Editor’s note: In “No one’s coming,” Kevin Hazzard tells the remarkable true story of Phoenix Air — a scrappy, innovative aviation company led by brothers Dent and Mark Thompson. When the 2014 Ebola outbreak left two American medical workers dying in Liberia and the world paralyzed by fear, Phoenix Air stepped up. Refusing to accept “impossible,” they engineered a groundbreaking biocontainment system and risked everything to fly into the heart of the epidemic, transporting patients with the world’s deadliest virus across the Atlantic while the nation watched in suspense.
Georgia in August is a miserable place. A sauna set on fire. The heat and humidity were worse at Dobbins because there was no escape from the sun and the tarmac was a frying pan. Gail Stallings stood melting into her PPE, all that rubber and plastic, panting into the respirator, as John Arevalo disappeared inside the Gulfstream III. He emerged backward, holding onto Kent, along with a third person she didn’t know, who was calling out the steps as he went. Kent flopped exhausted onto their stretcher. She couldn’t help but sneak a glance as she leaned down to buckle him in. Here was the man whose illness had sparked an international rescue that set off panic and hysteria and anger, so much anger there was enough left over for her just because she was asked to help; a man whose efforts to save strangers was met at home with jeers, with calls to let him die, whose plight in the long run- up to the presidential election inspired a low- water mark in American decency. Sensing in the moment exactly what Gail had sensed, Arevalo leaned over Kent and looked him square in the eye.
“Welcome home.”
This next part they’d done countless times but never in so fraught a situation. Gail’s mind raced as they went through the intimate choreography of loading a critical patient into an ambulance. She’d seen all the ways things that can go wrong do go wrong, and all that experience was riding with her now. What if there’s a problem while they’re lifting the stretcher? What if he starts vomiting blood into his mask, or his PPE tears or her PPE tears? What if the stretcher locks up (it happens) or collapses (a lot)? Plan for contingencies is a phrase that lives in the back of every medic’s mind because in critical situations they’re always shorthanded. In the twenty minutes between the time they arrived and touchdown of the aircraft they discussed this, and they agreed to check in on each other, use eye contact, keep everybody level. Gail glanced up and there was Arevalo. Nothing said but it’s all there in the look— it’s just us.
And we got this.
She returned to the mantra that had carried her through every critical situation she faced on the street. No running. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Steady. Just another day. Everything is everything. And it stayed with her as they loaded Kent into the plastic- shrouded cocoon of their ambulance, as she closed the door and made her way up front, as she put the truck in gear and drove off the base. That sense of serenity was there right up to the moment she turned out of Dobbins and straight into a mile-long gauntlet of media trucks, all lined up on both sides of the road. A single word escaped her lips as a hundred different cameras all swung to her at once.
“Damn.”
But there she was. Behind the wheel of the ambulance wearing a Tyvek suit, non- latex nitrile gloves, and an N95 mask, cameras zoomed in on her face, her partner in the back with a highly contagious patient, and the whole world watching. She was just trying to keep it between the lines. She knew that most people had tricked themselves into thinking they were safe, that an ocean and technology and the privilege of being American would protect them from the contagions plaguing the rest of the world. That many people refused to accept that the arrival of a virus on our shores had always been a when not an if. So she expected some craziness. But this? This was crazy on a whole other level. She maneuvered her way through the gauntlet of cameras at the front entrance of Dobbins, then beelined for the highway, and hit the onramp at speed. There were cop cars, unmarked FBI cars, helicopters overhead and buzzing around, chaos everywhere, but she trained her eyes on the road. News footage showed a driver coolly focused on driving, but not captured on film were her inner thoughts, which were significantly less cool and could be summed up as a rolling commentary of expletives.
She was speeding down the highway at seventy miles an hour with a patient the public viewed as a dirty bomb in the back of her ambulance and all she could think about was everything that could go wrong. She could have engine trouble or a flat tire, an accident even. Holy hell, can you imagine an accident? It was daytime, traffic everywhere, anything could happen. She needed to focus, to tune out the noise, and just drive. The words running repeatedly through her head were Don’t screw this up, Stallings.
It’s thirty minutes from Dobbins to Emory, and a half hour is a long time to sit gripping the wheel. She was so intent on blocking out the noise, on keeping her eyes glued to the road, that she didn’t see the car creeping toward them until it was almost in their lane. It came from nowhere, just appeared beside her. Crowded the dotted line and started swerving. She glanced over. The driver was leaning out his window, not looking at the road, camera out and filming. Gail was in the left lane, nowhere to go if he came any closer but into the concrete median, and this guy’s not even driving anymore, he’s just recording. It would have been almost funny if it hadn’t been scary, if she hadn’t been told about the death threats, if people weren’t lining up to watch her pass, if the whole thing wasn’t being broadcast live. As it was, she didn’t know what the guy wanted or what he’d do. Was this the thing they’d all feared? It was definitely something she feared. He followed for a while, filming, until the cops swept in and chased him away.
Twenty minutes in they got off the highway, and now the whole convoy squeezed into narrow side streets. Helicopters and cops and the ambulance, lights and sirens, all barreling through neighborhoods, houses trembling from the end-times roar. Ribner and his staff were watching the procession on TV, thinking what everyone else was thinking—it’s just like the OJ chase—except this time the circus was coming to him. When the wail of sirens outside got louder than the wail of sirens on TV and the helicopters started beating the air outside his window, he knew the moment had arrived. They were here.
Excerpted from “No one’s coming,” by Kevin Hazzard, copyright ©2026 by Kevin Hazzard. Used with permission of Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. Available for purchase at Hachette Book Group and Amazon.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kevin Hazzard is a journalist, TV writer and former paramedic. He is the author of “American sirens: The incredible story of the Black men who became America’s first paramedics,” (Hachette Books 2022). His first book, “A thousand naked strangers: A paramedic’s wild ride to the edge and back,” was published by Scribner in 2016. He now writes for film/TV, with work produced by Hulu, CBS, ABC and Universal. His freelance journalism has been published at “99% Invisible,” the “Atavist,” “Men’s Journal,” “Creative Loafing,” “Atlanta Magazine,” and elsewhere. He is also a sought-after voice on emergency medicine. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia. See https://www.kevinhazzard.com/ for more information.
