Afterimage
Roderick Geiger
Gyttings-Lindstrom Publishers
Los Angeles, CA
Copyright © 2014 Roderick Geiger
All rights reserved.
Cover Illustration Copyright © 2014
Cover design by Amelia Belle
“The Earth in Synapse”
www.BelleHammer.com
www.AfterimageNovel.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events or locales is purely coincidental.
ISBN-13: 978-0-9863274-0-7
ISBN-10: 0986327409
Dedicated to Rohan Geiger and his bubbie, Irene, without whom this story would never have been told.
Day 22
Sunday
Newsroom, Enterprise Daily News,
Manzanita, California
Ilene Ishue tried by sheer force of will to make the buzzing fluorescent lights shut up. She squeezed her eyes tight, pressing two fingers against each temple. “I can rise above this,” she chanted. “I am bigger than this.” On weekdays it wasn’t a problem; the unrelenting, tinitic hum of the ceiling fixtures drowning under the normal sounds of the office…keyboards, copy machines, jabbering voices, the front door methodically opening and closing, letting in waves of street noise. But not on Sunday, when this stretch of Chaparral Avenue lay in state, quiet as the cold room in the Mayton County morgue.
Ishue’s eyes popped open. “How am I supposed to create works of art with all this noise,” she said out loud, talking to herself as she often did when no one was around, and sometimes even when they were.
She marched to the wall switch and shut down the whole fluorescent system, all six switches, the room winking dark except for a surreal glow wafting in through the heavily tinted front windows. Almost like gray smoke.
“Yuck,” Ishue declared, throwing switches randomly, trying different combinations, finally coming full circle to turn all six switches back on. Now she marched 60 feet across the newsroom, exaggerating her footfalls like an angry child, coming to rest at the radio scanner. She cranked it up to full volume.
“The scanner shall remain on whenever a reporter is present in the newsroom,” she quoted from her employee handbook as she returned to her desk. But so little ever happened in the Tri-Cities area that Ishue usually left it off. Now it served an important function. It’s gurgling squawks over-rode the sizzling crackle from the plastic panels in the ceiling.
“There,” she said frumpily, leering into her screen which mirrored an image of her wire-framed glasses which in turn reflected white letters swimming on a deep blue background. She could see her eyes between the lines of copy, squinting back at her through her work. The letters were saying something about a park dedication up in Mayton, a Sunday story she needed to file for the weekend editor who clocked in at three. Fluff. Her mind wandered. Tiny eyes, almondy-shaped, too close together, pasted on a big, round face made even bigger and rounder by the curvature of the glass monitor. Focus, Ilene! She began typing swiftly: “Even rain couldn’t dampen the spirits of a half-dozen morons who showed up for this meaningless…” Chuckling, she fired a well-aimed pinky at the delete key.
Six desks and two aisles away the scanner was wheezing out noises, automatically clicking from frequency to frequency, spewing call letters, code numbers, distorted near-words. Over the years she’s learned how to translate the codes and unscramble the static. Sheriff’s deputy Carlson was writing a speeding ticket out on SR 41 at the Avenue B overpass. The Manzanita Fire Department Engine Company No. 2 just pulled into the Safeway parking lot.
Here at the Enterprise Ishue was the new hire. Formerly on staff at the Fremont Register, she’d left there four months earlier…after the Register, 66 years in business, had gone belly up, folded itself into a sad inventory of nine desks, six computers and a lease cancelled for failure to pay. After 66 years of daily publishing the Fremont Register had simply disappeared off the face of the earth.
Before the Register, the Costa Mesa Beacon, and before that, the Cheyenne Rider. Ishue the nomad had become used to new-hire status. As elsewhere in the world of small town papers, as elsewhere in the world at large, the job nobody wanted usually went to the new hire. Here at the Enterprise it was the weekend shift. Ten hours per day, Thursdays through Sundays. The three-straight-days off looked good in theory, but the weekend reporter usually had to come in on Mondays to fix something, rewrite something, finish something, follow-up on something. But Ishue didn’t really mind. She had nowhere else to be, no family except for her two neurotic little mutts, the both of which weighed a mere 22 pounds combined. Her 36th birthday was coming up in a month and she didn’t have any plans for the day. Hadn’t had a boyfriend in over a year. Things she didn’t much like thinking about.
At 9:17 a.m., just as she completed transcribing a “giving back to the community” quote from the mayor of Mayton, she heard something on the scanner that caught her ear. She listened for the obligatory repeat, fingers frozen like hungry spiders just above the keyboard.
“421 - all units - 4th and Arden - possible injuries.”
Possible injuries. “Shit!” Ishue pushed herself away from the desk and rose in a single, fluid motion. “Here we go,” she announced aloud, instinctively scooping up her little bag with cellphone, two reporter’s notebooks, a tiny recorder and a backup camera (in case the real photographer somehow screwed the shot).
“421 - all units - 4th and Arden - possible injuries,” the scanner crackled again, but the office was already empty, Ishue halfway across the parking lot, in moments her aging Toyota Corolla slicing through Manzanita’s sleepy streets, her press pass necklace bouncing on her maroon turtleneck pullover.
She stopped at the corner of Eighth and Arden for a moment to check wind direction. Light breeze, coming her way, but no hint of smoke. Most likely a small fire; already out. A brief in ‘Around the County,’ page A6. “Piss,” she groaned. “Beats being indoors.” She dug up the cellphone and called Donlevy - the first photographer on the Sunday stand-by list.
As she approached Fourth, she noticed numerous law enforcement - city and sheriffs, and two county FD paramedic units. There were a half-dozen ambulances scattered around but it was impossible to tell which arrived on call and which were already parked here, because Fourth and Arden was the city hospital.
A uniformed policeman was yanking on a roll of yellow tape just as she got there. She flashed her press pass and he backed up to let her by. “Good boy,” she said loud enough for him to hear.
Now the hospital east wing came into view, it’s concrete tilt-up walls sooty black and the trees and brush surrounding the structure burned black - but only on the sides facing the building. The away-sides were still green, the leaves barely singed. No evidence of fire on the ground. That was curious, as if the walls had briefly radiated tremendous heat. She double parked, careful not to block the emergency lane.
Right away she noticed an unusual burnt odor. Vaguely familiar, but not wood, not drywall, not fiberglass. Not wool, silicon, rayon. Not polybutylene, oil, diesel, chlorine, fur, flesh. None of the smells she’d smelled before at any of the three dozen-or-so fire stories she’d rolled on thus far in her career.
This was an acrid smell, void of moisture, slightly metallic. She could feel the odor in her throat, a kind of tingling in the lymph nodes below her tongue. Caustic. Hazardous?
As she approached on foot she saw that none of the emergency personnel seemed to be using filters or breathing apparatus. Not that hazardous. Captain Collier was standing beside the first responding engine, the big red-and-chrome ma
chine parked askance at the hospital main entrance, hoses whipping off her sides through the hands of the yellow-armored firemen while the captain engaged in agitated conversation with three hospital staffers. The air pulsed with shouting and mechanical noises. At least a dozen nurses and orderlies milled confusedly on the front steps. A stream of occupied wheel chairs had emerged, crowding the main entrance. Sidling in next to Collier, Ishue heard how the fire had originated in the radiology department and apparently lasted only a few minutes. The scene was suddenly interrupted as a second, very loud engine arrived, with much shouting dispatched to the ER ambulance dock, firefighters to enter the building from there.
“We heard a loud whooshing sound,” a nurse was telling Collier. “Woosh. Then the smell and smoke. I was frightened the PET scanner may have exploded or something.”
“What’s a PET scanner?” Ishue interjected abruptly. Instinctively she knew it had nothing to do with veterinary medicine. No one paid her any attention. Ishue yanked out her recorder and clicked it on.
“Ilene, we don’t have anything for you yet,” Collier hissed sideways to Ishue, raising an official arm in a ‘back off, we’re busy here’ gesture. A female firefighter arrived with a notebook open to the hospital floorplan. Other firefighters and hospital staff crowded in, giving Ishue a chance to cut the talkative nurse out of the herd.
“I’m Ilene Ishue from the Enterprise.”
“My, you got here fast.”
“Yes, we do try and help. I once saved a life by arriving quickly to a fire.” Ishue used this line often to seduce potential sources. Technically it was not really a lie. “Your name?”
“I’m Sally Conners, RN.”
“Where were you when you heard the sound?”
Conners looked around apprehensively. “I’m not really supposed to talk to the press…”
“What about the PET scanner,” Ishue almost seethed, trying to hide her displeasure. Is there no earthly creature who hasn’t been coached to clam up around reporters? “I mean, it’s not like a secret or something. You’ll save me a lot of time by telling me now.” Ishue pretended to turn off her recorder, then dropped it in her sweater pocket and extracted a skinny notebook.
“Well, I suppose…but don’t quote me,” Conners said nervously. “I’m sure the PET - Positron Emission Tomograph - is fine, but I do worry about it sometimes. It has those radiation decals all over it.” As she said this, she drew a little triangle in the air with her index finger. “You know, you have to put the serum vials in the cyclotron thing before you inject…” She caught herself. “But you should really talk to someone in Radiology.” She began backing up.
Ishue followed Nurse Conners as far as the lobby where she turned right into the west wing. This area was alive with human activity, an evacuation in process, draining toward the hospital’s west entrance on Arden.
The east wing – radiology, surgical rooms, pre- and post-op rooms, was dark except for emergency floodlamps mounted high on the hallway wall every 30 feet. The lights illuminated a pale fog of bluish smoke. A man in white scrubs was headed down the hall toward her, so Ishue moved to intercept him.
“What happened here, doctor?” She had negotiated a graceful U-turn and was now walking briskly alongside the man.
“Uh,” he said with a shrug. “Who are you?”
“Enterprise. Were there any surgeries in process during the accident?’
“No. Thank god it’s Sunday morning.”
And thankfully he isn’t afraid of reporters.
They were almost back in the lobby. Ishue could hear Collier’s voice approaching. “I understand the PET scanner blew up,” she said, fishing.
The doctor stopped. “What? Hell, no. Where’d you hear that? It happened in MRI during a routine head and orbits.”
“Was anyone hurt?”
Another shrug.
“Was it a fire or explosion or what?”
“Now that’s the question!” He started toward the lobby again.
Ishue stopped. “What’s your name, doctor?”
He raised his hand without looking back at her. “That’s all I know,” his voice trailed off. He rounded a corner and was gone.
“Drat.” Quotes without a source are crap. “It happened in MRI during a routine head and orbits,” an unnamed doctor said. It was only a matter of seconds before the firefighters would arrive to throw her out of the building so she turned now and trotted briskly down the hall, hoping to get inside MRI.
It was not to be.
Two firefighters, a male and female, were guarding the end of the hall in front of a double-door reading: Magnetic Resonance Imaging. They stopped Ishue, eyeing her press pass.
“You a reporter?” the female asked, raising her palm, stop fashion.
No, I’m a flight attendant. “Enterprise,” she said. It was noticeably colder in this part of the building. Odd? “How many injured?”
“You’ll have to talk to the Incident Commander,” the guy said.
“C’mon…Collier’s too busy for me to pester him now. They were doing a routine head and orbits in there. What happened to them?”
“Investigator’s on the way,” the male volunteered, trying to change the subject. “Must have been the plastic that burned.” He shrugged. “All concrete and metal. Nothing else flammable in there I could tell.”
Suddenly the doors flew open. Ishue had to jump clear, missing her chance to peek inside. Two paramedics hustled past pushing a gurney upon which lay a bandaged and bloodied man under oxygen. He wasn’t moving.
“Technician,” the fireman said proactively “He was in the control room and a wall fell on him.”
“My god,” Ishue said. “You have his name?”
The fireman shrugged.
The female firefighter, ire mounting, said: “You’ll have to leave, ma’am.” She said this belligerently, anxious to exert her recently-learned crowd-control skills. “Now. It’s not safe here.”
“What about the others,” Ishue asked, overriding the woman. “The patient?”
“Oh, you mean the woman?” the fireman asked. “Unconscious but she didn’t look too bad. Better than that technician anyway.”
“Do you have her name?” Ishue asked.
The fireman shrugged. The female was getting very impatient, starting to dance from foot to foot as if she had to pee.
“And the woman…she was the patient?” Ishue asked.
The male looked at the female, who glared back.
Time’s a wasting here. “Can I just squeeze in for a quick peek,” Ishue said in a petite, sweet voice that seemed at odds with the somewhat bulkiness of her person.
“Absolutely not,” the female said, squinting and wrinkling her nose. “You’ll have to leave the building RIGHT NOW.” She toyed with her radio menacingly.
Ishue retreated to consider her options. On her way back down the hall she ducked into the nurse’s station, looking for the MRI logs. She found the schedule on a clipboard hanging from the backside of the counter. She huddled down, out of sight.
The only entry for Sunday was 9:00 a.m.: “Constance McCormack – head, neck, orbits, no gadolinium.” She scanned the other clipboards for the duty roster, which provided her with the name of the technician, Ian Nigel. The form was blank in the little box next to radiologist.
“I told you to leave,” the female firefighter said, her face suddenly looming over the counter.
“This is Collier,” her radio crackled.
“Captain, I have a reporter here who refuses to leave,” she crackled back.
Once expelled from the building, Ishue hiked up to Arden looking for interesting interview subjects. The west wing entrance was helplessly clotted with wheelchairs, gurneys and ambulances trying to come together to effect an evacuation, Mayton County General the destination, 27 miles away.
“It’s a precaution,” Collier said of the evacuation he’d ordered. “Until we know what caused the fire, we can’t be sure what we’re up against.”<
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But many patients saw it as falling in a range somewhere between an unnecessary inconvenience and life-threatening incompetence. One elderly patient, the sex of whom Ishue could not distinguish with any certainty, suggested it was a way to pad hospital bills with additional wheelchair and movement fees.
Ishue collected a few quotes, then sat on the steps to organize herself.
As was common with fire stories, the fire’s cause would be the last information she’d get before deadline, if she got it at all. It would come from Fire Investigator Doyle, who was still in transit to the fire scene and who would likely take all day mulling it over before writing a report. She would have to write her story in bits and pieces, then add the cause and assemble her final draft this evening while her weekend editor drummed his fingers impatiently on the adjoining desk.
“It’s almost done,” she would have to answer to his frequent, anxious queries. He did, after all, have a family to go home to.
Whereas, Ishue, who didn’t, would push her drop-dead deadline to it’s deadest, and enjoy every paragraph. Stress, she had philosophized so long ago, was only contagious to the willing.
Just then a Channel Three satellite newsvan pulled up. It was time, Ishue concluded, to call the managing editor.
“Hey,” the gruff voice said sleepily.
“Hey, it’s Ishue. I’m at Manzanita Community Hospital.”
“You okay?” Ed asked.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” she said innocently. Then it hit her and she laughed: “I’m not a patient, Ed.”
“Oh.”
“We’ve got a weird accident involving an MRI machine here. Maybe some sidebars too.”
“Weird accident?” he asked dreamily. “Talk.”
“Okay, Ed. I’m the lead, right?” Technically the story could go to the senior city reporter if he wanted it.
There was a short pause. “Yeah, fine, yours.”
“Good. During a routine MRI we have some kind of explosion. Status of patient unknown. MRI technician in intensive care but stable. Another woman injured. Staff fears radioactive leak from PET scanner or something. Hospital is now being evacuated to Mayton General. Patients are pissed. There’s a very bad smell here I don’t recognize. Hazmat guys are here, but they’re not wearing masks.”
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