“Oh-two,” she shouted.
The kid from Boston connected an oxygen bottle to the tracheal tube and let it flow.
The victim’s chest raised a little.
Kate thought maybe, held her breath for a few seconds hoping, but his busted chest contorted and collapsed. Blood flowed from the torn skin where his broken ribs protruded.
“Gentle pressure,” she whispered.
The kid from Boston grabbed a towel from the kit. He pressed it against the guy’s chest, trying to hold the ribs in place, so Kate could get him breathing, but his torso was all Jell-O and broken bones.
Oxygen filled the victim’s lungs and contorted his ribs. A large blood-blister bulged through the skin on his shattered breastbone.
Flail chest with hematoma. Kate knelt on the steel, helpless with her first responder kit. He needs a team of specialists and a thoracic surgery suite, Kate thought, as air and blood gurgled out of him.
The mechanic squatted beside her. “A shipping can weighs over two tons,” he whispered. “It took eight of us to lift the corner of it just so we could pull him out.”
Kate closed the dead man’s eyes. She gazed across the ocean and noticed a ship cruising a ways off. It looked strange riding in the Nimitz’s wake. It had spinning satellite dishes and high towers with long antennas. She wondered if the people on that ship could see the Nimitz.
* * *
In the medical department, the sheet came off the second the dead body hit the examination table.
“Owwww!” Gutierrez groaned when she pealed back his jersey and eyed bone splintering through bruised-black flesh. Her brilliant white teeth bit her lower lip.
Kate snipped the dead man’s laces and pulled off a boot.
Gutierrez bucked up and began snipping his pants.
Kate tugged at a silver Navy ring on the dead man’s left hand but his fingers were pudgy and it wouldn’t budge.
“Try this.” Gutierrez handed her a tube of petroleum jelly.
The chief medical officer, Commander Sternz, entered the room. A stout woman with a freckly, olive complexion and dark eyes, Sternz wore her black hair in a bun so tight it looked painful. A smile rarely stretched her lips and never reached her eyes.
Kate tugged at the ring and said, “A shipping container fell on him, ma’am. He died from internal bleeding before I got there.”
Sternz glanced at the caved-in chest and said, “Finish stripping this cadaver and lock it in the morgue. Meet me back here at nineteen hundred for an autopsy.” She glanced mechanically from Kate to Gutierrez. “This gives us a training opportunity,” she said. “We’ll explore his thoracic interior.” Then Sternz left the compartment, oblivious of the door banging shut behind her.
“She’s colder than this guy,” Gutierrez said.
Kate dropped the Navy ring into a Ziploc bag along with the dead man’s wallet. They slid a thick, black plastic body bag under him, folded his arms and legs inside and zipped it shut.
Kate rolled the gurney across the hall to the morgue. She typed the combination on a keypad lock. She held the door with her foot as she maneuvered the gurney into the small space.
Vertigo wiggled behind her eyeballs and her knees wobbled. She stepped forward to prevent herself from stumbling. Wondering if a rogue wave had hit the ship, she glanced at the rows of shiny stainless steel drawers.
She thought about Donna Grogan with a broken spine, fractured skull and covered with sticky maple syrup. Grogan went into the morgue, but then where’d she go, Kate wondered. And Larry Burns, the cook who died of a heart attack while pulling a tray of dinner rolls from an oven in the bakery. Somebody put him in here, just like Grogan, but where’d his body go? Kate glanced at the drawers, wondering which ones Grogan and Burns had occupied.
She positioned the gurney and prepared to put this guy, whose name she didn’t know yet, into cold storage.
* * *
Kate grew up on the beach in Ventura, California. Muscles rippled on her long arms and legs. In high school, she was fiercely competitive in volleyball and track, so dragging a 170-pound corpse from a gurney to a morgue drawer wasn’t a problem.
She grabbed the body bag, braced her legs and out of nowhere a shadow of doubt flitted across her mind: What am I doing? I should be in college!
After months at sea, these thoughts intruded several times a day. I’m filling penicillin prescriptions for sailors with the clap, when I should be in a pre-med program or at least at a Friday night keg party with friends!
“Okay, cool it,” she reminded herself that the University of California at San Diego volleyball scholarship had only covered one-third of her tuition bill. She remembered the start of every semester, standing at the financial aid window signing a student loan promissory note. She still felt the anxiety and depression that swelled in her chest after several terms; after she did the math and calculated her growing mountain of student loan debt.
One night at the library, cramming for an Anatomy exam, a panic attack hit. Owing so much to Bank of America, she feared, would prevent her from ever buying a car, a house, or having kids. Shoving the textbook aside, she tallied what she’d owe by the time she earned a medical degree. The six-figure number gnawed at her during lectures and labs. She awoke in her dorm room in the middle of the night with such dread it was difficult to breathe. I’m too young for this kind of debt, she told herself as she sank back into a troubled sleep.
A few days later, with sunlight streaming through the library windows, she was surfing the web and saw, under a banner ad for Clearasil, a picture of a female sailor dispensing a prescription over a pharmacy counter.
The next day, she rode her bike off campus to meet with a Navy recruiter.
* * *
With fists that spiked their way to a high school volleyball championship and a UC San Diego scholarship, Kate dragged the body bag onto the cold drawer.
Outside the morgue, she double-checked the lock.
In the records office, she dropped into a chair, touched color-coded menu options on a screen to open a fatality report. Reaching into the Ziploc for the dead guy’s wallet, the ring slipped around her finger. She pulled it out, examined the blue gem and read his name, Stanley Comello, inscribed inside. Her mind flashed on his chubby knuckles and out of nowhere, tears brimmed on her lower eyelids. She dropped the ring back into the bag, and opened her eyes wide and inhaled deeply through her nose to make the tears go away. In Comello’s wallet, she found his ID and glanced at his picture. At 19, he hadn’t burned off the baby fat. His chubby cheeks and toothy smile gave him a slow moving, good-natured look.
She swiped his ID and his record started downloading.
She glanced at a whiteboard where they kept track of the number of days they’d been at sea. Across the top, someone had written “DAYS ON AN INVISIBLE SHIP . . .” and below that, a big number 93 in the middle of a dark smudge where someone erased and updated the number every morning.
She remembered the ship cruising behind the Nimitz and wondered if it was the Hayward. Had it finally found them?
She filled in the fatality report and clicked save.
Before meeting Terrance McDaniels for dinner, Kate checked the lock on the morgue one last time.
#
Books by Malcolm Torres:
SAILORS TAKE WARNING
SAILORS DELIGHT
THE PIRATE, a sea story
SIXTY-FOUR DAYS, a sea story
www.malcolmtorres.com
Sixty-Four Days, A Sea Story Page 3