professionals fight for the life that had been slipping away while her neighbors recorded it for digital clout. The teenager on the skateboard, finally spooked by the brutal reality of an actual defibrillator, silently pushed off the pavement and rolled away down the street, abandoning the spectacle.
But Greg remained.
Greg stood just a few feet away on the sidewalk, vigorously brushing a layer of pulverized dust off his tailored khakis. He held his phone up high, tilting it left and right, trying to find an angle through the wall of broad-shouldered paramedics crouched over Arthur.
“Unbelievable,” Greg muttered loudly, letting out an exasperated sigh. He looked directly into his phone’s front-facing camera. “You guys seeing this? They completely blocked the angle. The EMTs just totally ruined the stream. I had almost a hundred and fifty people in here, and now all you can see is this guy’s back.”
Greg took two steps to his right, leaning dangerously close to the lead paramedic’s elbow, holding his device horizontally now. “Hold on, chat. Let me see if I can get the paddles in frame…”
Something deep inside Maya’s chest snapped. It wasn’t a slow build of anger, but a sudden, catastrophic breaking of the polite social contract she had adhered to her entire adult life.
She didn’t scream. She didn’t explain herself to the chat.
Maya pushed off the SUV tire and lunged.
Greg never even saw her coming. He was too busy adjusting his exposure settings. Maya’s bloodied hands clamped down on his phone like a vise. Greg let out a high-pitched yelp of surprise, his grip inherently loose because he had never expected the neighborhood’s quiet pariah to actually lay hands on him.
Maya ripped the phone violently from his grasp. She didn’t hesitate for a fraction of a second. Using the entire momentum of her lunge, she pivoted sharply, raised the device high above her head, and brought it down with every ounce of terrifying strength left in her arms.
She smashed the phone face-down against the jagged concrete edge of the street curb.
The sound of the screen shattering cracked through the humid air like a gunshot, loud enough to make even David flinch. Glass splinters exploded across the grey pavement.
Maya wasn’t done. She lifted her heavy boot and brought her heel down directly into the center of the splintered glass. She ground her sole against the concrete, twisting her ankle until the metal chassis bent entirely in half with a sickening crunch.
The digitized voices from the live stream died instantly. The flashing red recording light blinked out.
Maya slowly lifted her boot off the mangled wreckage of circuits and glass. She turned her head, her chest heaving, her bruised neck standing out starkly against her sweat-drenched skin, and stared dead into Greg’s horrified, wide-eyed face.