The whole street shook as the car’s gas tank exploded. The few windows that had survived, shattered. My head throbbed and my lungs ached as the pressure wave hit us. Beckett screamed beneath me.
The shooting stopped.
For a few moments I just lay there, stunned. All I could hear was a ringing in my ears and my vision was blurry. When I got my senses back, I quickly rolled off Beckett and flipped her face-up, my heart racing. “Beckett?” What if she’d caught a piece of shrapnel from the explosion? “Beckett?”
She opened her eyes. I patted her down, looking for injuries, but she was fine, just dazed. I pulled her to her feet and then wrapped her up in a hug, lifting her right off the ground. She nestled her head into my shoulder. I closed my eyes, panting in relief. If anything had happened to her….
“Oh my God,” whispered Beckett. She was looking over my shoulder.
I slowly opened my eyes and looked around.
Main Street lay in ruins. Every window was shattered, bullet holes riddled the signs and the car that had exploded was on fire, sending thick black smoke twisting down the street in choking clouds. Four of the gunmen were down and the cops were scrambling to get cuffs on them. The rest were disappearing into an alley. As I watched, Colt grabbed hold of Seth and dragged him roughly away from Taylor, then ran with him into the alley. Seth looked forlornly back at Taylor as they were torn apart and she stared back at him, tearful and accusing. How could you do this?
The injured lay everywhere: cops, civilians, gunmen. The family who’d been sitting next to us outside the cafe must have tried to make a run for it, because the father was bleeding from his chest, the mother from her arm. People inside the cafe were screaming, begging for help, one woman stretched out on the counter as a man tried to stop her bleeding.
Earl lay on the ground, the front of his uniform soaked in blood. Lloyd was kneeling next to him, tears running down his cheeks. The gunman in the tan jacket was rolling on the ground next to the burning car in agony, his hands over his eyes.
And more. So many more. My training kicked in. We needed to declare a major incident, call local hospitals, have them send extra ambulances and doctors—
Then I remembered and my throat closed up. We didn’t have any of that backup. We didn’t even have our normal roster of staff.
I looked around and met Beckett’s eyes. Then Taylor’s.
All we had was the three of us.
I took a deep breath and we ran into the chaos.
39
Amy
THIS CAN’T be real. The town I knew so well was barely recognizable. With every step, my sneakers crunched broken glass and kicked tinkling shell casings. Everywhere I looked, another person lay bleeding, the snow stained red around them. And the ones out here were only the beginning. The store fronts were gaping black maws lined with jagged teeth. I couldn’t see who was screaming inside and part of me didn’t want to.
We stopped next to Taylor, who looked as shell-shocked as me. “I just….” Her face was as pale as the snow. “I just came out to get coffee—”
Corrigan pulled her into a hug. Even as he patted her back, he was looking around at the injured, deciding priorities. How is he unaffected? I was freaking out.
Then I got a look at his expression. He wasn’t unaffected. He was just used to this sort of horror.
He gave Taylor ten seconds, then gently pushed her back. “I’ll be in there,” he told us, pointing to the cafe. It looked like hell in there: all I could see was the silhouettes of bodies crammed together, people panicking and screaming and struggling to get out.
It made sense: the cafe needed someone who was big enough to push through the crowd, who wouldn’t get trampled. But I didn’t want to be left out here. The ER was bad enough, but this was something else entirely. Twenty or more people were yelling for help. Some of them would die before I could help them. Some of them would die before I could even reach them. I was shaking. I couldn’t stop shaking.
Corrigan took hold of my shoulders. “Amy. You’ll be okay.”
I shook my head, gazing around me in disbelief. People I knew, dying. Stores I visited every day, destroyed. “I—” I choked helplessly. My head went light.
“Beckett,” he snapped.
I came back to him.
He looked deep into my eyes. “You can do this,” he told me. There was absolutely no doubt in his voice. “You’re just scared. It’s okay to be scared. But you can do this.”
My heart was still hammering so hard it was painful but his words unfroze me. I drew in a shuddering breath and clung onto those words like a life preserver. Then I nodded.
And he was gone, sprinting off towards the cafe.
I turned around. Everywhere I looked, someone was screaming for help. Who do I help first? Who do I leave to die? I felt the panic rising again.
It’s okay to be scared. You can do this.
Taylor was frozen, too. She stared at me, her eyes huge. I had to get her moving and I couldn’t even get myself moving.
“Earl,” I told her, pointing to the fallen cop. “Help Earl.”
“I’m just a student!” she whispered, tears in her eyes.
I grabbed her hands and squeezed. “Not today.”
Then I ran to the man who’d been sitting with his family, eating breakfast next to us. He was on his back, hands clutched to a wound on his chest. His wife was sprawled next to him, bleeding from her arm, trying to comfort her kids. When I checked over my shoulder, Taylor was still standing there...but then she nodded to me and ran to Earl.
I fell to my knees beside the man. Blood was pumping between his fingers. It was so bitterly cold, I could see steam rising from the wound. “It’s okay,” I said out loud. “I’m a doctor.”
The woman touched my arm in thanks. She’d thought I’d been reassuring them.
I tore away the man’s shirt and reached for—
I blinked. What the hell am I going to use? I didn’t even have a first aid kit with me!
I pressed on the wound while I thought. The bleeding barely slowed.
“Is he going to be okay?” sobbed the wife. The children were crying too. I was a hair’s breadth from joining them.
What would Corrigan do?
I looked around and found one of the walking wounded, a bald man with a gash on his cheek. “You! I need your help!” He came over. “Run to the hardware store and get me all the dishtowels they have. And a knife, I need a small, sharp knife.” He hurried off. I found another person, a woman in her sixties. “And you: I need you to go into the stationary store and get me bulldog clips. The smallest ones you can find.” She ran.
While we were waiting, I told the man’s wife to show me her arm. “You’ll be okay,” I told her. “The bullet went straight through. Keep pressure on it.” Any other time, she would have been rushed to hospital. Only in this hell could a bullet wound be minor.
The supplies began to arrive and I started frantically treating people, using dishtowels as bandages and bulldog clips to clamp arteries. The father looked like he’d make it. The store owner I treated next was touch-and-go: he’d been shot in the leg and had lost a lot of blood. Then a teenage girl who’d been hit in the neck by flying glass. She was shaking with cold and shock and I realized I was still wearing my thick winter coat, so I pulled it off and wrapped it around her. One man had been thrown against a truck by the force of the car exploding and was lying on the ground with a possible cervical spine fracture. I didn’t have a neck brace to put on him so I mounded snow up all around his neck and packed it in tight to immobilize him.
I wish Corrigan was here. I felt stupid thinking it because I knew he was going through hell himself, trying to save lives in that dim, cramped cafe, patching wounds in freakin’ candlelight. And I felt guilty because who cared if I was upset and panicking, when people were fighting for their lives all around me? But I did want him. It didn’t matter that I was a surgeon, I was still human and part of me just wanted to cling to him and cr
y my eyes out.
But they needed me. So I kept going. Why aren’t the ambulances here yet, I wondered.
Then it hit me. Oh Jesus: nobody’s called it in! We’d come to rely on people using their cell phones: after any shooting, a whole flood of people would dial 911 within minutes. But the phone lines were down. The hospital had no idea anything had happened.
I grabbed a teenage boy who’d escaped uninjured. “Run to the hospital,” I told him. “Ask for Doctor Bartell and tell him we have twenty or more wounded with at least ten criticals. Tell him to send everybody. Everybody. You got that?” He nodded and I pushed him away. “Go!”
For maybe fifteen minutes, I ran around treating everyone I could, holding the hands of the ones I couldn’t. Corrigan still hadn’t emerged from the darkness of the cafe. I wanted to check on Earl but Taylor was kneeling over him and there were too many others who needed me. Is he alive? Dead?
Vehicles started to arrive, skidding and slipping on the hard-packed snow. We’d used all our ambulances to evacuate patients when the blizzard arrived so Bartell, expert organizer that he was, had begged, borrowed or stolen anything he could: pickups, vans, SUVs, all driven by nurses. Krista led the way in a postal truck.
We got the most urgent patients loaded and I was turning from the truck when Corrigan suddenly appeared in front of me. He looked as if he’d been through a war. Like me, he’d given away his coat and his shirt had been torn to rags: I realized he must have been tearing strips off to use as bandages. His jeans were stained with blood and his eyes had the same haunted look that mine probably did. “Are you—” I began.
He grabbed me, lifted me right off my feet and folded me into his arms. He didn’t say anything for a moment, just crushed me to him. I could feel the pain throbbing out of him. We knew we had to go but this couldn’t wait. I didn’t know what he’d seen in that cafe, maybe I never would. I just knew he needed me to make it okay again, just as I needed him. He buried his lips in my hair and laid a trail of kisses down my scalp, kissing me to make sure I was still real. His chest pressed into me, heaving with emotion. “Sorry,” he muttered. “Just….”
I nodded frantically. “I’m the same.”
He pushed back from me and cupped my cheek, his hand wonderfully warm against my skin. There was shock in his eyes, even though this sort of hell wasn’t new to him. Since he lost his wife he’d been in all sorts of disaster zones and war-torn cities. What was new to him, I realized, was having someone to come back to. A big, hot swell of sympathy hit me. He’s had to go through this so many times on his own….
He bent down and kissed me, slowly tasting me and then drawing me in. The pleasure and happiness rolled down my body in a slow wave, making all the horror drop back. I put my hand on his arm and I could feel his body relaxing, too.
We allowed ourselves that one, slow kiss and then jumped into the front of the truck with Krista. We’d done what we could here. Now we had to get the injured back to the hospital. My stomach twisted as I saw the convoy of vehicles behind us in the wing mirror. How are we going to cope with this many patients? Corrigan was sitting next to me and I squeezed his hand in fear. He nodded: he was thinking the same thing.
The ER was about to be utterly overloaded.
40
Amy
I’VE ALWAYS BEEN SCARED of the ER. But I’ve always been a little in awe of it and the people who work there, too. It’s loud and it’s chaotic and things move too fast, but those things are also strengths: I always felt like the ER was crazy enough, fast-moving enough, to cope with anything.
But it couldn’t cope with this.
When the fourth critical case was wheeled in, you could feel the panic in the air. By the time we’d reached the seventh, the place was in uproar and there were still three more outside. We would have been swamped even with our full staff.
What made it worse was the mix of patients. Some of them were gunmen, handcuffed to gurneys. Some were cops, still with loaded guns. Both had seen their friends killed by the other side. Then there were civilians who’d all been shot or injured by one side or the other. Some were crying, some were threatening, everyone was yelling. It was my own personal hell, a crowded, deafening pressure cooker that could explode at any time.
Corrigan caught my gaze from across the room and nodded at me. You can do this.
I took a deep breath and kept going.
Within a half hour, though, Taylor, Corrigan and I were all stretched to breaking point. We were trying to take the most urgent cases first, but we had to keep swapping as more patients crashed and threatened to bleed out. We were panting, desperate, trying to hold it all in our heads at once: this guy needs to be intubated now, this one needs a chest tube, this one’s vitals are failing. Even Corrigan started to lose his cool. There were just too many—
“The hell with this,” said Bartell suddenly. He’d been standing in the center of the room, keeping an eye on things, but now he marched into his office. Through the open door, I saw him wrench off his tie and toss it aside, then pull something out of the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet. When he marched back in, he was shaking out a crumpled, decade-old white coat. We all stood there open-mouthed as he pulled it on.
“I was a doctor, you know.” He indicated his suit. “Before all this bullshit. Now: what have we got?”
And he pulled on some gloves and started saving lives with the rest of us.
My next patient was Earl. He’d taken two bullets to the chest, one missing his heart by about a millimeter and one nicking a lung. Taylor had done her best to stabilize him in the street, but he’d lost a lot of blood. Maggie was right beside him, her eyes red from crying. There wasn’t really room for visitors, but from the look in her eyes, no one was going to make her move. Lying handcuffed to a gurney next to Earl was one of the gunmen. He’d only been shot in the leg, but he’d lost more blood and his pressure was dangerously low. “Get another bag of O-neg into both of them,” I told Krista.
Lloyd suddenly got in my face. He’d taken some shrapnel in the arm and was walking around the ER hooked up to a drip, jacked up on adrenaline, shock and guilt. “Why are you treating him?” he snapped at me, pointing to the gunman.
Corrigan stepped protectively in front of me, hands up to placate him. “We’re treating everybody!”
“This is bullshit!” yelled Lloyd.
Krista appeared from behind me and I sighed in relief. I turned to take the bags of blood—
She was only holding one.
I took it but frowned at her. “Thanks, but we need two.”
She was white-faced. “That’s the last one.”
What? I shook my head. “No it isn’t. It can’t be, we always keep at least ten bags on hand.”
Bartell overheard that. He turned from his patient, saw the bag I was holding and looked ill. The whole ER quietened down as he pressed a hand to his forehead and wiped it down his clammy face.
“It’s my fault,” he said. “We were due a delivery. The truck was on its way from Denver when the blizzard warning came. I completely forgot.”
“That’s it?” I asked in a small voice. “That’s our last bag?”
He silently nodded. As administrator, organizing things was his job. He looked not just humiliated but crushed at having overlooked something as basic as blood.
To my amazement, Corrigan stepped up and put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s not your fault, mate. None of us are at our best.”
Bartell gave him a stern look, unsure if he was being sarcastic, but Corrigan’s expression was completely sincere. Bartell nodded and sighed, accepting the olive branch.
“Okay,” said Corrigan. “This is what we’re going to do. Maggie?” She looked up, still red-eyed. “I need you to go into town and get everybody who’s not injured and get them here, now, donating blood.” She started to argue but he cut her off, nodding at Earl. “Maggie, this is the best thing you can do for him, okay? I need you to do it because I trust you to get it done.”
>
Maggie blinked uncertainly, then nodded. She planted a kiss on Earl’s cheek and marched out into the street.
When I looked round, Corrigan was looking at me. No: everyone was looking at me. Corrigan’s eyes were full of pity. I didn’t understand at first. Then I realized I was still holding the last bag of blood. It would be close to an hour at the earliest before we could get the first donated blood. Both Earl and the gunman needed a transfusion now.
Oh crap. What do I do?
Corrigan stepped forward but I put my hand up to stop him. However tempting it was to huddle behind him, Earl was my patient. It was my responsibility. I took a deep breath. “We’re giving this bag to him,” I told everyone. And nodded at the gunman.
Lloyd muscled forward. “ARE YOU KIDDING ME?” He was shaking with anger. He pointed to his mentor and looked around the room for support. “It’s Earl!”
There was a low rumble of agreement from the rest of the ER. Staff, townsfolk... everyone loved Earl.
Every cell in my body screamed at me to back down. A week before, I would have done. But I stood my ground and looked Lloyd in the eye. “Earl can have the very first bag of donated O-neg we get,” I told him. “But this guy needs the blood more.”
Lloyd stared at me. I stared right back. I could feel Corrigan’s eyes on me, willing me on.
Lloyd dropped his eyes and stalked off, cursing. I let out a long breath and handed the bag of blood to Krista to hook up. “I’m sorry,” I told Earl.
He weakly shook his head. “I trust you, doc.”
Those four words sent me close to tears. What if I’m wrong? What if I just saved some scumbag and killed Earl? Unable to speak, I patted his shoulder.
To my surprise, he gripped my wrist and pulled me close. Corrigan frowned and came over as well.
“I gotta tell you something,” said Earl. “In case….”
“You’re going to be just fine!” I told him sternly, not liking where that thought was going.
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