by Malone, Cara
“Chief Wilson,” Amelia said when the officers left, “how’s the rest of the city looking? Hopefully not as bad as this?”
Wilson let out a huff of air. “Wish I could say so, but Lakeland Avenue got hit pretty hard too. Lot of fatalities going to be coming your way today. You ready for it?”
“The mass disaster protocol has been activated,” Amelia said. She’d dispatched a handful of her investigators to Lakeland Avenue based on the information she got from the police dispatchers, and more calls were coming in from around the city. It was only nine a.m. and there were already more scenes than investigators, so she’d have to reassign them as they became available. For now, though, she needed to get a handle on this scene. “I was going to set up a grid and start working through this neighborhood with Ms. Granger, unless you have anything that needs my attention first?”
The chief shook his head. “I hope we find survivors here, but I’m afraid this is more your scene than mine.”
She nodded. That meant they hadn’t had much luck with search-and-rescue so far.
“Come on,” she said to Kelsey, “let’s find the fire captain and find out which of these houses are safe to enter.”
Half an hour later, the initial scene assessment was done, their grid was established, and Amelia and Kelsey had split up to begin their work.
There was some good news. A handful of survivors had been pulled from their homes and were clustered around the ambulances parked at one end of the street, getting medical care for minor cuts and bruises.
But there was also a growing list of victims. Firefighters and police officers told Amelia and Kelsey where there were bodies that they’d located, and Amelia recorded their locations according to the grid. It was Amelia and Kelsey’s job to document and remove each body.
Hopefully there wouldn’t be any additional surprises, but there were already too many bodies to transport in the van. Amelia called to order one of the refrigerated trucks she’d had on standby since activating the mass disaster protocol, then she got to work.
Amelia started at one end of the street and Kelsey went to the other. Her first set of victims was an elderly couple in a half-demolished home who hadn’t managed to get to their basement before the tornado touched down. The woman had been struck by flying debris and the man appeared to be dead of a heart attack. They were the first fatalities that the police had discovered upon arrival, which had prompted them to call the ME’s office.
Amelia took photos and applied ID tags to the decedents’ toes—Jane and John Doe, until the police could match up the location of their bodies with the residents of the house and make a positive identification. She called a couple firefighters over to help her lift them out of the house and place them in body bags, then laid them in the shade until the refrigerated truck arrived.
She was finishing her documentation of them when she heard a low, unhappy whining that reminded her of Frannie’s Dachshund. She went carefully back into the house and followed the sound to a bedroom.
“Hey, there,” she announced herself. “It’s okay, I’m here to help.”
She looked around for the source of the noise, musing while she did that for the second time in a couple of hours, she’d promised that everything was okay when it definitely wasn’t.
She crouched down and found a terrified but otherwise unharmed beagle under the bed. “Hi, baby. You gotta come here now, okay?”
His humans were gone, and Amelia found her vision misting over. How many fatality cases had she worked on in the past decade? And yet animals never failed to tug on her heartstrings. She could never be a veterinarian or she’d cry every day.
It was a challenge to get the beagle out from its hiding spot, but finally she managed. She quickly wiped her cheeks on her sleeve, then carried it out of the house and passed it off to the nearest cop she saw. “Found this little guy in there,” she told the cop. “Owners are dead—see if you can find next of kin to look after him?”
“Umm, sure,” the cop said, looking uncertain.
Amelia didn’t wait around to find out the dog’s fate. There were a lot of people who needed her, even if they were dead. Plus, her walkie-talkie crackled to life and Kelsey told her that she’d found more remains.
“Got a Caucasian male, looks around fifty years of age,” she said. “Puncture wound to the chest due to debris.”
Another one. Amelia shook her head, trying not to let the quickly increasing body count get to her. Sometimes, rarely, she had to dissociate from a scene and start viewing the decedents as objects to be examined rather than human beings. She thought she would be okay today, but that damn orphaned dog had gotten to her.
Now, as she responded to Kelsey then continued to the next victim on her list, she thought about how arbitrary death could be.
All these people were just living their lives a few hours ago, completely oblivious to the fact that they would soon be over. Amelia herself had started her day worrying about the entirely trivial possibility of getting wet on her way to work—
An impossibly young firefighter whipped around the corner of a house and slammed into Amelia so hard it knocked the wind out of her, to say nothing of disrupting her thoughts.
“Oops, sorry!” he said, then continued on his way.
Amelia took another step and two more firefighters came around the corner. This time she flattened herself against the house to avoid being bulldozed.
Then, just as she was peeling herself off the wall, a fourth one appeared, calmer and more controlled. She looked older than the other three, but probably about ten years younger than Amelia, in her early thirties by the looks of it. And she had the most gorgeous hazel eyes and a delicate, upturned nose.
She brushed her gloved hand over Amelia’s arm as she gracefully avoided the collision.
“Excuse me,” she said, her voice low and velvety.
“That’s okay,” Amelia said. “But how many more of you are there? Maybe I should find another way around.”
“Did my probies nearly run into you too?” the woman asked.
Amelia smiled. “Two of them were near-collisions. The first one totaled me.”
“You don’t look totaled to me,” the woman said, her eyes momentarily flitting down to Amelia’s lips. The look sent an unexpected thrill through her. Then the spell was broken as, suddenly, the woman leaned around Amelia’s shoulder and shouted, “Larson! Did you crash into the ME?”
Amelia glanced behind herself, where the three young firefighters were standing together. The kid who’d hit-and-run on her had a sheepish look on his face.
“Sorry,” he said. “I was in a rush.”
“We all are,” the woman said. “Let’s try not to create any more injuries than the tornado already has.”
He gave her a hangdog look, then she turned back to Amelia. “Sorry. It’s their first day and they’re practically feral.”
Amelia laughed. “It’s not that big a deal.”
Then she caught herself smiling and got serious again. For a second, she’d forgotten her surroundings, forgotten the enormity of the situation and how many lives had been lost, how many homes destroyed. When was the last time a woman had that much power over her, and all within thirty seconds of meeting?
The woman took her glove off and held out her hand. “Lieutenant Simone Olivier.”
Her name was like a song, exotic and beautiful, and Amelia felt a spark as she took Simone’s hand.
Simone’s lips curled into a wry smile when she felt it too.
“Sorry, these damn gloves,” she said, but Amelia was pretty sure that static electricity only accounted for a small portion of what she’d just felt.
She cleared her throat, realizing she hadn’t introduced herself yet. “I’m Dr. Amelia Trace.”
“I know,” Simone said, that smile still on her lips like there was a secret only the two of them knew. Amelia could feel it in her belly, her core growing hot the longer she looked into those wide, warm eyes.
Stop, she begged herself.
Then Simone’s fingers slid out of Amelia’s and she worked her hand back into her glove.
“Gotta go corral the puppies before they get up to dickens,” she said, and then she was gone and Amelia temporarily forgot what the heck she’d been doing, where the hell she was going.
She permitted herself just a few seconds longer to watch Simone rallying her recruits and coordinating them. They were searching the structurally sound houses. Amelia had a surprisingly difficult time tearing her eyes away from Simone.
She hadn’t woken up today expecting a mass disaster, but at least she had a plan in place for that. There were binders and resource lists and annual trainings for that. But the gorgeous, subtly flirtatious firefighter she’d just met? Amelia had no contingency plan for Simone.
4
Simone
“Hey, I’ve got more survivors over here!” Carter called.
Simone’s attention immediately snapped away from the ME, who she’d been watching out of the corner of her eye. She and the probies were shoring up a partially downed wall to make sure none of the first responders got hurt, but she pulled them away from it now.
“Go, go,” she ordered, pointing them to the house Carter had shouted from. “All hands on deck.”
The four of them ran across the street, along with everyone else within earshot. That included Dr. Amelia Trace, but for the moment, Simone had to shut Amelia and her golden hair out of her head. They had pressing work to do.
“What have we got?” she asked Carter.
The faint shouts coming from deep within the house were answer enough. There had to be at least five voices, maybe more, and shit, they sounded young.
“I was testing the structure when I heard them,” Carter said. “Tornado ripped away the whole north side of the house—we’ve got to get them out fast before the rest of it comes down.”
“Okay,” Simone said, her mind racing. She ran through a quick mental list of all the things they needed to do, then she started barking orders. Everything happened in a high-adrenaline blur, and the probies seemed to sense the importance of the task because they actually did as she asked without question or screw-up.
Maybe they had some potential after all.
It took about ten minutes to temporarily support the house, then clear a path to the partially obliterated basement stairs. It was a risk—the whole structure was compromised and even with the additional support, it could collapse any minute. But there were civilians down there and this was what firefighters did—they put the community ahead of themselves.
When the first survivor emerged from the basement, his arm slung over Carter’s shoulder for support, Simone shouted, “We need medics over here!”
There were already a few standing by and they sprang into action.
Simone’s crew pulled five teenage boys out of the basement, along with a woman who said she was the mother of one of them. All six had escaped fatal injury, but a couple of them had pretty serious wounds. Not everyone in the house had been so lucky, though.
“We need the ME,” Simone said when she emerged from the basement with Velez, carrying the first corpse between them. This time she wasn’t nearly so loud, resignation weighing down her voice.
The victim was another teenaged boy, and one of the survivors let out a strangled cry when he spotted him.
“Henry,” he said, and the paramedics had to wrestle him back onto the back of their ambulance so they could continue treating a deep cut on his leg.
“What should we do with… Henry?” Velez asked Simone. She was carrying his feet while Simone held the dead boy beneath his arms.
“Lay him on the ground and cover him,” Amelia instructed.
“Far enough away from the house in case it collapses,” Simone added, nodding where she wanted Velez to walk.
Her crew pulled another teenage boy out of the house—they were both dead from apparent crushing injuries, and Dr. Trace began documenting the scene.
“We found them both under a collapsed pool table,” Simone told her. “Looked like they were trying to seek shelter, but those tables are heavy.”
The adult woman, standing near the boy with the leg injury, started sobbing. “Noah was having a sleepover, you know, to celebrate the start of summer vacation. And now those boys are dead… because of my pool table…”
“Because of the tornado, ma’am,” Simone said. “This isn’t your fault.”
“Elizabeth, please,” she said. “Ma’am was my mother.”
Her attempt at humor fell flat, just like the words themselves. She was running on autopilot and was probably in shock. She didn’t appear to be wounded, but just to be safe, she would doubtless get checked out by the medics.
“Is he your son?” Simone asked, nodding to the boy in the ambulance.
Elizabeth nodded. “Noah.” Then she pointed to the two dead boys. “That’s Henry Felton, and Riley Poole. Oh God, who’s going to tell their parents?”
“An officer will do that,” Simone assured her.
Then Noah sat up taller, on full alert and once again disrupting the paramedics’ attempts to stop the bleeding on his leg. “Wait, who’s that?”
Everybody’s eyes went back to the house, where Larson and Williams were carrying out another body. This one was female, also young.
Elizabeth furrowed her brow. “I have no idea.”
“She wasn’t with you in the house?” Simone asked.
Elizabeth shook her head. “It was just me and the boys. Noah and his friends. My husband had already left for work when the siren sounded.”
Simone looked around at the surviving teenagers. Besides Noah, one other boy was receiving medical treatment, and the other three sat on the grass, looking shaken. They didn’t look guilty, but Simone asked, just to be sure, “None of you snuck a girl into the house?”
They all shook their heads, and Elizabeth answered for them. “They’re good boys.”
Noah added, “I’ve never seen that girl before.”
“Maybe she was in the neighborhood when the tornado hit,” Velez suggested. “She could have been seeking shelter and yours was the nearest house.”
“I don’t see how that’s possible,” Elizabeth said. “This is a safe neighborhood, but we always lock our doors.”
“You’re sure you found her in the basement?” Amelia asked Williams and Larson. It was a little hard to tell, with half of the first floor in shambles.
But they nodded, confident. “Yeah, with the others.”
Well, it wasn’t like the middle of a tornado was a calm place to be, where you had plenty of time to observe your surroundings. Anything could have happened while Elizabeth and the boys were seeking shelter in the basement. Maybe the girl broke a window to get in—it wasn’t like anyone would be able to tell now.
“We’ve got to take him to the hospital now,” one of the paramedics said, gesturing to Noah. “He needs stitches, and probably some blood.”
“I’m going with you,” Elizabeth said, already climbing into the ambulance.
“I’m fine, Mom,” Noah tried to reassure her, but she gave him a stern look.
“You’re not fine. Didn’t you just hear that man say you need stitches?”
The kid managed to roll his eyes for the benefit of his friends in true teenager fashion, then somebody pulled the door shut and the engine started. At most other scenes, the ambulance would be out of here by now, maybe even with the sirens wailing. But the road had only been partially cleared of debris, so both ambulances formed a slow-moving caravan picking their way carefully through the neighborhood.
The police gathered the three uninjured boys and took them away to reunite them with their parents.
Then Simone turned to Amelia. “So, what happens next for them?”
She gestured to the three bodies they’d pulled out of the house. It was an unfortunate reality of the job that she’d encountered her fair share of bodies, but she wasn’t used to s
ticking around. Firefighters were usually the first in and the first out, always moving on to the next emergency. But today was different.
Today, everybody was a little lost, just trying to be useful.
“I called for a refrigerated truck when I saw how many bodies there were,” Amelia said. “It should be arriving any minute.”
A chill ran up the back of Simone’s neck, setting the fine hairs on end. It was the same feeling she got whenever she heard an emergency siren—an injection of adrenaline and déjà vu that brought her back to all the people she hadn’t been able to help over the course of her career.
She shoved it aside as always and asked, “That bad, huh?”
Amelia nodded. “We could only transport one at a time in the van anyway, but we only typically have around twenty cases at a time. This neighborhood’s casualties alone would stress our resources, and then you have to add in all the other areas of the city that have been affected.”
“Depressing,” Simone said.
“Sorry,” Amelia answered.
Simone shrugged. “Nobody’s fault. It’s just a shitty day is all.”
Still, she didn’t envy the medical examiner’s job. Running into a burning building to rescue someone was one thing. All you had to do was turn off the part of your brain responsible for self-preservation and do whatever it took to make the save. Cataloging, identifying and autopsying enough bodies that a refrigerated truck is necessary, on the other hand… Simone had no clue what part of your brain you had to turn off to get through something like that.
One thing was for sure—Amelia Trace was one badass woman if she could handle that.
“Oh my God, my house!”
They were interrupted by a man sprinting up the sidewalk, making a beeline for them.
“Sir, you can’t go in there,” Simone said. “It isn’t safe.”
“My wife!” he shouted. “My son! They were home, I’ve been trying to call and I can’t get through. This damn neighborhood always has had shit reception!”