Shadows (16 page)

Her mother coughed,
snapping her back to reality.

“
Are you OK,
Mom?
”

Her mother turned to her
and nodded.

“
I'll get you
some water.
”

“
Thanks,
”
her mother replied
weakly.

Someone had set up a water
station along with a crate of fruit over by the sheriff's office.
Susan hadn't realized how hungry and dehydrated she was, which was
ironic given her clothes were still damp. She had a drink and
munched on an apple as she walked back to her mother with a bottle
of water and a peach.

“
Thank
you,
”
her mother said, taking the fruit and water from
her.

In the distance, Susan
could hear someone crying out in agony, yelling for help. Susan
could see the injured lying everywhere. A doctor moved between
people, carrying what looked like a first-aid kit.

“
I should
...
”

“
Yes,
”
her mother said.
“
You should
help.
”

Susan walked over to the
doctor as she leaned over a patient lying on the bench beside one
of the tables. There were so many injured people, by her estimates
they numbered into the hundreds. Blood stained the floor, making
the marble slippery as Susan stepped carefully between the wounded.
Two doctors and three nurses couldn't cover several hundred
patients.

Susan stood
on the edge of the doctor's vision and said,
“
Is there
anything I can do to help?
”

“
You want to
help?
”
the doctor said, sounding exasperated. She
didn't look up from stitching a bleeding wound.

“
Yes,
”
she replied, noting the sense of
hopelessness in the doctor's voice. At that moment, what seemed
like a good idea felt stupid, and she was suddenly aware of how
inadequate she was in this regard. She might have been willing, but
she wasn't able.

“
Can you
sew?
”

To Susan, the question
seemed irrelevant, and yet she couldn't answer with a simple yes.
She felt intimidated both by the doctor and the enormity of the
disaster.

“
My mother
works the looms. She taught me to mend from an early
age.
”

“
OK,
”
the doctor replied, still not
looking up from her patient.
“
You're on
lacerations, that's the group nearest the wall-screen. We've got
too many crush victims to tend to them. They're all
yours.
”

Susan stood there confused,
not making the connection in her mind.

The nurse
assisting the doctor looked up, adding,
“
Take them
one-by-one into the kitchen and wash their wounds thoroughly in
warm soapy water. Don't let the water sit. Make sure it's
constantly running. Dry and bind their wounds using anything you
can. You'll find a bunch of bandages on the counter by dry-storage,
but I doubt there will be enough.
”

The nurse
paused, thinking for a moment before adding,
“
Deep cuts
may require stitches. Sterilize your needle over a flame. Other
than that, sewing up a wound is just like mending torn coveralls
... Oh, and wash your hands and arms thoroughly between patients.
Any questions?
”

Susan shook her head, more
in dismay than to say no.

“
Call me if
you need help,
”
the nurse said, tossing a small
package over to her.

Susan caught the package.
For a moment, she simply stared at the contents through the clear
plastic. There was a single compression bandage, a couple of gauze
pads, scissors, medical tape, a roll of surgical thread and a
couple of needles.

The patient before the
doctor writhed in pain, crying out in agony. The nurse pinned his
shoulders as the doctor kept working away on the wound. A metal
clamp slipped and fell to the marble floor. Blood squirted from a
severed artery, spraying the doctor's apron as she fought to
control the bleeding.

Susan looked over at the
mess of bodies in front of the wall-screen and figured she didn't
know what she was doing so she might as well start at the front and
learn as quick as she could. This wasn't what she'd meant when she
offered to help. She thought she would sent to get fresh water or
would help move patients around. The prospect of dealing with
serious injuries was daunting, but she was determined to do
whatever she could to help ease the suffering.

Stepping between people
lying on the ground, Susan made her way to a young boy with deep
cut running down his forearm. He was sobbing quietly, looking at
his arm.

“
Come with
me.
”

Those three words seemed to
be medicine in themselves, and not just for him. They instill
confidence in her as well.

Over the next few hours,
Susan realized the physical act of cleaning wounds was only part of
the job. Having someone care for them was healing in itself,
helping those injured to find the strength to endure.

Three more teenagers, a
girl and two boys joined her. She recognized them as being a couple
of years younger than her at school, but she didn't know them by
name. They introduced themselves as Olivia, Steve and Jamie. They
clearly thought she was a nurse despite her dirty, bloody porter's
coveralls and took their lead from her.

Together the four of them
set up a system for treating those with less severe injuries. Steve
and Jamie helped the injured to a large stainless steel kitchen
sink normally used for preparing vegetables, while Susan and Olivia
set to cleaning and bandaging wounds, all the while talking to the
patients, finding out who they were, where they were from and how
they'd been injured. Afterwards, one of the boys would assist the
patients to the far wall, well away from where they'd been
initially placed. Susan found a mop and bucket at the back of the
floor and had the boys clean the bloodied floor as they
went.

The overhead lights were
bright. Ordinarily, there would have been numerous lights on in the
kitchen, saturating the workbenches with light and leaving no
shadows, but the quake must have damaged the wiring. Only a few
lights worked, including the light directly over the sink. At first
it didn't bother Susan too much, but after awhile she found her
tired eyes failing in the stark contrast between light and dark. As
she tended to her patients, she had to keep moving around, trying
not to cast shadows over her hands. She needed to get a good look
at each wound and would spend considerable mental effort
distinguishing between muscle and sinew, bloodied fragments of
concrete and wooden splinters. After a while, all she could focus
on were the injuries. The faces that moved before her became
incidental, secondary to their wounds. It took all her will to
focus on the subtleties of each injury.

The night was long, and yet
the moans and cries softened as the night wore on. Beneath the
stark, electric lights within the kitchen, Susan had no awareness
of time passing. A couple of the kitchen hands broke out coffee and
gave it to the medical workers. Susan had only ever had coffee once
before and was surprised by the rush it brought to her
mind.

Jamie brought over a
middle-aged man, seating him on the end of the bench. Susan
finished up with a young girl, using a cleaning cloth and medical
tape to secure what she thought was a broken finger to a good
finger. Jamie took the girl away and the man swung his legs up into
the sink.

“
OK, what
have we got here?
”
Susan asked, looking at his legs.
Like the doctor, hours before, she no longer looked at her
patients, focusing only on their wounds. At the time, she hadn't
understood why the doctor couldn't have looked up at her, but now
she knew. It was a job, a bloody, tiring, thankless effort.
Depersonalizing the task was the only way to get through the sheer
volume of patients. It wasn't that she didn't care or wasn't
careful, it was that the only way to care was to focus intently on
each injury as it passed before her.

Blood had clotted around
multiple cuts leading from the man's knees down to his feet. He
still had one boot on, but his coveralls had been cut away at his
thigh, exposing his wounds.

“
I was
trapped for a few hours under a wall of fallen concrete cinder
blocks.
”

“
Crush
injuries should be tended to by the doctors,
”
Susan said,
scrubbing her hands and forearms with soapy water as she called
out,
“
I'm going to need more soap here. Can someone get me a
refill?
”

“
On
it,
”
Olivia said, turning away from her and rummaging
around under the bench behind Susan.

“
They sent me
here,
”
the man said.
“
Told me I was a
category four.
”

“
OK, let's
take a good look,
”
Susan said, not knowing what
category four meant but respecting the doctor's triage system. She
used the tip of a short kitchen knife to carefully pick at dirt and
debris in his wound, gently washing away as much of the dirt as she
could with water squeezed from a sponge.

“
I'm not
going to lie to you,
”
she said.
“
This looks
pretty bad. You should really be seen by a
doctor.
”

Out of the corner of her
eye, she could see him nodding in agreement as she continued,
arching over the sink, carefully examining his legs.

“
I'm sorry,
but this is going to hurt. I've got to clean out your wound before
I can stitch you up.
”

Using her elbow, she nudged
the tap toward the man so the trickle of warm water began washing
over his legs. Susan was vaguely aware of another woman standing on
the other side of the bench, holding the man's hand for support as
he grimaced in pain. She must have been a relative, Susan figured,
but as hunched over as she was she didn't make eye
contact.

“
We've got a
lot of bleeding here,
”
Susan said, turning to
Olivia.
“
I'm going to need you to apply pressure to the
back of the calf.
”

She raised his leg, resting
his ankle on the other side of the kitchen sink. There was
considerable abrasion, with long strips of skin torn from the shin
bone. A flap of loose skin hung down from the back of the man's
calf muscle. The water ran red with blood.

Olivia came around beside
Susan with a bunch of wet cloths. She had wrung them out, but soap
bubbles still sat in the coarse material.

“
Here,
”
Susan said, pointing, rolling the
man's leg gently to one side so she could get a better look at the
torn calf muscle.

Olivia
clamped her hands below the man's knee, saying,
“
The needle
closest to you is sterile and threaded.
”

“
Good,
”
was all Susan could manage in reply.
Her narrow focus on the bloodied leg before her caused the rest of
the world to fade and recede into the background. She wiped away
the blood with a cloth while reaching out with her other hand and
picking up the needle, never taking her eyes off the wound. Sweat
dripped from her forehead.

The man grimaced as she
began sewing up the tear in his muscle. He rested his hand on her
shoulder, squeezing as she threaded the needle back and forth
through the torn tissue. No one else had touched her. They'd all
sat with almost formal rigidity, as though she were some high
priest, but this stranger reminded her of her father. In the back
of her mind, she wondered where he was, hoping he was OK, hoping
someone was caring for him as she was caring for others.

“
Scissors.
”

Olivia handed scissors to
her. Susan snipped the surgical thread and handed the scissors back
to her, shifting her focus to a loose flap of skin on the man's
ankle. Carefully, she cleaned the skin, trying not to disturb the
weeping flesh too much, and then stitched the skin back in place.
She breathed a sigh of relief as she dried and bandaged the
wound.

His other leg wasn't as
bad. She had him lift the leg she'd treated out of the sink so she
didn't get the fresh bandage wet. There was severe bruising to the
man's left leg along with several small lacerations that didn't
require stitches and a light abrasion on his shin, similar to the
one she'd treated on his right leg. Susan cleaned his leg gently
and then dried his leg with a damp towel. Although she'd used
medical bandages on the right leg, she bandaged his left leg with
strips of cleaning cloth to keep her supply to sterile bandages in
reserve.