The man stood directly in front of Darrell, forcing him to a dead stop.
Darrell cocked his head to one side, confused, and studied the man closely.
“Are you Saint Peter?”
It was an odd question.
But not for a man who’d spent several hours convinced he was dying, and that the next face he saw would be standing at the pearly gates.
He’d bypassed confusion and gone straight to delirium.
Two days of nonstop physical activity with no water takes its toll not only on the human body but the mind as well.
A doctor would later tell him that he and Rocki were within a couple of hours of dying. Their hearts had long passed the redline point and were on the verge of giving out.
Then along came Dusty Graves and his road crew.
They’d been focusing on the ground in front of them and never saw the snow plow approaching, clearing the ash off the roadway and slinging it into the ravines below.
The headlights were visible for up to a quarter of a mile, now that the ash fall had slowed to a trickle.
Had they lifted their heads they might have thought the lights symbolized their end times, for many brought back from near death experiences talk of bright lights and the like.
These lights, though, were accompanied by a light bar, flashing amber and red lights, on top of the cab above Dusty’s head.
Although they couldn’t see him, Dusty saw them from a quarter mile away.
By the time he slowed the big plow to a stop fifty yards in front of them, everyone in the convoy behind him had been notified by radio there were survivors ahead.
They were all surprised, for Rocki and Darrell were the only signs of life they’d seen in many miles.
As surprised as they were though, they wasted no time springing into action.
In mere minutes the two were placed in the bed of a pickup, given a limited amount of water and treated for shock, and being transported at the fastest speed deemed safe toward the nearest trauma center one hundred miles away.
They were saved, thanks to God’s good grace and a man named Dusty.
Chapter 48
The rest of the day was a blur of activity for the pair.
At the Mount Kilgore Regional Medical Center they went through triage and were assessed as critical and told they were very lucky to be alive.
Virtually all the other recent arrivals suffered some type of external trauma: fractures, severe lacerations, amputations.
Although both were diagnosed as having suffered concussions, most of Rocki and Darrell’s injuries were a result of severe dehydration, exposure and exhaustion.
Rocki had swelling in the parietal lobe, in the center of her brain, and a slight bleed in the area caused concern for her doctors.
Darrell was still confused but was recovering quickly, and her surgeon considered him well enough to understand the problem.
At the same time, he took the extra effort to use layman’s terms when he could, to speak slowly, and to encourage Darrell to stop him and ask questions if there was something he didn’t understand.
“If situations were different and she’d been brought in immediately we could have removed a piece of her skull to allow for expansion.
“That would have mitigated the long term damage.
“Since that was impossible, there’s a good chance she’ll suffer some long term effects. We’ll deal with those as they come.
“Our primary concern now is the clotting.
“Her being dehydrated helped in one way and worked against her in another. Her thickened blood meant it clotted faster and easier than it would have had she been fully hydrated.
“That was a good thing, in that it helped stop the bleeding in her brain.
“But it was also a bad thing, for the thickened blood formed a clot that has been restricting blood flow to other parts of the lobe.
“Blood that the rest of the brain needed to keep from dying.”
The surgeon looked Darrell directly in the eyes.
He suspected Darrell understood, based on the tears he saw forming in his eyes.
But just to be sure, he asked.
“Are you with me so far? Am I going too fast?”
Instead Darrell asked his own question.
“How are we going to fix her?”
“Right now she’s in a medically-induced coma. We’ve removed a large piece of her skull and done a little bit of exploratory.
“We’ve removed a large blood clot and a second smaller one. The blood flow seems to have returned to the rest of the lobe, and we’re watching that to make sure it continues and keeping an eye on a certain section of brain tissue to see if it comes back.”
Darrell swallowed hard, afraid of the answer his next question might bring.
“And if it doesn’t?”
The surgeon, a man named Mike Walton, hated the next part.
He was human, just like his patients and their families. He laughed and cried like every other man on earth. He hated delivering bad news, but it was an important part of his job.
One which was best done without hesitation, without emotion…
…And without false hope.
“If the brain tissue has died, or is beyond healing, we’ll have to remove it.”
“What will that do to her?”
“Most of the function of the parietal lobe isn’t mechanical. It’s mostly sensory, in that it drives or supports the cognitive skills. The thinking part of the brain, if that’s easier for you to relate to.
“Damage to this part of the brain won’t affect her gross motor skills. It won’t prevent her from walking, or from using her hands, for example. She’ll still be able to walk, and to dress and feed herself.
“It might, however, affect what you might call her thinking and reasoning skills.
“It could affect her in a dozen different ways. Probably the worst would be her thinking skills. You said she’s a writer?”
“Yes. It’s the only thing she knows. She’s been a writer since her teen years.”
“Of course we have a lot to learn. Mapping the brain isn’t as easy as mapping a region. It’s not like saying the ability to point to the north resides in Dayton, Ohio and the ability to arrange things in alphabetical order resides in San Francisco.
“Mapping a brain is like saying the ability to point to the north resides somewhere in the Midwest and the ability to arrange things in alphabetical order resides west of the Rockies.
“Some patients suffer severe injury to the parietal lobe and we expect the worst. They come through with no damage at all, other than an occasional memory lapse.
“Others have what appears to be a minor injury and suffer a lifetime of seizures, total lapse of recall, and vision or hearing issues.
“For that reason I’m hesitant to provide you a long-term prognosis except in general terms.
“I would expect that she’ll probably have to retire from writing. She’ll probably struggle to find words that once came very easily to her.
“Also, this is the part of the brain that aligns words in a specific order so that they make sense.
“She will probably struggle when identifying nouns and verbs, adjectives and adverbs. All words might look pretty much alike to her.
“She will probably have great difficulty in forming even simple sentences.
“There’s a possibility she won’t be able to read. That even simple sentences look like alphabet soup to her. Just a jumble of nonsensical letters with no real meaning.”
It was a lot to process.
Darrell sat there looking at his hands next to her hospital bed. Even in the best of times he might not have known what to say. In his present state of confusion and weakness he was even less equipped to deal with what he was just told.
But he still had her. She’d survived.
Everything else was gravy.
The doctor rose to leave and patted him on the shoulder.
“I’ll lea
ve you two alone. We’ll talk later, when we have a better picture.”
Chapter 49
Darrell talked to Jenn and the kids the night before, just after Rocki had been rushed into surgery.
It was one of the hardest calls he ever had to make.
Oh, it started off well. Little Autumn answered the phone and squealed “It’s Grandpa, It’s Grandpa” in her little bird voice until everyone else came running.
She started bawling tears of joy, and at some point had to hand the phone to Meadow because she lost that little bird voice.
All the joy came to a very abrupt end when Meadow asked to speak to Nana and Darrell had to say, in an unmistakably sad voice, “I need to speak to your mom, honey.”
The chitlins lined up, privy to only half the conversation at that point, but hanging on Jenn’s every word and wincing at some.
“What kind of brain injury?”
“How long has she been in surgery?”
“Will she be able to recognize us?”
Each question was a stab into three tiny hearts, and by the time Jenn hung up the phone they were bawling again.
This time not from joy, but from sadness.
Darrell told Jenn not to think about coming to see their mom.
“The roads are still iffy,” he told her. “They tell me the interstates have been cleared of ash and are okay. But getting to and from the interstates is still a big problem.”
Jenn had been through enough heavy snowstorms over the years to know the drill well.
Snowplows always hit the interstates first, for that’s where most people head to get to and from work and where most of the truck traffic is. Getting the trucks moving is priority one, because they’re the life blood of America.
And, of course, because a few idle big rigs tie things up and make everybody miserable.
Once the interstates are rolling, the plows’ next priority are main thoroughfares. Then feeders.
Lastly they hit residential streets, and even those are broken down by priority, those with schools or hospitals coming first.
All other residential streets fall in a big lump called “all others.”
They’re plowed last, and sometimes not at all, for sometimes by the time their number is up the snow has melted away.
That was one of two additional problems the plow operators were having.
This time the snow wasn’t melting, for it wasn’t snow. It was ash. It would be in place for a very long time. This time the sun shining brightly overhead wasn’t their ally.
The other thing hindering the snowplows was that plowing the roads was kicking up an awful lot of ash and putting it back into the air. Where, of course, much of it was sucked into the big engines’ air intakes.
Word quickly got around the problem could be mitigated to some degree by placing a simple cotton sock over the air intake and adjusting the air mixture.
That didn’t work on all makes and models, but for the ones it worked on things got much better. The ash tended to accumulate on the sock until it got heavy, and then fell off in chunks.
The other plows had to come to a dead stop every half hour or so, so the air filters could be removed and beaten against the side of the plow to free them of accumulated ash.
It slowed down the process considerably.
FEMA was communicating with civil authorities mostly by ham radio now, and was offering advice on the fly.
“On the fly” is a kind way of saying they were making things up as they went, because the eruption caught them totally off guard.
They had absolutely no plans for recovery after a major volcanic eruption.
Oh, sure, they started working on recovery plans once scientists started talking about Yellowstone two years before.
But they were still in the “gathering good ideas” phase when the eruption came. They’d never made it to the “draft plans” phase and were a couple of years away from having working regulations and plans when the eruption occurred.
It struck most citizens as unbelievable that FEMA, the agency most responsible for the recovery, was caught with its pants down.
The administration’s response was to say, “Sorry, our bad” and to fire the FEMA administrator with a full pension.
It later came to light that the president appointed him to the position having “full confidence” in him despite the fact he had zero experience in disaster management or recovery. It turned out he was a big campaign donor and golfing buddy of the president’s.
It was just another in a long list of reasons for the American public to hate its government.
Later, much later, there would be congressional hearings into the matter, but of course no one’s head would roll. That was because the president’s party had a majority in both the house and the senate.
All guilty parties therefore had “get out of jail free” cards.
The official report would announce that “while things could have been done better, no one was deemed to be at fault.”
And things would go on as they always did in Washington. Graft and ineptitude would continue to be the order of the day.
It wasn’t FEMA who was coming up with recovery ideas; it was the municipalities. One city started collecting ash and moving it outside the city limits, where it was placed into huge piles on each side of county roads.
They shared the idea on ham radio, and other cities followed suit.
Another city started burying it in mass graves on excess city property. They took the dirt the ash displaced and started building huge mountains in city parks. In years ahead, after the “play mountains” were overgrown with grass, generations of children would play and ride their bikes up and down the mounds.
Again, other cities took the idea and ran with it.
In short, America told FEMA and the federal government to take a short trip to hell. They’d find ways to deal with the problems themselves.
Chapter 50
The internet in Little Rock was still down and would be for quite some time.
But most of the telephones were still working and Jenn wasted no time in finding the information she needed.
The roads in her community still hadn’t been plowed.
She still couldn’t get out of her driveway.
But a phone call placed to the public library, on a main feeder road a few blocks away, revealed the feeder road had been plowed and was indeed open.
Darrell had implored upon her to stay at home, and not to try to come to the hospital.
He wouldn’t even tell her where the hospital was.
But he did tell her the name.
And that was all she needed.
She put Meadow in charge of her siblings and fought her way through the ash to the Zavala Branch of the North Little Rock Library System.
Greeting her at the door was a large handmade sign:
PLEASE STOMP YOUR FEET
BEFORE ENTERING
She was surprised to find two dozen patrons in the building. She’d expected to be the only one.
Apparently people get bored when there’s no internet access and no television to watch.
“Hello,” she said to the sweet little gray-haired lady manning the information kiosk. “I’m looking for a list of hospitals by state.”
“Aisle 5, on the left side,” came the answer without the slightest bit of hesitation.
Either the sweet lady really knew her stuff, or she’d been asked the same question several times in recent days.
Sure enough, on a knee-high shelf on the left side of Aisle 5 were a group of fifty reference books with the very appropriate title:
MAJOR MEDICAL CENTERS
OF THE UNITED STATES, BY STATE
She had no clue how far her parents had gotten on their trip into Yellowstone, because Darrell refused to tell her.
But she did know the route they were taking.
Rocki told her before they left their plan was to go up through Kansas to Nebraska, then west into Wyoming.
>
She took a chance and grabbed the volume for Nebraska.
Scanning the Table of Contents, she found the hospitals and medical centers were listed in alphabetical order.
It took her no time at all to determine there was no Mount Kilgore Regional Medical Center in Nebraska.
She’d heard on the radio that the eastern half of Wyoming had been totally obliterated, and was essentially no more than a smoking hole in the ground.
She reasoned if they’d made it that far they’d have met the same fate.
They must have spent a lot of time visiting with the locals every time they stopped, as that was their nature. It may well have saved their lives by slowing them down.
If they hadn’t made it to Wyoming, and hadn’t made it through Nebraska, Jenn’s next guess was Kansas.
And sure enough, in the Kansas book, she found what she was looking for.
The Mount Kilgore Regional Medical Center was located at 4130 Mountain Valley Drive, in the town of Hays, Kansas.
She took a pen and small notepad from her purse and jotted down the address.
Her next stop was at Aisle 7, where the atlases and maps were shelved.
She smiled a smile of victory when she found that she could travel from Little Rock to Oklahoma City, through Wichita, through Salina and then to Hays, Kansas, without ever leaving the interstate highway system.
All she had to do was get out of her driveway.
Chapter 51
Jenn took after her mother more than her dad.
She was bubbly and cute and friendly beyond belief.
She was always the first to offer a really dumb joke or a shoulder to lean on.
She brought sunshine into people’s lives and smiles to their faces.
It was no surprise that everybody wanted to be her friend, for she was just that kind of person.
It was also no surprise that she knew seemingly half the people in Little Rock.
Many of them owed her favors.
Many others would grant her favors just because of who she was.
The Yellowstone Event: Book 6: The Aftermath Page 15