Flight #116 Is Down (10 page)

The girl who lived here was in Laura’s gym class. Laura had plenty of friends; she didn’t need another; she had never spoken to Heidi Landseth. Heidi wouldn’t stay in public school anyway; she belonged at Miss Porter’s or Ethel Walker or one of the other hoity-toity prep schools in Connecticut.

Laura and her crew ran toward the plane crash but never even rounded the side of the house; never even saw the downed plane at the bottom of the hill; the first wounded victim was carried up to them by two walking wounded passengers.

The man was burned. Laura had never seen burns before. Never smelled them. The stench coated her tongue, invaded her gut. She was going to get sick, she knew it. The woman carrying the other end of the stretcher said sharply to Laura, “Breathe through your mouth.” Laura steeled herself not to get sick, not to faint.

He also had a sucking chest wound. Every time he breathed it sounded as if he were underwater. They fitted a cervical collar around his neck, they put MAST trousers on his legs to prevent shock, they sealed the open chest wound, and gave him oxygen. The senior crew member started an IV. Laura was not trained for that.

The ambulance could take two victims, although Laura had never been in an ambulance with both stretchers filled. Now she saw how hard the ride to the hospital was going to be. The crew would hunch over, doing what little they could to stabilize their two badly hurt patients. She was proud of herself; she had not gotten sick; she was doing the right things in the right order.

Now it was up to the driver.

But the driver did nothing.

They went nowhere.

The exit was blocked.

Saturday: 6:22
P.M.

Patrick had finished his training a year and a half before. They had had a textbook just like any other textbook: chapters with questions at the end, plenty of photographs with captions, some graphs, an index. Although there were frequent update training sessions, he had not looked at the textbook once since then. But he could see the page for high-impact accidents as if somebody were holding it open before him. The color photographs had made him gag when he first saw the book.

Now, at his feet, lay a man whose arm looked as if it had been pushed down in a blender. Now Patrick knew that the book illustrations were clean and neat, meant for inexperienced eyes. “Help,” whispered the man. Patrick and a team of ambulance people—people he didn’t even know; people who had come Mutual Aid from a neighboring town—knelt to slide the man as gently as possible onto a stretcher.

The textbook had said simply that high-impact injuries, whether from velocity, like a car crash, or height, like a plane crash, meant multiple long-bone fractures, plus head, neck, back, and chest injuries. Patrick had not quite grasped that each victim might have all of those. That it would be visibly, horrifically gory.

They had had Disaster lectures in EMT training. It had been pretty exciting. He remembered when the instructor had passed around samples of the Disaster tags. When you had only one or a few victims, which was certainly all Patrick had ever had, you didn’t need tags, but when you had hundreds, somebody somewhere had to decide who went into the ambulance first, and who waited for the next trip; who got a doctor next … and who didn’t. Every hurt passenger would be tagged for identification by the ambulances lined up in the courtyard. On top of the tags, you could write down the vital signs, like pulse and respiration. Below the space were large brilliantly colored strips: the bottom color was the one that counted.

Red—Stop and get this guy; you can save him if you go fast

Yellow—Slow; this guy can wait a little

Green—Go past: he’ll be okay on his own

Black—He’s dead

Patrick had not realized that—in this plane crash at least—when you divided patients up into the traditional color categories—you could eyeball it.

This guy was a Red.

The tags would be tied to buttons or sleeves, and the color panels could be ripped off if the patient’s condition changed. If this patient stopped being a Red, they’d rip off the Red panel. Then his tag would be Black. During training the kids had squealed with giggly horror at the symbols that went along with each color. Yellow was a turtle. Red was a rabbit. But Black—Black was a shovel.

Stay Red, Patrick thought at the man. Stay Red, he thought at God.

He and two of the team log-rolled the victim onto the stretcher, while very gently a fourth man braced the damaged arm with a folded blanket. They strapped the man tightly into the stretcher, so his weight would shift as little as possible as it slanted, going up the hill.

Trying not to slip, the taller of the volunteers carried the lower end and tried to keep it high, keep the poor man as flat as possible. There was a feeling of frenzy among all the teams moving patients: there was still fire several hundred yards away; there could be another fire right here, right where they stood. Speed counted. Getting to the house counted. Having to go slowly on the icy patches made them all want to scream.

Patrick remembered the Golden Hour. (His mother was partial to that phrase: it reminded her of the Golden Rule. Patrick didn’t see the similarity.)

Since the Korean War, emergency treatment staffs had known that physiologically, the human body could care for itself from even the worst wounds for about an hour. If you could keep that victim’s airway open and stop his bleeding—if you could do that
and
get him to the hospital within one hour, you could probably save him. Even if he were very badly hurt.

But with the worst patients, you had only an hour.

Sixty minutes.

You couldn’t say—“Hold the clock; we have to wait for the ambulance!”

You couldn’t say—“Hang on, fella; we gotta wait till somebody cuts away the plane before we get you out.”

You couldn’t say—“This isn’t fair; we have to cope with a hill and some ice; give us more minutes this time.”

The clock ticked, and the Golden Hour ran out.

If you had only one victim, say a motorcycle accident, and a crew of four to rescue, an Hour was not a difficult thing. Even way out here in the woods, you could get your victim to a hospital in time. Say, three minutes until the accident’s called in; say, five minutes to get a volunteer to the ambulance barn and another five to get the ambulance to the scene; plus the time it actually took to get the victim onto a backboard, into the ambulance, and leave; plus fifteen minutes to reach a hospital … you could make it.

But say the victim was in a car and couldn’t be cut free for another quarter hour. Say other drivers didn’t make way for your ambulance; or the weather was terrible and you had to drive slowly; or you got to the hospital and they were already handling two other accidents and your patient had a wait ahead of him …

Your Hour was up.

Or rather, the victim’s Hour was up.

Panting, fingers stiff with cold, they reached level ground and went on in the door being held open for them, carefully maneuvering the stretcher through Heidi’s house and out into the courtyard again, into the blaring, blinding lights.

All these people.

All these hurt people.

Sharing the same Golden Hour, the same precious sixty minutes.

S
ATURDAY: 6:26 P.M.

The rain came down onto Carly’s cheek. At first it was just cold and awful, but it began to hurt, as if slowly taking her skin off and getting down to the nerve cells. After a while her face hurt more than anything; it was the icy rain that was going to kill her. She could not bear the rain on her face. Just cover my face, she thought. But she could not seem to call out.

Saturday: 6:27
P.M.

Ty could have killed Laura. The names he would like to call that girl were short and suitable.

Inside the barn he put on his orange slicker, with
NEARING RIVER RESCUE SQUAD
written on the back, and his last name,
MARONN
, below that. He hated his last name. Laura was not the only one to change the first vowel and call him Moron. Ty donned the hard hat with the cowboylike rim and hoped for a run to join.

He hoped wrong. The plane-crash call had brought out of the woodwork dozens of grownups who were rarely active these days, but who, like Laura, were going to the head of the line and leaving Ty in the gutter.

He shrugged, got back in his truck, and headed for the site.

A full mile from Rockrimmon, he hit traffic.

There were already so many volunteers pouring in from every town within reach, and so many bystanders pouring in from what looked like half the nation, that there was no going anywhere.

Ty didn’t want to get caught in it.

He pulled into the closest driveway, parked in some stranger’s turnaround, locked the truck, grabbed his heavy-duty flashlight, got out, and began running.

He was going to be a part of this rescue if it included marathons.

He ran the mile easily, slipping in the slush of the road but not quite falling; jumping between stalled cars when opposing traffic made it pretty stupid to be in the middle of the road.

He reached the intersection of Old Pond Meadow and Rockrimmon.

Rockrimmon was two lanes, but barely. Timid and beginning drivers were quite sure it was only one lane.

The first ambulance was trying to leave but no longer had space to get out. Fire trucks trying to arrive filled the incoming lane. Parked cars and trucks of people who had decided to walk in filled the outgoing lane. Nobody was going to get rescued. They were just going to form a major traffic jam and sit the night out.

A row of five fire trucks filled the eastern direction down Old Pond Meadow. Backing those huge vehicles up in the dark, on the ice, past the curving stone walls—poor idea.

But west, the way he’d run—it was possible.

Ty beckoned the ambulance toward him, recognizing the driver: a fat old guy he’d never liked, a know-it-all who lorded it over the teenagers and grasped every bit of knowledge to himself instead of teaching.

Ty could hardly stand it that this slob was in on the action and Ty was going to direct traffic.

He put his feelings out of his mind. Over and over in training, they’d said, You can’t stuff your head with personal things; think procedure; get the job done. Period.

He tapped on the closed driver’s window of the car closest to him. “Pull in closer to the stone wall. I’ll direct you.” The driver obeyed him, and a precious three feet were gained. Ty ran to the next car, whose owner gave him a second flashlight, and the next car, and the next, wedging them forward and off to the side, giving the ambulance room.

They met, of course, an oncoming ambulance trying to pass the stalled traffic; normally an intelligent decision, but not this time. Ty backed and ordered and wedged and pointed and finally got passing room for the exiting ambulance.

His feet were soaked through.

He put that out of his mind.

He worked his way back the entire mile to his truck, getting people out of the road, forcing people to listen to him, setting up traffic directors at every intersection—there weren’t many; only three on this entire backwoods section—until finally, an entire twenty minutes later, he had gotten the road clear for the ambulance.

Twenty minutes.

It made him sick.

Who died during that twenty minutes? What precious life bled away because of cars littering the road like so many useless soda cans?

But Ty understood the drivers. He too wanted fiercely to be on the site. He wanted to be part of
that
action, not this action. What was this? It was running vertical parking lots in the dark.

They also serve who only run and park, Ty said to himself. He entertained himself with thoughts of murdering Laura.

He got a lot of flak. The newcomers were from the State, they were from the Region, they were from Disaster Control, they were doctors, they were nurses, they were neighbors.

“Walk in,” said Ty firmly to each one. How he envied them. They’d get there eventually.

Me, I’ll just stand here for eternity, parking cars. I don’t even get tips.

Saturday: 6:35
P.M.

The rain stopped.

Heidi had never been so grateful to the sky.

She held up her palms to test her conclusion. The gesture was being repeated all over the grounds of the estate.

We are like primitive people praying to the gods of weather, Heidi thought. Human beings from time immemorial, ancient Sumerians and Egyptians, ancient Indians and Vikings, held their hands like this. O Sky, relent! Give us a break!

Instead of waving flashlights they should be holding the holly branches and gathering their offerings at some great hearth.

But there is a great hearth here,
thought Heidi.

Momentarily she watched a girl about her own age, in an ambulance jacket, along with two others getting a backboard under a patient. Now they strapped the patient carefully onto a stretcher. While the girl took the patient’s pulse, the other two worked plastic trousers up on the victim’s legs and then inflated them. She did not know what that was for, what it did, what it was called. Around the patient’s head they placed two heavy orange slabs, rather like a swimmer’s life jacket, and strapped the head securely down.

Heidi was jealous.

It’s my yard, she thought, and I can’t even take a pulse. I don’t even know what to feel, or where to feel it, or what to count.

And then she remembered something. Something really important.

Dolt, dolt, dolt! she accused herself. How could you be forgetting that? You’re such a worthless fool, Heidi.

She tore around the grounds, looking for Mr. Farquhar.

So many people. So much commotion. And everybody so formless, so faceless, in their huge, enveloping fireman’s coats: just big, moving, yellow blotches. She wanted a bullhorn, she wanted a microphone, she wanted Mr. Farquhar.

Of course when she found him, he was busy. There were two men and a woman arguing with him, or giving him facts, or just generally yelling. Heidi could not tell. He could hardly believe it when she interrupted him. It was only because she owned the house and the land that he could even bring himself to spare her two seconds. He faced her momentarily, holding in his annoyance, the whole tilt of his head saying—Make it quick, girl, I have better things to do.