“Rad here.”
“It’s me.”
His voice changed dramatically, from terse and gruff to soft and rumbly. “Baby. You heard? You okay?”
“Yeah, yeah. One of my friends here is worried about her son. He works in that building. The hospital is putting together a team to go help. They need medical on site and at the hospitals. We’re leaving in an hour.”
“Hold up. You don’t leave Tulsa without me.”
That made no sense at all. “What? I don’t—what?” As the sense of his words finally dawned on her, Willa’s breath caught. “You don’t get to tell me where I can and can’t go, Rad. Don’t you dare.”
“Jesus fuck.” She could practically hear his jaw clench. “Listen to me. You don’t know where Smithers is. You don’t know if he knows where you are. You don’t know if he’s watchin’ and waitin’ for a chance. Away from home, you don’t have protection. You do not go off without me. We’re all talkin’ here about ridin’ to out to help anyway. We’ll swing by the hospital and ride along.”
He had a point; she’d be safer with him than without him. But she tried to imagine what the other nurses and the doctors would think about the Brazen Bulls riding along with their bus, and the image wasn’t pretty. “Rad…”
“I’m not arguin’ this with you, Willa. Be as strong as you need to be, but I’m stronger, and I’m goin’ with you. Can’t keep me off the road, can you?”
“You’re a stubborn asshole.”
“Bullheaded. Yep. Got a streak of it yourself. And don’t call me asshole. You know how I feel about it. Find a different insult.”
“Jerk. Butthead. Dick.” She couldn’t keep the smile from her voice.
He laughed. “And that’ll do. We’ll meet you at the hospital.”
“I guess I’ll see you then. Rad—what can you do there?”
“Muscle. We can move debris. We can keep the perimeter. We can carry—we can do what we can. We can help.”
~oOo~
Willa went home and packed a quick bag with a couple pairs of sturdy shoes, a change of clothes, and some toiletries. She played with Ollie in the back yard for a few minutes, then ran next door and asked Mrs. Abrams, a retired bus driver and counted among Ollie’s people, to watch out for him for a day or two.
Mrs. Abrams was watching the news, so Willa told her where she was going, and she got a hard hug from the sweet old lady.
“I don’t understand this world, Willa. I don’t understand at all.”
Willa didn’t understand it, either.
~oOo~
Her fellow travelers had a few raised eyebrows when a bunch of big Harleys thundered up near the bus, but no one was overly scandalized. In fact, as they got on the road, Willa heard stories from some of her colleagues about the club. Most were stories about their charity work, or about them helping out stranded motorists. A few stories were about violence. Overall, though, people sounded positive. Rad had told her more than once that the club didn’t ‘shit where they ate,’ so their reputation in Tulsa was good.
No one in the bus knew she was with Rad. She kept her private life tightly controlled and didn’t talk about it with anyone outside it. None of her work friends were close enough to be private-life friends. She had no one in Tulsa that close.
Except Rad. He’d crashed right into her private life. Not even Ollie had slowed him down.
She sat in the bus and listened to the talk around her. She thought about their destination and tried to prepare herself for the horror they’d find. And she watched Rad and his friends ride around the bus. Their escorts. Knights on shining Harleys.
~oOo~
They arrived in Oklahoma City before noon. As they entered the city limits, a leaden silence came over the bus, even before the Murrah building was visible.
Then it came into view, and the bus filled with sounds of shock and dismay. Janet screamed and buried her face in Dr. Rheingold’s chest, weeping.
When they got off the bus near the EMS command post, they all stopped and simply stared. They’d seen the images on television. They’d heard reports on the radio. But seeing the building, its remains, in actual space, its true size and scope, hearing the sounds of suffering and rescue, smelling the smells of destruction and death—it was too enormous to comprehend.
It stood there, its guts exposed from top to bottom, wires and pipes and ducts hanging out like intestines, a wide drift of rubble slanting into the street. Smoke, or dust, or both, rose up in plumes. Bright yellow spots moved across the devastated scene—rescue workers in safety gear.
“Let’s go!” Dr. Rheingold called, and Willa’s colleagues followed him to the command center. Rad and the Bulls were right behind them, and they arrived as if one team.
At the EMS post, they were told that most of the survivors were believed to have been evacuated. They were still in active search and rescue, but they were preparing to shift their efforts to recovery—which meant finding and identifying the rest of the bodies of those who had not survived.
Willa was assigned, with three of her colleagues, to the primary triage center on site. The others were dispatched to local hospitals. Rad and the Bulls were sent to talk to the Oklahoma National Guard to find out how they could help.
Rad grabbed her hand before she could follow the EMS operative to the triage site. “I don’t like this.”
“There are police and firefighters and military everywhere. I’m safe. We’re here to help. Let’s help.”
His eyes burned into hers for a moment, then he kissed her hard and let her go.
“You take care.”
“You, too. I’ll see you soon.”
~oOo~
They were moving people out of the triage center and to local hospitals as quickly as they could. But hundreds and hundreds of people had been hurt, and the center was full of suffering and the evidence of even more. A temporary morgue had been set up. Willa tried not to focus there, to focus instead on the living.
She spent the day triaging patients, tagging them as ‘red,’ ‘yellow,’ ‘green,’ or ‘white.’ Red tags meant they needed immediate, intensive assistance. Yellow-tagged patients were stable but seriously hurt. Patients with green tags were those who needed sutures or had simple fractures or mild concussions. They needed care but were in no danger of death or serious complications. White tags didn’t need a doctor. They were shaken and stressed, possibly bruised and scraped, but an ice pack and a hug would do for a prescription.
Most of the children had been evacuated quickly, first thing, and had already been dispatched to local hospitals. The triage center was mainly full of adults, and wounded were still coming in, but slowly now.
Rescue workers were arriving at the triage center, too, injured by falling or unstable debris.
As she worked, a front-line fellowship cohered among the volunteers. Most didn’t know each other, most didn’t even know names, but they watched out for each other. When a particularly devastating case came in—someone who’d had a limb amputated without anesthesia so that he could be extracted from the rubble, for instance, or a small child who’d been pulled out alive but hadn’t made it to triage—there was an almost palpable sense of unified support among the rescue workers. Strength and resilience was shared among those who helped.
Emergency medicine was always stressful. Devastating injuries happened all the time, not only when evil reared its head. Car wrecks, work injuries, gun violence—Willa had seen it all, and it had all taken its toll.
But when such pain was caused intentionally, with malice and intent, and on such a scale? How could one make sense of something so senseless?
She hated this work, important as it was. She could feel it changing her, dimming her. She’d never learned to detach from the people who were her patients, and she’d never learned to keep her back turned toward the cosmic questions such barbarity as this provoked: Why was innocent life so easily taken? And how was a mind who could take it formed? How could God sit by and let madn
ess and evil tear down this beautiful thing He’d made?
Unanswerable questions loomed in Willa’s mind and blocked out the light.
There was a little sock on the ground in the triage center. Just the tiniest sock she’d ever seen, almost as small as a doll’s. White with a touch of lace.
It had been white. Probably that morning, while she’d been straddled over Rad’s lap, or while she’d been holding Helen’s hand and exhorting her to push, a mom or a dad had pulled that little white sock with the touch of lace onto a baby girl’s foot. Getting ready for work, and getting their little girl ready for daycare. Just a normal Wednesday morning.
Now it was soaked with blood and covered in grime.
She snatched it from the ground, meaning to get it out of sight—to throw it in with the biological waste, or even into the rubble. Just away, so she couldn’t see it anymore. Her heart couldn’t take it.
One of the patients with a yellow tag, still waiting for transport to a hospital, began to seize. Willa shoved the sock into the pocket of her scrubs and hurried to help.
~oOo~
While the body of the patient who had died seizing was carried to the temporary morgue, Willa went to the bio-waste container and yanked off her bloody gloves. Needing a moment to collect herself, she stepped away and had some water and a granola bar at the little stand that had been set up to keep the rescue workers going.
As she swallowed down the water and crumpled up the paper cup, a voice behind her said, “Hey, baby. Got a minute for me?”
She turned and found Rad standing there. He was covered in grey dust—and blood coursed freely down his face, leaving red channels through the grime.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
In that unguarded moment before Rad spoke, he saw a weary, sad woman before him. Standing alone near a table that held two big barrel coolers, stacks of paper cups, a bulk carton of granola bars and a picked-over crate of fruit, Willa stared emptily into the air before her and crumpled up the paper cup in her hand.
They’d been at the site for hours; bright noon sun had given way to full dark while they’d been working, and industrial floodlights had been set up around the area. The stark beams of unfiltered white light gave a cast of unreality to the devastating scene. Were it not for the smells and sounds, and for the images careening in Rad’s brain, seeking their place among his memories, it might have seemed like they stood on the set of a science fiction film. Something post-apocalyptic.
They hadn’t found a survivor in the rubble for a couple of hours now—the last had been a young girl, mid-teens, at around dusk. But they continued to find bodies. And parts of bodies. As professional rescue teams came on scene from miles away, civilian volunteers were shifted to less dangerous work, but the site was so big, and the destruction so extreme, that they’d had need of every able body available to move debris and catalogue what was recovered and where.
Rad was sore in every joint and muscle. He was tired. He needed to close his senses down and not see or hear or smell or think for a while. And now his head throbbed angrily. He needed comfort.
“Hey, baby. Got a minute for me?”
Willa turned, her face still carved with the same weariness he felt. When she saw him, relief smoothed the exhaustion from her face for a flash, and then worry took over as she noticed that he was bleeding.
She put her hand to his face; he felt her fingers slide through the blood. Then she grabbed his head in both her hands and urged him to lean down. As she probed in his scalp for the wound, she asked, “What happened?”
“Piece of building landed on my head.”
“You weren’t wearing a hard hat?”
“I was. Got in my way, so I took it off.”
“That was stupid. You could have been killed. A nurse died today from falling debris.”
She found the wound, and he flinched as her fingers pushed at its edges. “I know. I’ve seen the error of my ways. Can you stitch me up?”
“C’mon. A doctor needs to take a look.” She took his hand, but he locked his legs in place.
“Don’t want a doctor. Want you.”
“Rad, there’s a procedure. This isn’t the clubhouse.”
“No, it’s a bombing site. Nothing normal goin’ on. I don’t want some stranger diggin’ in my head.”
With a tilt of her head, Willa gave him her narrow-eyed examination. Then her eyes opened wide, and she smiled. “You’re afraid of doctors.”
“Bullshit. I ain’t afraid of shit. I just hate ‘em gettin’ all up in my space like they do.” Hating wasn’t the same thing as being afraid.
That smile stuck to her face. Though she was mocking him, he was glad to see it; her teasing had erased the ragged dismay he’d seen before she’d known he was there.
“They can’t very well treat you from a distance. With all your scars, I know you’ve had doctors take care of you before. Griffin couldn’t have done all those sutures.”
She’d never mentioned his scars until now. “So? Don’t mean I like it.” He gave her hands a cajoling shake. “C’mon, baby. Sew me up. I only want your hands on me.”
“I can’t, Rad. Not here. There’s a procedure.”
He did not want to get shoved into some procedure just to close up a cut, and he did not want to end up as a statistic in this historical record. “Jesus fuck. Never mind. Just gimme some gauze or somethin’.”
“Why are you being such a baby? Triage has slowed way down. Just come over and let somebody take a look.”
With a grudging snort, Rad let Willa drag him into the triage area.
She sat him down on a cot and gave him a fucking green tag, and there he was. Statistic.
There were only a few people getting attention in the triage area now. All the surviving victims who needed off-site care, those who’d been rescued and those who’d made their own way out, must have been transported already. Those that remained were like him—a little dented but otherwise okay. He felt ridiculous sitting there like his stupid cut mattered in this scope of all this.
Then Willa washed his face with gauze and cool water, cleaning the blood and grime away. Her touch with those lovely, soft hands was light, and he closed his eyes. Each brush over his face seemed to erase a layer of shock from his psyche.
Rad had seen and done violent things in his life. He’d done bad things. He’d caused pain, and he’d felt pain. Blood and gore didn’t bother him. Death was nothing more than the end of a road, and in his world, violence was the fare for the ride. He didn’t relish being the agent of anybody’s end, but everybody had an end coming.
What had happened here, though—he couldn’t get his head around it. He’d never known anything like it. Delaney and Dane, veterans of Vietnam, had proceeded through the day with a grim focus on their mission. The rest of the Bulls who’d made this trip had followed their lead, but Rad had seen on the others’ faces the incomprehension he’d felt. His brain had kept trying to detach, over and over, gears grinding in his head. But there was no way to stop seeing, to stop feeling. It was everywhere.
The worst of it, for Rad, hadn’t been finding a body, or a body part. The worst of it had been finding the destroyed pieces of a normal life: A woman’s handbag. Somebody’s lunch sack. A child’s toy, completely intact and pristine, atop a mound of bloody rubble. Those were the symbols through which Rad saw the enormity of the devastation here.
A rumpled young doctor came over and checked Rad’s tag. “Let’s take a look. You weren’t wearing a hard hat?” He pressed his fingers into his sore head, and Rad fought the urge to flinch away—and to follow the flinch with a punch.
He didn’t answer the doctor’s question. Willa, who hadn’t left his side, said, “He said it fell off.”
Not strictly true, but good enough.
The doctor shined a light in his eyes. “Follow the light for me.”
Rad did what he was told. He followed the light. He said when he could see the doctor’s finger in his peripheral vision. He squee
zed the doctor’s fingers in his fists—that one, he enjoyed. The doc’s flush as Rad showed him his strength almost made all this nonsense worth it.
The doctor cleared his throat and shook out his hands. “Okay. No signs of concussion. The wound needs a few sutures. We’ll flush it out and get you sewn up right away.”
“I want her to do it.”
“Rad, shut up.”
The doctor turned to Willa. Rad didn’t like the look he gave her—in that look, the doctor said loud and clear that he thought nurses were nothing but secretaries who did bedpans. “Are you a practitioner?”
Crash (The Brazen Bulls MC Book 1) Page 16