by Lou Cadle
Chapter 5: Bash
Bash jogged across to where the green Toyota coupe was smashed into the light pole. The car was surrounded by three people, the man he’d spoken to before and a pair of frightened teenaged girls, one white, one Asian, hands gripped together. A middle-aged white woman was leaning into the driver’s side window. As he approached them, the man said, “Thank God. I think he’s pretty bad.”
“Have you tried opening the door?”
“Jammed tight from the damage,” the man said. “I think he might have panicked and accelerated into the pole. Or been speeding. I mean, look at it.” He pointed to the crushed front of the car. “They aren’t supposed to accordion like that at city speeds.”
Bash edged up to the woman, who was holding a blood-soaked rag against the man’s head. The steering wheel had pinned him upright in the seat. The driver was unconscious. He wore no seatbelt. It didn’t look good.
“I don’t think I’ve helped,” she said. “And I can feel things moving around that shouldn’t.” Her voice shook at the last phrase.
“You did great,” Bash said. “Hang on for a second.” He palpated the neck, found a thready, rapid pulse, checked the pupils, glanced at his near ear and felt around to the far one for cerbrospinal fluid. Listening for breathing, he caught a reedy sound with a hitch, totally wrong. Gentle, he palpated the chest, thinking, I need gloves, hundreds of gloves, and a stethoscope. And the jaws of life and a damned operating room for this man. But gloves would be a start.
“Did you undo his seat belt?” He nudged her hand aside and palpated the skull. Fracture, definitely.
“No, it was off already.”
Here it comes, he thought. This is the start of it, and it’s going to go on and on and on for me. I don’t want to do it, but I have to. Triage. He needed tags. Black for this guy — he was a goner. Pneumothorax, maybe injury to the pericardium or heart, and a serious head injury. This guy needed a surgeon, and fast, and an ICU. And much as they all might wish for it, that wasn’t going to happen. Bash checked his phone. No signal. No way to call for helicopter evacuation from elsewhere, even if they could get one with all the competition he knew there’d be.
“You can step back,” he said to the woman, making his voice as gentle and as kind as he could.
She pulled back a bloody hand and stared at it, a confused expression on her face. Blood was barely seeping from the wound now, the blood pressure low.
Bash sighed and patted the injured man on the shoulder. “I’m sorry, fella,” he said. He stood up and faced the four people. “He’s not going to make it.”
The man blinked at him. “What do you mean, he’s not going to make it? We’ll get an ambulance — “
“Cell phones are out,” said the white girl.
“I’ll run down to the hospital and get an ambulance,” said the man. “Should have done it before.” He shot Bash an angry look.
“There is no hospital,” said Bash.
The woman looked up from studying her bloody hand. “What?”
“It’s gone, just pile of bricks now.”
“But what about — ?” she said
“I’m sure at least half of the patients and staff are dead. Some are pinned or trapped. Some are injured. Some are — “ he was going to say, “Some are going to die waiting for help,” but he couldn’t be that blunt. He looked round the group. “I’m so sorry. Did you know him?”
They all shook their heads
“But how will people get help?” the woman asked. “Without a hospital?”
The man muttered “Fuck,” then looked at the girls and flushed.
Bash suspected the girls had heard the word before. “I’ll help. Other nurses and doctors who survived will help. We’ll save as many as we can, I promise.”
“But where?” said the woman. “Where will you help them?” She gestured to the catastrophic damage to the buildings all around them.
“That’s a great question,” he said. He glanced around. He knew about aftershocks. He could see the condition of the buildings along hospital row. The sandwich shop across the street looked intact, but that was the only building. Hmm. He could use the food in there. He needed that to become the hospital cafeteria. And if an aftershock took it down, better not to put patients in there. He looked behind him at the nearly-empty visitor lot to his workplace. He pointed at it. “There.”
“Outside?” She sounded shocked.
“It’s safest,” he said. He looked at the four of them, assessing. Then he pointed at the two girls. “You two need to check in with your mom and dad.”
The white girl cocked her head at the Asian one. “She’s an exchange student living with us, Haruka.”
“Do you speak English?” he asked the girl.
“We learn English every year in school,” she said, clearly, though with a strong accent.
“You speak it very well,” he said. “I’m sure your parents will be terribly worried about you.”
She nodded.
“Have you texted them?”
She nodded. “But it does not work.”
“It will, eventually.”
The white girl spoke again. “My mom works over in Johnstown.”
A town a dozen miles away, but up in some hills. “Ah, well, she’s probably okay then. But it might be some time before she can get back here.”
The girl nodded.
“You checked in with your families?” He aimed the question at the man and woman.
“I will. I’ll go now,” said the woman. She threw a miserable glance at the injured man inside the car.
“You did what you could,” he said. “Don’t blame yourself.”
“I’ll pray for him,” she said. “And for you.”
Bash nodded. He raised eyebrows at the man.
“I’m not from here. I’m from Marion.”
“That’s in Illinois?”
“Yeah. I fix photocopiers.”
“I’m sure your people are fine, then. Far enough from the quake.”
“Yeah, ex-wife has the kids there. But…” he gestured helplessly about him. “I can’t just leave. There’s so much to do here.”
“Are you willing to stay and do some of it?”
“Absolutely,” the man said.
“Thank you,” said Bash, meaning it from the bottom of his heart. “I need help. I need you to walk up medical row here and collect every walking medical person you find, every support person, every receptionist, everyone who is willing to work. Send them here unless someone has already gotten something better set up elsewhere, in which case, come get me, please. I’m going to set up for first aid in this parking lot. And if you find stretchers intact, or even office chairs with wheels, a pile of blankets, a table sturdy enough to use as a bed, anything like that, wheel them over here, please. Get people to help. Bring me anything that looks useful, anything like medical supplies. I need it all. Bandages, splints, syringes, everything like that, and pens and paper, something to write with.”
“Will do. I know some of these offices from fixing their copiers.” He took off toward the east.
The white girl said. “We’ll help.”
“You sure?”
She nodded, decisive. “We can do anything he can do.”
Bash smiled at the attitude. “Thank you. Think about what you see in your first aid supplies, or what you’ve seen in doctor’s offices. I’d need all that, and I have none of it. And don’t forget gloves. Look for boxes of latex gloves, boxes and boxes of them. And if anyone tries to stop you, my name is Sebastian Hill, BSN, Cancer Center, and have them come and complain to me instead.”
“Sure, I get it,” she said. She tugged on Haruka’s hand and they went down the street.
“What’s your name,” he called after her.
“McKenna!” she shouted over her shoulder.
Bash ran back to his collapsed office building and yelled up, “Suze, you okay?”
“I found Meggy,” she called down, but from w
here, he couldn’t see. “She’s dead, Bash.” There was a catch in her throat.
“Can you hold on alone for five minutes?” he called.
“If I have to.”
Bash ran as fast as he could over to the sandwich shop. The glass in front was cracked in several places, but the one-story building looked solid.
“Hey,” yelled someone. “There’s no one in there.” A tall young black man, early 20’s, came up to him, dressed in a white shirt and clip-on bow tie. He came up to Bash. “You want a sandwich now?” he asked, incredulous.
“No, no. I came to ask a huge favor. You’re the manager?”
“Assistant manager, but yeah, in charge today.”
“I’m going to be setting up a first aid station — temporary hospital, really — over there in that parking lot. I’ll be blunt. We’re going to need this food.”
“Need it? For…?”
“For patients and staff. We need you guys to be our commissary, our cafeteria, for as long as that food in there stays good.”
The fellow cocked his head, thinking. “We have a freezer. Big freezer, big fridge, too.”
“Then we probably have three days, maybe four or five, before the food all goes bad.”
“The cheese and salami, chips, like that, should stay good even without being cold, as long as they don’t get real hot.” He rubbed his neck. “But I was going to go home, you know. I can’t stay here and serve people.”
“No one needs to be served right now. But I don’t want anybody else to get to that food. It’ll be a life saver. Literally.”
“Well, shit,” the young man said. He rubbed his neck some more and looked around. “I hate to think what the owner would say. He’s a greedy asshole.”
“He may be a dead asshole now, for all we know. And in any case, not worried foremost about his sandwich shop.”
“Oh, he owns a dozen places. This isn’t the biggest or the one he’ll be thinking about first.”
“So you’ll help us?”
He made a quick decision. “Hell, I’ll give you the key.” He dug in his pocket and came out with a big ring of keys. “I locked her up. You can get in easiest out back, by the dumpster.”
A dumpster! He’d have his newly recruited workers borrow it, for sure, wheel it or drag it over to the parking lot if they could. He’d need a place for medical waste. He needed so many things.
“You’re saving lives,” he told the young man, as he pocketed the keys. “You’re a hero.”
“Nah. I’m just — well hell, I tell you, if I can get back here tomorrow morning after I check on my people, I’ll give you a hand, too. You keep the keys, but if I can come back, I’ll make you up some sandwiches. You probably want to eat the potato salad, cold slaw, like that, first.”
“You’re right. And I thank you, really, from the bottom of my heart.” He shook hands. What’s your name?”
The man pointed to a nametag. “Nathan.”
“I’m Bash. I hope your family is okay, Nathan.”
“Yeah, me too,” he said and held a hand up in farewell as he went back to his car.
“Food,” muttered Bash. “Dumpster. Medical supplies. Personnel. I need a tent. A nice big tent.” As he got back to the fallen building, he glanced at the employee lot and saw 20 cars, including his, sitting there. And he thought, those are beds for the healthy or walking wounded. Beds for staff to catch a few winks between long shifts. Those cars are temporary housing, that’s what they are. Even if their owners are dead, and please no, let them not all be dead, those cars will keep someone dry and warm.
“Suze,” he shouted up. “We need their car keys too!” He climbed the pile of debris to explain the situation to her.
She hadn’t taken well to his demand that they paw through corpses of their friends for car keys, and he couldn’t blame her. It was grisly work and not terribly useful after all. Most must have had their keys in purses or the lockers. If he got a minute, he’d see if he could find the lockers amongst the debris.
Seeing Meggy’s corpse was awful — he really had liked her — and she had been crushed beyond recognition by equipment from the roof. Only her size, plus her skirt and shoes and the electronic pad in her lab coat pocket had let Suze identify her. Her face and chest were under a slab of roof and another big metal box, air conditioning or heating or whatever. It didn’t matter what it was; it had killed her.
Suze was crying silently as she worked, tears trailing down her checks from time to time. “Don’t you care?” she asked when he didn’t cry with her.
“I just — “ he shook his head. “I care. I’m thinking about what to do next, Suze. It’s an ER. Our life has just become one big ER, and everything has to be triage now. I’ll grieve later. It’s way down my triage list.”
She had shaken her head at him and they had gone back to searching the debris. They found another dead nurse, Rikki, an older woman who had kept to herself. They heard no voices calling for help, which made Bash’s heart feel heavy with dread. No one was banging on metal trying to get their attention, either. Twenty more staff members in the building, and he feared none of them were left alive.
Suze’s leg was obviously hurting, but on her hands and knees, she managed well enough. With her bad leg, she wasn’t much help in lifting heavy debris. He had found an electrical cord attached to a projector, one of those things you plug your laptop into to give presentations. He had, with some effort, yanked it out and used it to strap his jack and handle to one of the bare beams, so they didn’t get lost in the debris field.
They had found their third body, they couldn’t tell who, only one leg without a femoral pulse and the rest buried under rubble, when he heard someone screaming from the street, “Nurse Sebastian, where are you?”
Carefully, he stood up and saw the two teenaged girls wheeling a trolley along the cracked sidewalk, like a mail cart or something, piled high with boxes. He waved his arms overhead until they caught sight of him. “I’ll be right back,” he said to Suze.
“Does it matter if you are?” she said, with a fresh welling of tears. “I don’t think we’re going to find anyone alive here.”
He scrambled down the debris pile. When he hit the ground, he glanced at his watch. It had been 30, 35 minutes since the quake. The sun was getting lower. Shit, damn, and every other bad word he could think of. He needed light. A generator and lights. He needed too damned much and he was only one man. One man, one weepy nurse, and three civilians. That wouldn’t begin to fix things.
When he got to the girls, he saw that Haruka looked pale.
“You okay?” he said to her. He thought she’d probably seen dead people, horrible sights, and it was getting to her. As it would anyone who didn’t have training at pushing it aside temporarily. It got to everyone, eventually, even the trauma-trained.
McKenna said, “She’s afraid of me.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because I just killed a guy,” the girl said, and burst into tears, launching herself at Bash.
Bash took her in his arms and patted her back, shushing her as she wept. He looked at Haruka, who, to his shock, was nodding.
Haruka said, “She did.”
McKenna wrenched herself out of Bash’s arms, dashing angrily at her tears. “That asshole.”
“I’m sure you didn’t do anything,” said Bash, thinking she was feeling guilty for not helping an injured person, or maybe even moving someone who was dying.
“I hit the bastard over the head,” she said, sniffing, then rubbing snot off her face with her shirt. “With one of those round metal bar things, that you see, those ridged things, like from a wall.”
“Like a rebar?” Bash said, feeling a bit dizzy at this confession.
“Yeah. That bastard,” she said, furious.
“He was stealing drugs,” said Haruka.
“What?”
“There is druggist store,” she said.
“A pharmacy,” said McKenna. “And I knew the kid. He use
d to go to our high school but dropped out last spring. Or maybe got kicked out. And he had these — “ she pointed to two grocery sacks hanging off the handles of the cart she had been pushing “ — and he says, ‘Hey, you two girls wanna party? I got some tasty stuff here.’ And he said that about what was in the sack. And I thought about people who would need drugs, I mean, really need them and I picked up the bar and I started hitting him. And hitting him and hitting him — “ she faltered. “And I think I killed him.”
“He is not moving, Mr. Sebastian,” said Haruka, touching her head to indicate, he thought, the injury to the drug thief.
“Call me Bash,” he murmured, as he picked up one of the bags and looked inside. Oh, smart kid, that thief. There was Vicodin, and Oxy, and Percodan and Dialudid and — holy crap — fentanyl skin patches. He held up a box of those to show McKenna. “Chances are, he would have killed himself with these anyway,” he said. Addicts had before, many times. He closed the bag and took the girl by the shoulders.
“Look, I’m not suggesting you beat up more people, but he may be fine. Maybe he’s only unconscious. Maybe someone will bring him in for first aid.”
She shook her head.
“Or maybe you killed him,” he said, hoping it wasn’t so. “But in doing that, you’ve saved a bunch of other lives.” He pointed to the sacks. “That stuff there, that’s going to allow us to set bones and do minor surgery and is going to let people who are hurting get to sleep for a little while. It will save lives, really.” He held her eyes. “Many, many lives.”
Great, he was thinking, first triage deciding who can live and die, and now he’s jury and judge over criminal matters. Where does a guy apply for godhood, he wondered? I’m moving myself in that direction. “But don’t — “ he gestured vaguely — “Try not to kill anyone else, okay? I have enough patients as it is.”
She laughed. “You’re weird.” The tears were done. For now.
“I am that.”
“You gay?”
“I am that, too.”
“Fine by me,” she said. “But you might not want to tell some of these people around here.”
