by Radclyffe
“…situation in the Keys?” Catherine said.
“We’ve deployed four hundred troops, including engineers and construction crews, and twenty heavy trucks from our ground transport company to assist in securing the bridges between the islands, but the lower portion of the Keys is inaccessible by road. Along with the Navy and Air National Guard we’re assisting local authorities in evacuating residents who either are unable to return to their homes from shelters or have had to abandon their residences due to severe damage.”
“What does that mean for the relief efforts in our area?”
“We now have eight thousand troops actively in the field. Due to the profound flooding extending throughout the metropolitan area, most of our rescue efforts are being carried out in high-water vehicles and boats.”
“What can we expect over the next few days?”
Sawyer looked directly into the camera. “The National Hurricane Center predicts rain will continue for the next thirty-six hours at least, adding significant water to the flooding already present. Wind will be less of a problem as Leo moves past, but the flooding will worsen. Vehicular traffic will be impossible, and anyone in residences or business establishments cut off by high waters can expect no improvement in their condition for at least three days.” Sawyer’s expression grew more intense. “If you are without fresh water or food or suffering from severe heat conditions, it’s essential that you evacuate. We have troops ready to assist. Call the number on your TV screen or 9-1-1 if you have access to cell service. If not, signal your need for relief with a white flag of some kind. Hang it out a window or from any object that can be sighted from the air. We are patrolling the entire region by helicopter, and we will find you.”
Dara listened to Sawyer’s orders and wondered how many times today Sawyer had remembered climbing into a tree, tying a tattered cloth to a branch, and waiting to be rescued. She wondered when she would see her again, recognizing that the ache in the pit of her stomach wasn’t hunger or fatigue or fear. She needed Sawyer, a glimpse, a brief touch, a smile to let her know her world was still all right.
Landfall plus 20 hours
Dara’s door opened, a slash of light cut across her face, and she sat up blinking. “What is it?”
Her voice sounded used up and empty, a lot like she felt. How long had she been asleep? It felt like only a few minutes.
“Sorry,” Penny said in a rush. “We’ve got five on the way—all multiples, two critical.”
Dara pushed herself to her feet. A wave of dizziness threatened to capsize her and she steadied herself with a hand on the bedside table. The flow of emergencies had been unrelenting, occasionally surging to the point where the injured backed up in the waiting area despite the PAs, residents, and nurses triaging as quickly as they could. Then they’d almost be caught up and the tide would ebb, only to repeat the cycle a few minutes later.
“Who do we have?” Dara asked in the shorthand that was second nature to her and Penny after years of working together.
“You, a couple of first-year residents, and Vincie. Both PAs are already tied up with an MI and an acute appendicitis.”
Dara made a mental note to check on those patients later. Even in a crisis, ordinary medical emergencies still kept coming. “Trauma room?”
“Two is open.”
“How soon?”
“Five minutes out.”
“What do we know?”
“Not much. It’s weird, a guy who said he was a cameraman with Catherine called it in. All he could tell me was part of a road collapsed and a vehicle flipped over.”
“Catherine’s cameraman?” Dara’s body trembled with a jolt of adrenaline. Catherine was with Sawyer, wasn’t she? Why hadn’t Sawyer called? “Did he say anything about the victims? Who they are?”
“No, sorry. He didn’t have much in the way of details. He sounded pretty shook up.”
“Right. I’m coming.” Dara struggled to make sense of the chaotic story. Sawyer and Catherine weren’t necessarily together. If they were, Sawyer would’ve been the one to call in any kind of mass casualty alert. Sawyer wasn’t there. Sawyer wasn’t hurt. Still, Dara’s heart pounded anxiously. “I’ll take the residents, you assist Vincie.”
“Right. I’ll see you there.”
Dara stuffed her phone into the back pocket of her scrubs and jogged toward the trauma bay. Two first years and the chief ER resident waited for her. She nodded to Vincie. Even when Vincie ought to have been as exhausted as Dara, she radiated calm. If Dara had to deal with a major crisis with minimal help, Vincie and Penny would be the ones she would’ve chosen. “Hi, Vincie.”
“Morning.” She smiled wryly. “I suppose we could call it that. It’s almost four.”
“Wonderful.” Dara took a quick inventory of the two treatment tables side by side, the overhead lights already turned on and focused downward, instrument packs on trays, gloves and gowns by the door. She pulled on a fresh cover gown, grabbed a pair of disposable gloves. Her two very green residents waited off to the side, a mixture of panic and excitement in their eyes.
“I want the two of you to assist in transferring and getting monitors on and lines in.”
“Okay,” Kirk said briskly, the current crisis apparently having purged his previous laid-back attitude.
“Roger that,” Naomi muttered.
Dara pointed a finger at her. “Let me guess. Reserves?”
“Yep. Coastie,” she said, smiling.
Dara smiled back. “All right then. Get going.”
Both residents hurried out into the hall as a familiar commotion signaled the imminent arrival of the trauma patients. Wheels clattered over the tile floor, a mishmash of voices talked over one another, growing louder as the first responders tossed bits of information to the trauma team like confetti on the wind. The double doors burst open and the first gurney rocketed through. For just an instant, Dara’s heart stilled, and her breath stopped in her chest. Sawyer’s face was streaked with blood, and for the blink of an eye, that was all Dara could register. She took half a step forward and her brain registered the rest of it. Sawyer ran alongside the gurney, both hands pressed to the thigh of a small woman in a military uniform, barely visible beneath the jumble of equipment sharing the stretcher with her. Sawyer’s hands were bloodied, as were the dressings and everything else in the vicinity. But despite the fresh blood trickling down Sawyer’s temple, she was moving, alive, and Dara breathed again.
“Colonel?” Dara said, finding her voice.
“Blunt penetrating trauma to the thigh,” Sawyer said tersely. “Probably a fractured femur and something big torn up in there. Blood loss is barely controlled.”
“Let’s get her over here.”
Kirk stepped up quickly to assist Sawyer in the transfer, and out of the corner of her eye, Dara saw Vincie and Naomi moving the next patient onto the other bed. When Penny reached over to help, Dara called, “Penny, don’t.”
Penny shot her a look but nodded and set about getting the IVs hooked up. The door opened again and Catherine entered, a cameraman beside her.
Dara moved to intercept her. “Not in here.”
Catherine looked as if she was about to protest, then nodded once and backed out, saying, “I’ll want an update as soon as you’re free.”
“That will be a while,” Dara muttered, quickly assessing the young troop. BP 60 palpable, heart rate 150, extremities cool. “She’s hypovolemic, all right. Going into shock. How many more?”
“Three more beside Amal over there,” Sawyer said, indicating Vincie’s patient. “These two are the most serious. The others are all extremity fractures. I’ve got my team lending an assist to yours in the ER.”
“Good, fine.” Dara carefully lifted one corner of the dressing Sawyer held in place in the patient’s left upper thigh. The entry wound was a small, almost innocent-looking clean puncture, the edges of the two-inch circular wound almost surgical in precision.
“Kirk, get surgery down here. Any s
urgeon, I don’t care who it is. No, wait. If you can’t get trauma, get general surge, and if you can’t get them, get plastics.”
“All right.”
“Tell them we need them now.”
“Yep. I’m on it.”
“What the hell did that?” Dara asked no one in particular.
“Piston rod maybe,” Sawyer said. “We took a nosedive into a fifteen-foot crater when a sump hole opened up under us.”
Dara’s stomach clenched. It could so easily have been Sawyer lying there. “Have you seen the exit?”
“No, once we got her extracted, there was too much blood. All we could do was try to control it.”
“So we may have a foreign body in there.” Dara raised her head and caught sight of one of the ER nurses who’d just walked in. “Christie. X-ray.”
“We’ve been calling,” Christie said, “but one of the portables is down, and the other tech is—”
“I don’t care. If they’re not down here, that’s where they need to be. Call them again.”
“Okay. Calling.”
“We’re getting really thin on staff,” Dara muttered as she accepted four units of blood from a blood bank tech. “Is it getting any better out there?”
“Some,” Sawyer said. “Mostly now we’re dealing with walking wounded, heat exposure, and minor traumas. Plus the usual medical emergencies.”
“How bad is your head?”
“Looks worse than it is,” Sawyer said offhandedly.
Dara narrowed her eyes. “Don’t do that.”
Sawyer blew out a breath, nodded. “I never lost consciousness. Hurts like hell. Probably need some stitches.”
“Vision?” Dara hung a unit of blood.
“No problems. Dara,” Sawyer said softly, “I’m okay.”
“Do you need me to get someone to take your place holding compression on that wound?”
“I got this.” Sawyer’s jaw tightened. “She’s my senior NCO. Her husband’s down in the Keys with our ground transport company.”
Dara nodded silently. Sawyer would not leave one of hers.
The X-ray tech arrived with a portable machine and Dara motioned him over. “We need a PA of the left thigh. There may be a foreign body in there. You have to be quick. We need to keep pressure on the wound.”
“Just keep holding while I get the plate underneath,” he said.
“Hey, Dara,” a woman in surgical scrubs said as she bounded into the room with a harried-looking young guy in scrubs behind her. The woman halted at the side of the stretcher, hands on her hips and a frown creasing her forehead. “This does not look like a facial trauma to me—although you’ve got a dandy jaw fracture just down the hall. I was about to book an OR room when your resident corralled me to come down here.”
“Hi, Gabby,” Dara said. “That jaw will have to wait. We’ve got a major vascular injury here and you’re it so far.”
“Huh.” The woman edged in next to Sawyer at the side of the stretcher, and Sawyer gave way. She was a head shorter than Sawyer, full-bodied, with quick, almond-shaped brown eyes. Wisps of ebony hair escaped from beneath a surgical cap, and gray streaked her temples. In another setting, Sawyer would have thought her strikingly beautiful. Right now she found her unmistakable self-assurance even more appealing.
“It’s been a while since general surgery for me,” Gabby said.
“You never forget, do you?”
“Not yet.” Gabby eyed Sawyer with interest, taking in her uniform and bloody face. “Gabby Hernandez. Plastics. Anything else I need to know about this troop?”
“Good to meet you, Doc. Sawyer Kincaid.” She shifted her hand as the surgeon lifted the compression pack to survey the wound. “Sergeant Meadows was alert for a few minutes after our vehicle flipped. She was pinned in but was able to tell us she wasn’t injured anywhere else. Blood loss was brisk, and she lost consciousness pretty quickly. Other than a big vessel torn up in there somewhere, she’s been stable.”
“Well, most of the vessels I sew together are about the size of a hair. A big one ought to be easy.” Gabby replaced the bandage and motioned to her resident to take over the compression. “I’ll get her upstairs, get this open, and if the vascular boys get free they can take over. If not, I can still do a vascular anastomosis.”
“Thanks, Gabby.” Dara stripped off her gloves and tossed them at a nearby trash can. “How’s the family?”
“Manny got his mother to evacuate. They’re in a hotel in Vegas.”
“Good for him,” Dara said, thinking he’d done a lot better than she’d managed to do with her mother. “Thanks for staying.”
“Wouldn’t have missed it.”
“Are you set over there, Vincie?” Dara called as Gabby’s team pushed Sergeant Meadows’s stretcher out the door.
“Fractured ribs and a pneumothorax. I put in a chest tube, and the blood gases are good.”
“Good. Send him up to the SICU. I’ll be down the hall.” Dara pointed at Sawyer. “Come on. You’re next.”
Chapter Twenty-four
“Look, you’ve got more important things to do than patch up a superficial laceration,” Sawyer said. “Just get one of the residents to stick a couple staples in it.”
Dara slowed and pointed to the first empty treatment room they passed. “In there. I just need to get a suture tray.”
“Dara,” Sawyer said quietly. “Come on. You know—”
Dara spun around and poked a finger that stopped just short of Sawyer’s breastbone. “Listen to me. You matter. You’re not just someone who takes care of everyone else. You need to learn that part of taking care of people is letting them take care of you. Now, if you don’t mind, I have a lot to do, and I would like to take care of you so I can get on to the rest of it.”
Sawyer sucked in a breath. Shadows smudged the pale skin beneath Dara’s eyes and she looked ten pounds thinner than the last time she’d seen her. Sawyer wished she could get her out of the line of fire, someplace safe, and knew she couldn’t. Knew Dara wouldn’t want her to and would be royally peeved if she tried. What she didn’t need to be doing was adding to Dara’s worries to lessen her own. “Hey, I’ve missed you.”
With a shake of her head, Dara pressed her hand flat against Sawyer’s chest. “And that’s why you get away with so much. Because you say the perfect thing at just the wrong time and somehow make everything seem right again.”
“I’m glad I’ve got something going for me.” Sawyer covered Dara’s hand, curled her fingers lightly around the edge of Dara’s wrist. “You know what? I haven’t said this before, but I like it when you take care of me. When you worry about me. I like mattering to you.”
Some of the weariness lifted from Dara’s shoulders as she brushed her fingertips slowly back and forth over Sawyer’s chest. Sawyer’s uniform shirt was stiff, but it didn’t prevent the heat from seeping through, from warming her all the way down inside. “You are an incredibly frustrating woman. You know, when I heard we had injured troops coming in, and I saw you with the blood…” She drew a shaky breath. Too late to worry if she was revealing too much. “I was terrified.”
“I’m sorry.”
Dara leaned in and kissed the tip of Sawyer’s chin. “I don’t want you to be sorry for being who you are. As a matter of fact, I don’t even want you to change anything—except the part where you remember that you are not alone.”
“Dara, I—”
“I’m sorry I don’t have my camera rolling,” Catherine said from a few feet behind them. “There’s nothing like a budding romance to humanize a crisis. Not exactly the personal story I was going for, but it might work even better. When did you—”
Sawyer’s eyes darkened when she looked past Dara. “This is off the record and private.”
Dara turned, her hand drifting down Sawyer’s arm as she faced Catherine. “Every shot you take of Sawyer and the others out there risking their lives is personal. You’re risking your life too, and people know it. We’re not a st
ory, and it’s time to back off.”
“You know, I suppose you’re right. Pity,” Catherine said with a smile that almost looked regretful. “You both look so good on camera.”
Dara rolled her eyes and muttered, “Impossible. Come on, Sawyer. Let’s get back to work.”
Sawyer said, “Be right there. Catherine, you and your cameraman can take a break. I’ll be coordinating from here until my people are stable and I get a chance to see them.”
“I could use some time in the editing booth,” Catherine said. “Can I count on you to let me know if anything urgent comes up?”
“Somehow you always seem to get the word,” Sawyer said dryly. “But yes, I’ll keep you updated.”
Catherine patted Sawyer’s shoulder. “It pays to have good sources, darling.” She brushed her thumb over Sawyer’s jaw. “You have blood on your face.”
“Catherine,” Dara said lightly, holding the curtain open so Sawyer could enter the treatment room, “that’s a no-fly zone from now on.”
Laughing, Catherine waved and headed away in the opposite direction.
Dara shook her head. “She’s unbelievably aggravating and I rather like her.”
“I’d like her more if she didn’t turn up at the worst possible times,” Sawyer grumbled. “I’d give a lot for a couple of hours—hell, a couple minutes—alone with you and no interruptions.”
“So would I.” Dara gave her a little push. “Go inside and sit down. You need anything? Coffee, something to eat?”
“Let’s get this over with.” Sawyer hopped up and sat on the edge of the stretcher. “When we’re done, I’ll grab a cup of coffee and something hot to eat. I’m waiting to see how my sergeant does.”
