My partner, Bronson, and I are doing absolutely nothing, staring out the windshield of the ambulance on this cold Halloween weekend and listening to each other’s stomachs digest our lunches, when we get a call for a female with a leg injury at the Vanderveer Houses, arguably one of the worst housing projects in Brooklyn.

“Yuck,” Bronson says, getting out of the ambulance and entering the courtyard, a desolate, crabgrassy place with ugly benches surrounded by brick buildings that all look alike. All the battered metal doorways are identical, and each one looks as if a crazed gunman is going to pop out of it, shooting.

We’re met at the door of apartment 6-D by a young woman with garish makeup and a glistening coat of AquaNet in her hair.

“Creature Feature Meets Baby Jane,” Bronson whispers to me. He asks, “What’s going on?” – a bit too abruptly, but he hates to waste time.

“I called for my mother,” Baby Jane says. “She got worms on her leg.”

“Really?” I ask. “You sure it’s worms?”

Bronson scoffs. “Can’t be worms.”

She looks at him evenly. “It’s worms.” She leads us past piles of clothes and trash bags to the back bedroom, where a 250-pound woman is lying in a huge sagging bed.

Lo and behold, it’s Sally, the bag lady from the corner of Nostrand and Foster avenues. We see her every day panhandling outside the liquor store. She always flags us down and asks us for gauze for her leg. Sometimes we give it to her. Sometimes we tell her to take a hike.

Her clothes are soiled, and the smell of unwashed flesh permeates the room. Empty Georgi vodka jugs litter the floor. I spot her cane lying beside her in the bed. She has the hooked handle resting on a filthy pillow and the grubby blankets pulled up, as if to its chin.

“It’s all tucked in,” I tell Bronson.

Bronson is a smart aleck. “So now we make house calls?” He takes a sterile bandage out of the trauma bag. “Need gauze?”

I clear my throat. “Your daughter said you have worms on your leg.” I snap on a pair of sky-blue latex gloves, then another pair over that. She’s an alcoholic. I don’t need to flirt with hepatitis C. “Want to lift your pants leg?”

She doesn’t want to.

“We have to take a look,” I say, and attempt to do it for her.

She kicks me.

I sigh. “Look. You see us every day. You have to trust us. Now, lift that pants leg.”

She sucks her teeth and rolls up the leg.

I recoil. On the side of her calf is an open sore about three inches long, putrid, with a cluster of white maggots writhing in the flesh.

A fly enters a house, lays eggs somewhere soft and rotting, and bingo! Maggots. It’s why every ER has purple bug zappers.

“It itches,” she says, and tries to scratch.

“Don’t scratch!” I shout.

The daughter stands by the door, biting her lip. “Can you clean them off?”

Bronson mutters to me, “The Avon lady speaks.”Then he tells her, “I think we’ll let the ER nurses do that.”

“Let’s go to Maimonides!” I say. I can’t wait to give this patient to Rachel, the beautiful triage nurse Bronson is in love with. She annoys me.

Bronson wrinkles his nose. “I think we should go to Kings County.”

I give him a smirk. Ever chivalrous, he wants to spare Rachel the pleasure of cleaning parasites from rotting flesh. “She has enough to deal with on Halloween.”

“What a guy,” I tell him. But it’s true, ER rooms are packed on Halloween. Then I tell Sally, “Kings County’s closer.”

I wrap her leg while Bronson fills out the paperwork. The tiny white maggots squirm energetically, and the cinematography of every late-night B horror movie I’ve ever seen as a child on channel 9 comes back to haunt me. I shudder as I place the gauze pad over the wound and quickly bind the leg. I don’t want any of those critters falling off inside the ambulance and reproducing.

Bronson asks Sally her medical history, but she’s not telling him anything.

All done wrapping the leg, I judge Sally’s weight again and clap my hands. “Okay, hop to it.”

She takes her cane from the pillow, hoists herself out of bed, hobbles across the room, and limps her way through the apartment and out into the hallway. She jabs the elevator button.

At Kings County, the ER is busy. Bronson presents Sally to the fat triage nurse who’s forever yelling at us because we usually bring her all of our vomit-covered drunks.

She slams down her stethoscope. “Goddammit, now I gotta clean maggots.”

Bronson smiles. “Trick or treat.”

Ms. Klopsis is an emergency medical technician for the FDNY. This column details her observations and experiences on the job. Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of patients.