Thomas, his curiosity aroused, got out of the ambulance and followed Kyle along the back side of the fence until they reached a spot where one of the boards was missing. “Ah, this is great,” Kyle said. “Great for what?” Thomas asked. “Watch, you’ll see,” Kyle answered. “What am I going to see, Kyle?!” Thomas demanded. “Man, this is going to be good,” Kyle snickered. Thomas’ patience was wearing thin. He furrowed his brow and sternly asked, “Kyle, what’s going on? I’m in no mood for twenty questions. Out with it.” “Okay. While you were daydreaming…hold on, here they come.”

Buckled in Ted reached down beside the driver’s seat for the Cole-Hearse switch. The switch was a dial that let the driver select between two batteries in the engine compartment he wanted to use to run the ambulance. When they were on an emergency run both batteries were used because of the power drain emergency lights put on the system. While running normally, they’d select either battery one or two, but not both. They had decided on a system to maintain the batteries equally. If the day of the month was odd they chose battery one. On even numbered days they chose battery two. Today it was time to run the odd numbered battery. Ted casually flipped the switch over to the number one position.

Walking along the sidewalk approaching the ambulance was a young mother holding her small child’s left hand in her right. In the mother’s left hand was a leash attached to the collar of a miniature poodle. The child was a smiling little girl of about five with blue eyes and blond pigtails tied with pink ribbons. She was holding an ice cream cone half as big as she. Crossing just a few feet in front of the ambulance was a man and his wife. Both appeared to be in their early sixties but they were holding hands and laughing like kids while walking from the parking lot to the grocery store. They seemed to be in no great hurry. Just coming out the front doors of the grocery was a lady in her mid-thirties, hair up in pink rollers, wearing too tight green leotards and purple tie-dyed shirt. She was pushing a grocery cart piled high with filled brown paper bags. She should have used two carts but had somehow managed to balance the bags on top of each other. The store had bag boys who would take your cart to the car and unload it for you but some people preferred to do it themselves. Some because they knew the bag boy expected a tip and they were too tight to give him a quarter while other’s probably didn’t have a quarter to spare. This lady looked like she might be the first exception.

Thomas totally unexpected what happened next. When Ted flipped the switch over to the on position, the siren started blaring, every emergency light on the unit began rotating or flashing, the headlights were on high beam, and the emergency flashers were activated. The FM radio was on a rock and roll station and came to life with the volume at ear splitting maximum. The Beatles’ “Hard Days Night” could be heard clearly by Thomas, who was two hundred feet away, over the ear piercing yelp of the siren. Topping everything off, the two-way radio volume was as high as it would go and the squelch was turned down. The resulting sound was like the static you would hear when a television station went off the air and there was nothing on the screen but fuzzy, white snow. Thomas stood frozen in place, both awed and mesmerized by the unfolding events.

The little girl in pig tails was so startled by the cacophony of noise she screamed at the top of her lungs and grabbed her mother around the waist. The giant ice cream cone she was eating instantly became a wedgie in the back of her mother’s leotards. The mother’s reaction was to scream and clutch her child. In doing so she dropped the leash and the last anyone saw of the startled poodle, it was running full tilt across the parking lot. The dog disappeared among parked cars and, as far as anyone knew, it was still running. The happy couple in their sixties were no longer smiling. Their faces were a mixture of shock and horror. The husband held his wife tightly and eased her to the asphalt as her legs buckled and she clutched her chest.

The lady pushing the overloaded shopping cart was an event in itself. She was just coming off the sidewalk with her cart when she was assaulted with the jumble of nerve jarring noise. She jumped back, slammed her hands over both ears and screamed at the top of her lungs. As she jumped back she pushed the shopping cart away from her and out into the parking lot. Just as the cart crossed in front of the ambulance a local doctor in his BMW was coming past. He never saw the cart and hit it dead center of his grill. The cart, and its’ bags full of groceries, flipped over and canned goods took a mind of their own rolling across the parking lot. Two dozen eggs and a gallon of milk shattered and became a splattered, uncooked omelet on the pavement. A bottle of ketchup, a jar of mustard and a large bottle of pickle relish also met an untimely end to garnish the omelet.

Thomas was dumbfounded. “Kyle, what have you done?” Kyle’s eyes were frozen on the mayhem in front of him, his jaw slack. “We’ve got to get out of here,” he said turning to Thomas. Kyle’s eyes were big as saucers and his face was white as a sheet. “You’re right about that,” Thomas told him.” Kyle said. “I might have overdone it just a little this time.” “I’m sure that might be an understatement, Kyle.”