What Stands in a Storm (23 page)

Voices began echoing across the courtyard as people dug themselves out of the shelled apartments. She was not alone.

“Help! I'm over here!” Chelsea screamed. “I can't move!
Help me!
”

Her phone was right there, within arm's reach, and she fumbled around for it. She knew the cell towers were probably down, that her call would never go through. But she dialed her mother anyway.

“Hey!” her mother, Kelle, said.

“I'm so sorry, Mom!” Chelsea said. “I lied to you! I'm sorry I lied! I was at the apartment . . . and it's destroyed.”

She had told her mother that she was on campus, safe, when she had stayed in her boyfriend's one-bedroom apartment instead, while he went to work on campus. She had not wanted her to worry. She never thought this would happen. Not today. Not like this. And yet here she was.

“What do you mean? Are you okay?” her mother said.

“I can't move my legs! I'm so sorry! I lied, Mom. I'm sorry I lied!”

“You've got to get to the hospital,” said Kelle, a surgical nurse who was on her day off. “Your dad and I are on the way.”

At the far end of Charleston Square, two newlyweds crawled out of their bathroom to find every wall of their student apartment warped, torn, or missing. Water dripped through holes in the ceiling, and through the front door of their second-story apartment they could hear a neighbor screaming and crying. They looked at each other and filled the sinks and tub with whatever water was left in the pipes. Then they opened the door and realized how lucky they were.

Their corner of Charleston Square was the only section of the complex that still retained some semblance of a roof. Looking around them, they took in 360 degrees of chaos. Much of the complex was leveled to the foundation, and the massive oaks that had shaded the courtyard were splintered across the lawn. Muffled screams were coming from beneath great piles of rubble.

Derek and Susan DeBruin closed the door and rummaged through rooms that looked as if they had been hit by a hurricane, gathering first aid kits, headlamps, knee pads, gloves, and water. Derek, a grad
student in higher education administration, was grateful he had taken a Wilderness First Responder course just a few months ago, a requirement for his summer job as a rock-climbing guide. He was still wearing his yellow mountaineering boots, which he had pulled on that morning to try out a new pair of crampons—the pointy metal spikes that would allow him to walk across a glacier. He kept the boots on as he and his young wife, Susan, began scrambling across precarious heaps of broken boards spiked with rusty nails.

Someone on the east side of the building was calling for help from the parking lot. Derek climbed over a three-foot wall of debris as Susan ran around it. In the parking lot they found three college students hovering over a figure sprawled on the ground. He ran to them and saw on the ground a blonde woman who looked a year or two younger than Susan, probably a fellow student. Her blue eyes were open but unseeing, pupils dilated, and when he pressed his fingers to her neck he felt her thready pulse slipping away.

Beside him, Susan did not see what her husband saw with a trained and clinical eye, that the extent of this woman's injuries was such that CPR was not possible. She only saw a beautiful young blonde woman, and a shirt that was ripped to pieces.

Derek looked up at the three students, two boys and a girl, standing over him, holding their breath. He had assumed they were the young woman's friends, but they did not know her, and yet they visibly mourned her loss. He asked them to go find him a sheet. He laid it gently over her body. Nicole Mixon, twenty-two, a junior in accounting, was an honor student and a member of the Gamma Phi Beta sorority. She left behind three younger sisters.

Charleston Square was now throbbing with people exhibiting a kaleidoscope of mental states. A hysterical woman emerged from the periphery, crying loudly and uncontrollably. Derek tried to help her, but he could not see an injury or understand what she needed. She kept trying to speak, but her words were strangled by sobs.

A group of college students from across the street came out and
offered to help. No official responders had appeared on the scene, and suddenly Derek and Susan found themselves in the unexpected and precarious position of assumed authority. People looked to them for direction. But they were not authorities—they were graduate students and climbing guides. Maybe it was their gear that made them stand out in the crowd. Or maybe it was the way they walked with purpose, as if they knew what to do, and people were drawn to that comfort.

In the inner courtyard, Derek and Susan spotted a small group of men kneeling in the grass by a body. When they drew closer, they saw the body belonged to another college girl. She was lying supine, torso slightly twisted to the left. She was awake and coherent, crying into her mobile phone, apologizing to her mother.

Chelsea Thrash was scared but alert and oriented. Unlike the hysterical woman who appeared uninjured, this girl, though clearly hurt, was remarkably calm. Derek palpated her in a primary exam, noting extensive bruises and lacerations. Mud caked her skin and debris filled her hair, and she was visibly fighting pain. When he checked her spine his fingers found her lower back hemorrhaging badly. She said she could not feel her feet.

Spinal injury
, he thought.
We need a backboard and an ambulance.

It didn't take long to realize that if no responders had yet appeared on the scene, there was no telling when they might arrive, and this woman could not afford to wait. He and Susan could not carry her out alone, over these mountains of debris. They were going to need more strong arms if they were going to get her out.

As if summoned on cue, three strong men walked up. They had come to spread the word that Fire & Rescue was setting up triage at Mayer Electric, their place of employment, just a few blocks away.

“What can we do?” one of the men said.

“We need a backboard,” Derek replied. “Something we can use to carry her and keep her stable. A door. A table. Find me something.”

One of the men reached into the rubble, flipped a kitchen table upside down, and plucked off the legs as if he were pulling weeds.

Either that table is really cheap
, Derek thought,
or you are really strong.

Derek guided the men through the delicate process of logrolling Chelsea carefully onto her side, taking great care not to twist her spine. They slid the makeshift backboard under her hip and shoulder and rolled her back upon it. Now they needed to make sure she didn't roll off.

“I need pillows, towels, some kind of padding,” Derek said.

Derek rolled a towel and wrapped it around Chelsea's neck, stabilizing her cervical spine, then used pillows and linens to pad the gaps between her body and the tabletop. He strapped her body to the table with belts and bath towels torn into long strips. Then eight strangers and neighbors each grabbed an edge of the table and carried her over the debris.

As they crossed the parking lot and neared Tenth Street, a man drove by in a 1970s pickup truck with his wife and two children riding shotgun. Two older kids were sitting in the bed of the truck, which was loaded with every possession the family had salvaged from their home.

“Do y'all need a ride?” the man asked.

“We don't need a ride,” Derek said, “but she does.”

Without question, the man unloaded the back of his pickup truck and dumped his things in the street. The men gingerly slid Chelsea and the table over the rusty tailgate and secured her in the back.

“I have room for two'a you guys,” the man said.

Two men from Mayer Electric climbed in and directed the truck to their parking lot, where the ambulances were shuttling load after load of people to the hospital.

Derek and Susan had turned and started back into Charleston Square when two students approached them in the parking lot, clutching an infant.

“We just found this baby in the rubble. It's totally fine.”

The responders of Rescue 27 set up a makeshift morgue in the back of Mayer Electric, because people kept bringing them bodies. There was nothing they could do but set them aside and pull a dirty sheet over them as they turned their efforts back to the living. The dead came to them pitifully, on tables, in the arms of family, one in a dirty rolled-up carpet.

By now they knew that the Curry building, their Emergency Operations Center, had been destroyed, and with it most of the emergency supplies they needed to work through this. Mass casualty trailers with backboards and stretchers, C-collars and bandages, were now buried or swept away. FEMA disaster trailers with medical supplies, blankets, and water were crumpled up and discarded by the wind. The tools they needed for digging and prying—gone.

They improvised, ripping T-shirts to make tourniquets, fashioning splints from scavenged two-by-fours. They found a pickup truck with keys dangling in the ignition. It had blown-out windows and four flat tires, but it served as a makeshift ambulance.

Rescue 27 had run out of medical supplies long ago. Its compartments were completely bare, not a single bandage left. Now it became a shuttle bus, carrying loads of the walking wounded to the hospital. Adam Watley and his crew packed them in like cordwood—ten, twelve, fourteen at a time. This was not patient care. It was hauling live bodies. The rescuers had long since given up on operating by the book. The book had no chapter about days like this.

As Watley returned to Mayer Electric for another busload, his next patient arrived on a table, numb and motionless from the waist down. Chelsea Thrash looked at him lucidly, her blue eyes brimming with pain, and he saw in those eyes a calm that gave him the first hope all day. There was nothing left on the truck with which to treat her, but if he could give her one thing, it was time. He turned to the driver.

“Let's run this hot!”

The lights flashed and the sirens wailed as Rescue 27 sped to the hospital, this time hauling only one patient.

This one
, Watley thought,
just might make it.

7:00 P.M., APRIL 27, 2011—PRICEVILLE, ALABAMA

Fixing supper in her kitchen, Will's mother looked up and turned to her husband, Darrell.

“It's not like Will not to call me,” she said. “Something's wrong.”

Jean Stevens had dialed her son's number again and again but kept getting that unfamiliar beeping. She had assumed that the lines were down, but now she was starting to worry.

She turned on the TV, to newscasters talking feverishly. There were three big ones on the ground in Alabama right now. The biggest one of the day, an EF5, was in the northeastern corner of the state, claiming twenty-five lives. Between shots of a radar showing multiple storms, the news was flashing scenes that looked as if they came out of a horror film.

That's Tuscaloosa?
She felt an icy hand squeezing her heart.

Will had gone over to Danielle's house, that much she knew. They decided to call Danielle's parents but did not have the number. What was Mr. Downs's first name? They couldn't remember, so Jean dug through last week's mail to find Michelle's wedding invitation.

“Have you talked to Danielle?” Darrell asked Ed Downs.

“No, we haven't talked to her today,” he said. “But her landlady called and said there had been damage to the house.”

Jean and Darrell felt a surge of panic. They got in the Tahoe with Will's eighteen-year-old sister, Taylor, and hoped they could make the two-hour drive to Tuscaloosa on a quarter tank of gas.

As they sped down the interstate, Darrell dialed Will's best friend, Rand Hutchinson. They had played ball together since fifth grade, and Rand lived across town from Will in Tuscaloosa.

“Hey, man,” Darrell said. “Have you talked to Will?”

“No, I haven't talked to him. But I'll see if I can get ahold of him,” Rand said. “His apartment was nowhere near the storm. He'll be fine.”