by Dario Solera
She sniffled a little, gulped down the last of her cappuccino, and then stood. “It’s late.”
Four
Marie disappeared behind a double door, which flapped shut lazily. Alone and impaired, she would make it, but with what kind of life in front of her?
With hands on her hips, Léa stared at the tiled floor between her and the door, trying to ignore the bustle in the hospital and the cries of people coming from everywhere. Wounded, mostly, but also parents who had lost their children, or children without their parents. Turning back toward the other side of the corridor, she had a good view of the emergency hall.
Stretchers and wheeled beds filled every corner. Used utensils and bandages lay on the floor near overflowing yellow biohazard waste bins. Blood had pooled beneath some gurneys, with a few crimson footprints nearby.
The wounded were too many. They were left dying alone—even triage had failed. The first had arrived only a few hours ago, with simple injuries like sprained ankles, bruises, and first-degree burns. But then, when the hospital staff had set up a good pace and were treating patients fast, the worst had started coming.
“Dr. Bosshart!” someone called from the entrance of the triage room.
She jogged there, putting a new pair of latex gloves on.
“He’s bad,” the paramedic said, “but still alive.”
Blood seeped from a wound on the face of what appeared to be a five-year-old boy. His left cheekbone was exposed and his lips were broken, with teeth missing. A bloodied plastic tube protruded from his mouth and went to the ventilator. More blood peeked from below the thermal cover he had on the rest of his body. His shape was minuscule on the large ambulance stretcher.
Léa removed the blanket.
“He’s lost his legs,” the paramedic said, almost without breath, while continuing to pump air through the lungs of the boy.
Everything spun around her. Voices dwindled off and her ears rang a little. Her vision blurred, and gravity forced Léa on her knees, with her hands clinging onto the stretcher.
Her body weighed a million tons.
A tingling sensation made its way into her limbs as she tried to take deep breaths to shake it off. The boy needed her help, and she ought to care for him.
She almost passed out, but gradually, with each lungful of air, her vision cleared and she could feel again.
Cold sweat droplets had collected on her forehead and neck. She wiped them off with the sleeve of her light-blue coat and rose to her feet.
“Are you OK?”
With her legs still quivering a little, Léa spoke with a feeble voice. “Yes. Call for help.”
“We need support here!” the paramedic yelled. The power of his voice surprised Léa, its shock wave almost knocking her off balance.
Another doctor approached and inspected the unconscious boy for a moment. “We don’t have any blood left.”
Her eyes were lost in the background. It had always been just a matter of time, and that was it. They were done, and they could very well shut the doors and go home.
“Did you hear me? He’s dead without a transfusion.”
“Yes. I heard you.”
And the doctor was gone, off to tend to some other wreck of a human body.
Léa sent the others away and pushed the stretcher into a corner, working her way through the mess, and then pulling the floor-to-ceiling white curtain shut. She sat there, watching the chest of the child rise and lower every time she squeezed and released the plastic bulb of the ventilator.
The eyes of the small boy were shut and his expression relaxed. She didn’t even know his name. She glanced at the file: Marc.
“I’m sorry, Marc,” she whispered.
Blood had stopped spreading under his legs. His veins were empty. She grabbed a green towel from the nearby tool cart and lay it over stumps and belly, smoothing it and tucking it below his arms. Two brown stains appeared at the bottom.
His chest raised and lowered. The carotid on the neck of the boy pulsated every second, only slightly visible beneath the skin.
Her left hand held his. It was tiny and soft, but cold and lifeless.
Minutes, hours. She couldn’t tell how much time had passed. Her right hand ached, but she ignored the pain and kept squeezing the ventilator, just noticing the slippery sensation of her gloved fingers on the gummy device.
Slower pulsations rippled the skin on Marc’s neck now, and the throb was almost imperceptible.
Keep ventilating, keep going, she thought, until the pulsation stopped. Her hand moved up to the boy’s wrist, feeling for a pulse, but there was none.
It was as though a dam had crumbled inside her eyes, flooding the valley below with unstoppable rage.
Patients screamed on the other side of the curtain. Doctors yelled orders.
Léa stood and walked to the exit. She heard her name called by a woman’s voice, but she ignored it and pushed on, her legs made of lead, each step costing her infinite effort.
She stepped between the wounded waiting to be allowed in from triage. Some of them were immobile, eyelids parted and eyes staring at the ceiling. She continued to walk toward the glass sliding doors, locked open long ago to let paramedics in faster.
Outside, the snow falling from the grey sky pierced the skin on her face. She ventured a few steps into the narrow driveway where ambulances would approach triage in reverse.
With her eyes closed, she screamed with all the power she had in her lungs. She yelled at no one and at everyone, at the enemy and at the army. Her bellow resounded against the walls of the nearby buildings.
Empty, devoid of breath and energy and will, she fell to her knees, without minding her clothes getting soaked with freezing, filthy water.
Around her, Geneva was burning. Dark plumes of smoke raised and twisted in the air, turned orange by the raging flames.
Five
“Look,” Will said, “I didn’t want to cause you any of this.” He walked fast behind her, fumbling with a sleeve of his coat.
“Not your fault. Don’t worry.” She sent him a smile, enjoying the chilling sensation of the outside air. “I’m serious.”
“Right.”
“You may call this unfinished business.”
For a time they kept a brisk pace toward the campus without speaking. Sarah watched the pavement in front of her, observing footprints in the snow and avoiding them, as if they were artwork with a right to exist on their own.
Her father used to paint. Well, before arthritis took control of his hands. Back home they had the attic full of the many landscapes he had produced, somewhat impressionist, full of joy, and beautiful. He had never visited any of the places he used to paint, and some of them he pulled straight out of his imagination.
“They’re just not original enough,” he always said when his wife or Sarah tried to convince him to sell some of his works. He could have made some money, though, her mother was sure of that. Between the two of them, she was the one more bound to earthly reality. She ran the house and the family, and although he was the breadwinner with his job at the bank, he wouldn’t be able to manage finances.
“Where are we going, by the way?” Will asked.
She snickered. “I am going to work. I don’t know where you are going.”
“Of course,” he said. “Right. Um…”
“You can’t come with me.”
“I guessed that.”
“Look, you have the keys to my apartment. Have a tour of the city. It’s nice. I’ll be back by around seven.”
“That’s fine. May I walk with you to the lab?”
“Sure.”
“So, I didn’t exactly get what it is that you do in there.”
“In short, I spend six months in front of a computer trying to build a model of some kind of interesting subatomic particle, one day running an experiment with the accelerator, and then another six months on the computer.”
Will laughed. “Yeah, you told me that yesterday. It’s a li
ttle vague, isn’t it?”
She glanced at him sideways. “We’re working on this particle called the Higgs boson. It’s very special. Do you remember all the fuss about it?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Come on! The God particle.”
“Oh, yes. Of course.”
“Good. So we have discovered that it exists and that the standard model is correct, right? Well, now we are trying to use that and other subatomic particles to find out if dark matter exists, and if it can be created from regular matter.”
“Interesting.”
“You don’t understand, do you?”
“Not even a word,” he said with a laugh.
“The problem is that time’s up. I’m at my destination,” she said, pointing at the campus entrance.
“Your work, what is it useful for?”
“Do you ever look up at the sky at night and wonder what all that black is?”
“It’s void. Vacuum.”
Sarah grinned. “Oh, quite the contrary.” As she turned and resumed walking toward the gate, something screamed in the air.
It was a distant, muffled whine that resounded in the streets. In a few moments, it was loud enough that people started searching the sky with their gaze.
A regular vibration broke the low tone of the noise.
“What’s that?” Will said.
She scanned the sky.
Groups of two or three people talked in the street, but the noise covered their voices, its pitch slowly becoming higher.
With eyes locked onto the grey clouds, Sarah walked closer to him. Judging the source of the sound was impossible. It just sounded like it was generating all around them and coming right out of the very air.
The low buildings left ample perspective of the sky and the mountains, but nothing obvious was visible in any direction.
Suddenly, with a bang so loud that it made people scream in fright, a large, greyish object flew by above them so fast that it covered their entire field of view in a second. A trail of dark smoke marked its path from north to south.
Sarah followed it with her gaze. “What the hell was that?”
“A fucking airplane,” Will yelled. “A fighter jet!”
Just where the line of fumes led to, a flash erupted in the distance. Two seconds later, the blast hit them, the ground, and the buildings, shattering the showcase window of a nearby bookstore to bits.
She felt the shock wave through her body, right into her bones, and she crouched, covering her ears. Time slowed to a crawl, and the noise of the explosion never seemed to recede. She was thoughtless. She had transformed into an animal, just fear and instinct in her brain, clogging her mind and slamming her to the ground, forcing her to fight with herself on whether to remain there, as low as possible, or run for her life.
But the noise stopped. People fell wordless, and the streets were silent except for the cacophony of a thousand car alarms going off.
“Fuck,” Will said with both his hands on his head. “It crashed! It went down!”
As Sarah stood, her heart raced so fast that it worried her. She was shaking and she felt cold.
“It can’t be farther than three or four blocks,” he said.
A black column of smoke mushroomed into the sky.
“Everybody OK?” someone yelled.
Police sirens ran somewhere between the city’s buildings.
“Hey,” Will said as he saw her. “Are you OK?”
She stared at him.
“It’s fine. It’s over now.”
“OK,” she said with a broken voice.
He put an arm around her shoulders. “Why don’t we sit for a moment?” He guided her stiff body to a bench on the other side of the campus’s gate and sat her down. “It’s over. Try to relax.”
Becoming more aware of her surroundings, she saw people standing in the middle of the closest intersection, fifty meters down the street. Some of them were walking toward the crash site with a quick pace, others were running in other directions.
His hand massaged her back, and she registered that he was holding her left hand with his left. His touch was strong and warm.
Slowly, the tremors in her limbs subsided and her heart slowed down. “Thank you,” she said.
He offered a smile and squeezed her shoulders in his arms. “Can you walk?”
After taking a deep breath, she nodded. “You want to go there?”
“Yeah.”
“OK.”
Six
A tarp-covered military truck pulled up at the curb, where the alley to the triage room met the main street. The driver cut off the engine and jumped down, while another uniformed man joined him in front of the vehicle.
Two dozen armed soldiers got off the back of the truck.
Léa stood and watched the troops unload their supplies: military backpacks, submachine guns, and wooden crates. Their uniforms were clean, and their rifles shined in the dim light.
Driver and passenger walked toward her. “Good morning, madam,” the latter said. “I’m Lieutenant Gagnier. We’ve been tasked to build up a defense line around the perimeter of the hospital.”
His sharp jawline and shaved head gave the man a stark look, and he had only a handgun in the holster on his hip. The other soldier stood a couple steps behind him, pointing a submachine gun at the ground. On their uniforms they both had the dark green shoulder boards of the 2nd Infantry Brigade.
“Why?” Léa asked.
“Geneva is about to be evacuated.”
“What? Where to?”
“The French have helped us equip refugee camps near Lausanne and Bern, and they prepared a larger one just outside of Grenoble. We’re moving people based on residence address.”
“No, wait a minute, what about the patients?”
“We’re relocating them. Vehicles and personnel will be here as soon as we’ve taken position.”
Léa’s lips parted for a moment. She sighed and looked up at the sky, noticing that the snowfall was dwindling. “That won’t work. Many of them cannot be moved.”
“That’s why these men will remain here.” Gagnier glanced back and motioned his right hand.
The soldiers near the truck jogged forward, some disappearing inside the hospital, others installing defense posts close to the entrance.
“Do you have doctors on your staff?”
“No, madam. We’ll ask a group of you to move to the refugee camp.” He produced a sheet of paper from a breast pocket of his camo jacket. “You are?”
“Dr. Bosshart.”
The man’s eyes darted to his printed orders. “Ah, yes. Léa Bosshart. You are to be transferred.”
“But I can’t leave my patients.”
“Your colleagues will tend to them.”
“I’m staying.”
“Doctor, I am not legally entitled to force you to relocate or to do anything else. Switzerland has no martial law. But trust me, it’s better if you go. You’ll be of great help there. My list tells me you are among the best.”
“That’s not the point. I’m sure there are many valuable doctors—”
“It’s up to you. Choose wisely.”
“Sir, all men are in position,” the other soldier said.
“Good. Call the transports.”
***
Medics were bringing patients outside and loading them onto the trucks parked along the curb. Léa followed them with her gaze, spotting familiar faces every now and then. The flow of stretchers was incessant and regular, as if they were moving on a giant conveyor belt going from inside the hospital to the street and back.
Vehicles were loaded one at a time, and when full, they were sent away with an escorting armored vehicle.
“Fifteen minutes,” the driver said after listening to his radio. During operations, he had never left Lieutenant Gagnier.
“You are…” Léa began to say, but she stopped before finishing.
“What?” Gagnier asked with curiosity in his voice.<
br />
“Efficient.”
The man smiled. “It’s the first time we’ve done something like this.”
Marie passed in front of her, asleep on a stretcher. The clump of bandages at the tip of her left arm was small and stained with blood. Her hand was gone and she was alone, but at least she was alive.
Léa had only a few minutes to make a decision. Only a dozen patients would remain there, outnumbered by the squad of soldiers that would protect them. Two doctors and two nurses would have to remain, according to Gagnier’s papers.
“What’s happening, Lieutenant? Who is doing this? Why are they attacking us?”
“We don’t know. It happened so fast, and Geneva looks like the only city attacked so far. There have been hundreds of sightings all over the world, but it’s just us that had attacks.”
“They’re not terrorists are they?”
Gagnier let go a short laugh. “What’s your opinion?”
She didn’t have an answer. She hadn’t had the time to think about that, to form an idea. She had spent the last forty-eight hours awake in the hospital, suturing wounds, fixing broken bones, helping out those in need. But did it really matter who it was? “What will happen to these men?”
“They will defend the post, although we haven’t registered any new attacks in a while. We don’t expect imminent trouble.”
“That’s nice to know, but what I meant was, what are they going to do if there’s an attack?”
“They—we are going to fight to the last man.”
“It doesn’t make sense.”
“It’s our job.”
“If what I heard is true, you’re not going to stand a chance.”
The man’s jaws clenched, and he looked away.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m talking—”
“Don’t worry, Doctor,” he said, still looking at the trucks on the street.
“Thank you for your help.”
After some time, Gagnier spoke again. “What were you doing on the ground before we arrived?”
She didn’t even look at him. Stretchers flowed by in front of her with more wounded, and she wondered how all those people could have fit inside the small hospital.