Текст книги "The Flood"

Автор книги: David Sachs

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

17

 

There were just five doctors, twenty-two nurses, three paramedics and one combat medic. Travis recognized one of the doctors, the middle-aged man he’d seen on the deck crying in the woman’s arms just before the attack. On this doctor’s face, Travis saw an anguish so ugly he forced himself to keep looking at it, as if he needed to understand.

One of the men in the group was the ship surgeon. There were two ship nurses as well. They did not know if the other nurses or doctor on staff had been killed or abandoned ship in the lifeboats.

“Do you have anyone else here you know from the ship?” the ship surgeon asked the ship nurses.

They nodded.

“Take them with you and go to the clinic. We’ll need surgical tools, all the basics, okay? Every scalpel, scissor, and forceps we have. Plenty of gloves and antiseptic. We’ll need spinal collars and backboards, bandages, splints, the whole shebang. Suction, oxygen, zappers, all the toys with battery packs. Let’s see. Thrombolytics and morphine.”

He spoke with the casual precision of expertise. The two nurses went back to the clinic, taking with them three other crew: a bartender, a DJ, a waiter.

“Go on, doctor,” the man from the bar-top prodded. “How do we manage this?”

“Okay,” the doctor looked around his makeshift team. “Guys, the first thing you need to know about multiple casualty triage is that the rule changes from Do the best for each patient, to Do the best for the greatest number of patients. Who are the nurses? You five will fan out. We need to triage, like this. Minimal intervention now, just opening airways or controlling external hemorrhages. Nothing else but assessment. All these guys with their hands up, get them to show a number with their fingers. Check the patients out. Salvageable and can’t wait is number one – any massive trauma or loss of blood. Salvageable and can wait is number two, broken arms, non-critical wounds, 1st and 2nd degree burns. Number three is unsalvageable. Who are the paramedics?”

Travis raised his hand, along with two other men.

“Get the number threes morphine, then come help with the ones. When we deal with the ones and twos we’ll see if any threes can be saved. Anyone with serious blood loss… we just don’t have the blood.”

“We can do a donor clinic,” Travis said. “Right here. I did it in Africa. They just use the whole blood.”

“We can’t do blood tests,” the ship surgeon said.

“Ask them,” Travis said. “A lot of people that are O-negative know it.”

The universally compatible blood type, O-negative.

“Okay,” the ship surgeon said. “Okay. You, triage nurses, go. Get moving. Remember, one, two, three.”

The ship surgeon peered into the crowd and then called out, “I need two volunteers to run back to the medical clinic. Two volunteers who know where the clinic is, can run there, and carry stuff back.”

The ship surgeon sent two passengers back to work with the nurses to bring blood storage and needles, tubing, saline bags and hangers.

The man on the bar left the ship surgeon to organize the medical team.

He faced the two junior officers from the ship who had come down, as well as six military officers and dozens of soldiers and reservists. The man on the bar asked them to wait while he addressed the crowd.

“Okay, everybody, we have good news. The ship’s surgeon is here, he has his staff nurses and a whole team of doctors and nurses volunteering from the crowd. We have nurses going out right now to do triage. Please do as they say, the doctors will be following them. We should have medical supplies from the clinic starting to come in around ten minutes. We have some of the ship’s officers and some folks with military experience. We’re going to have them come up with a plan to assess our situation as quickly as possible, and assess our food situation as well which I think everyone here is probably starting to wonder about.”

Hundreds watched his face and wished for him to know what to do next.

“Firstly,” he continued, “does anyone here know of any fires going on, or, well, just any information that anyone has that they think is important, I guess this is the chance to shout it out.”

“Who are you?” someone shouted.

“I’m John Hesse,” the man on the bar said.

Travis was watching the triage nurses approaching the first few groups where hands were still held high. The nurses took their time. Travis was aware that the crowd was yelling at John Hesse on the bar, but he continued watching the nurses. Checking vitals without instruments. Asking the questions. Then the first wave seemed to break across the room, and the nurses moved on and hands held up turned to fingers counting numbers in the air. There was a three.

Travis was familiar with this kind of work. He saw two outstretched hands go down, and Travis knew what that likely meant.

“Does anyone here know about the power systems, or about propulsions?  Do we have any of the engineers or anything like that?” John Hesse yelled.

One of the junior officers huddled in front of the bar spoke up, unsure of himself. “I don’t think we can get propulsion back. If they damaged the engines, we can’t fix them now. I haven’t seen any of the engineers. This emergency lighting we have is from a separate generator. I have no idea where it will be working or how much total power it has. But it means something’s still working, at least.”

“What happened to New York? Does anyone know?” someone shouted.

“We have enough to worry about here,” Hesse said. “We have to consider shouting as how we communicate as a group right now, so I guess we all need to be judicious. Don’t yell out information or questions unless it directly affects our activities and understanding of our situation… right now.”

“I have a dead body,” someone called out. “What should I do with it… right now?”

John Hesse looked down at the ship surgeon.

“We’ve only got two body compartments,” the surgeon said, “and they won’t be cooled even if there still is emergency power in the clinic. We could be here days, this could be a health hazard. Bodies rot quick. We need bodies off the ship, I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry,” John Hesse said back to the crowd. “We have no facilities here for bodies, and they will become a health hazard very quickly. The dead will have to be buried at sea. Please everyone see to your own family members, enlist the help of others in moving them if needed. Everyone is really going to have to get used to helping each other. When we take care of the more urgent matters we’ll have some organized body removals around the ship, but… take care of your own.”

Hesse took more questions, shouted out more vague ideas about assessing the situation, and then he called off the discussion and came down to talk with his second volunteer group. It was a crowd, but he could see that officers and some civilians had sifted themselves to the front while crew and some other civilians were just behind them.

“Which of you is the highest ranking ship officer?” he said.

“I’m a second officer,” a young man said. “I think that’s the highest.”

“Do we have any senior military officers?” Hesse asked.

“I was a colonel in the Army,” an old man said, adding, “I didn’t have too much experience at sea.”

Hesse looked from one to the other. “You two need to talk. We need an assessment of our power, our danger from fire and leaks, our food situation, our communications… that’ll do. We also need an assessment of the best way to get some food down here this morning, you might want to get a team together for that effort. You,” he pointed at the second officer, “you let the Colonel take charge, you tell him anything he needs to know about the ship. Colonel, you can take volunteers from the crowd here if you need to send teams out. I suggest you use the other men here-” indicating the officers and military men, “-as team leaders. But I’m sure you know what you’re doing, Colonel.”

“Before we do any of that,” the Colonel said, “we need toilets. The toilets aren’t flushing. Folks need toilets.”

“OK,” Hesse said. “You should have some crew here who can help.”

The Colonel looked behind at the crowd of volunteers.

“That should do. If I need more help, I’ll come back. And ask people to piss of the decks until we get the johns going.”

Hesse nodded.

“One more thing,” Hesse said. “Anyone you send out there, if they find any bodies, they have to be dumped.”

Hesse looked at the Colonel, and his eyes wandered across the other men gathered round him. As he looked at the men, there was nothing in his eyes that asked their permission. Like that, he became the general.

18

As supplies came down, the medical team worked in high gear. The crashing of the ships had caused scores of accidents, from flesh torn open to sprained ankles to bodies and bones crushed under falling structures.  There were burn victims who had hung on through the night but could never be saved this morning. They mostly spoke of fire in stern areas and someone told of the power room exploding. There were heart attacks and bullet wounds, and one man who had left New York without his insulin in a diabetic coma. Travis, bringing morphine, occasionally heard the shouts of the crowd around him and the responses from John Hesse.

There were missing family members, and Hesse designated a landing on one of the staircases as a meeting place for those split up. The staircases didn’t glow green anymore. In the dull daylight, the emergency lighting was drowned out as well. All around, the fantastical lighting of the day before was gone, and now the Romanesque columns and shapes seemed an ancient, abandoned site just found in the fog.

As the morphine went out to the injured, the screaming echoing in the belly of the ship was snuffed one voice at a time.

Colonel Martin Warrant, long retired from active duty, first formed teams to construct and install porta-johns. They considered using water buckets to flush the existing toilets, but there was no way they could keep up with the demand without running water, so a whole lot of porta-johns would be needed. He put an old Air Force officer in charge of the john-crew, mainly Festival crew members, including some tradesmen and others familiar with the materials and tools available.

Only when the john-crew was organized and out did Colonel Warrant turn to his other priorities, assessing the ship and planning food delivery. He spoke to the other ship’s crew and military men and women after a brief discussion with the Festival’s last Second Officer.

“We will need to break up into teams. Because of the ship’s size and decentralization of food and key equipment, we will split by area. We are going to do this fast, but we are going to do this thoroughly and get it right. We’ll need information on damage, fires, communications equipment, power, remaining lifeboat capacity, other passengers onboard, and of course, food.”

He scanned the quiet group. “First of all, who here has the faintest goddamn idea about ships’ engines?”

Nobody answered.

“Alright. Who thinks they can figure it out?”

“We have scuba gear,” one of the Festival’s officers said. “Maybe someone could check out the propellers and get an idea how bad the hull is.”

“The bridge is gone,” another man said. “How could we sail even if we had power and propellers?”

“You can control the ship from the power room,” the Second Officer said. “You just can’t see.”

“Alright,” Colonel Warrant said to the officer who had mentioned the scuba gear. “Do you dive? Well, find four divers, and if you need men to lower them, take men for that too. Check the propellers, what the hell, take your time and check the whole goddamn ship. For God’s sake, make sure you’ve got a way back onboard. Good luck. Okay, what’s next? Right, who thinks they can figure out if the power room is salvageable?”

His assessment teams under way, the Colonel finally turned to food. Fortunately, there were a number of galley crew there: the Executive Chef, the saucier, the roast cook, the assistant butcher, several waiters and busboys, beverage managers, bartenders and stewards.

It wouldn’t be easy, the Colonel was told: they had half their staff to prepare food, with no power, for double the crowd. So Hesse recruited more cooks, servers and dishwashers and Colonel Warrant sent another team off to work.

After his morphine round, Travis set up the blood clinic, calling for donors from the O-negatives. Occasionally, as the assessment teams left, the Colonel or some other among them would call for volunteers. One time he asked for helpers to bring food down. A few dozen lined up to give blood. It was then still before 8:30, but Travis was conscious of his own hunger as he heard that complaint repeated around the room. He looked towards his son and Corrina occasionally and was happy to see Claude Bettman had stayed near them.

After this, Travis worked with the doctors.  He joined up with the sad man. His face now showed some relief in the distraction of broken bodies, his stock in trade. But he needed help. He had to amputate a foot.

The doctor’s name was Joel Conrad. He was also a New York refugee. A cardiac surgeon from King’s County Hospital, he and Travis began their acquaintance by naming mutual friends from New York hospitals. After a few minutes, that talk tailed off as they each realized they might be talking of dead men and women. He was a good doctor, Travis could see that as they worked. Now he could see his face, not hidden in a women’s lap, not disfigured with emotion. Conrad was a handsome man, with fine grey hair still somehow holding its part after all they’d been through. His face was tan, like some of the tourists on the Festival, which had initially sailed from Florida.

After the amputation, blood spattered on their shirt sleeves, they treated a burn victim. The patient’s husband cleared his throat and kneeled down so that his face was level with Travis and Conrad’s.

“Doctor. Do you think we’ll survive?”

Travis looked to Conrad as if to offer whatever support he could, but Conrad answered calmly, looking up at the man after his first few words.

“Why shouldn’t we?” Dr. Conrad said. “We have everything we need here. Surely we can live with some diminished electricity long enough to be rescued.”

The man seemed to be looking for more than an answer to the question he’d asked. He waited a moment after Conrad spoke and then continued.

“What if no one knows about us? What if it takes…”

“Then we’ll have to wait. Days or weeks,” Conrad said. “Remember that whatever we have suffered here, we are still alive. We still have this freshly stocked luxury ship to support us, and each other to get us through. I can assure you that there are many, perhaps hundreds of thousands, who are worse off than us. We escaped the flood.”

Travis saw Conrad grimace as he said those last words, but he let the impression go.

There was an injured girl. She had her family there, and the mother and brother were crying. The injury was less serious than it looked. Her clothes were bloodstained, but the loss of blood was not substantial, and Travis felt pride at seeing her hooked up to one of the newly donated bags of blood. He was distracted, so that only when they finished with the patient did he get a good look at Conrad’s face again. The doctor stood looking away, taking a momentary breather. The ugliness contorting his face had returned, and Travis thought: it’s guilt.

Sometime after noon, assessment teams began returning, conferring with John Hesse and Colonel Warrant. Then one team came, triumphantly, with food. Seven men and women came in with six-foot carts, carrying stacks of covered trays.  Quickly the proud looks of those bringing the food turned. They were swarmed before they could penetrate the room.

Hesse jumped up onto the bar.

“Everybody! Please listen! There is plenty of food for everybody! But not all at once. The team getting the food will return to the galleys and prepare more cartloads, but there is not nearly enough here right at this moment for everyone – so why don’t we have the kids eat first, and anyone who absolutely feels sick?”

“Why don’t we just go down to the kitchen and get food ourselves?” someone called.

“The galley can’t operate with hundreds of us pouring in there. Please, give these people a chance to bring the food in.”

There was a lot of screaming.

“Who are you to tell us we can’t go up and get food ourselves?”

Hesse waited for quiet. In standing there above the others, his own patience was so visible it made the crowd quiet because they wanted to hear his response.

“Please!” a new voice screamed, a woman’s.

Travis saw. It was the mother of the girl on deck yesterday.

“This man saved my girl,” she said. “Please listen to him.”

Hesse cut in quickly to the space that followed her words.

“Guys, we are in a tough situation here and we all know it. Until we get all the assessment teams back, we really won’t know what kind of shape we’re in at all. But I can tell you one thing – if we choose to act now through chaos it will certainly be a lot worse. We have survived two disasters right now, but if we give in to fear and panic we will create a disaster of our own that we may not survive. Please. Back away from the food carts. We’ll call for kids first in a moment when they’re ready. We’ll have more food down here within an hour, and hopefully they’ll get power to the stoves. We have right now lots of bread, cold cuts, cheeses and fruits. Our cooks will get more sophisticated as we go.  We may not even have enough food here on the next round, but be assured, we will feed you. No one’s ever gone hungry on a cruise ship.”

One of the men who had led an assessment team came right up to Hesse and tugged at the hem of his jeans. Hesse came down to him. The tension in the crowd dissipated; the food servers were left to set up, though many stood close by watching and watching the others doing the same.

“There are others,” the man said to Hesse.

“I know,” Hesse said. “Some of the groups have found families hiding out or locked in their rooms. They’ve been telling them to come down here. If anyone needs medical attention where they are, tell the doctor.”

“No, I mean a big group. Hundreds. They’re in the Theater. Apparently that’s the second location the captain herded the refugees in New York. There’s a lot of the tourists wound up with them now as well, the ones that had rooms in the back. It seemed like they’d overwhelm us here so I told them to send some representatives to come down here and coordinate with us and share information. They should be coming any time.”

Hesse nodded. As he rejoined Colonel Warrant, the crew member who had led the diving group returned.

Carts of food were continuously brought down; Travis and Conrad did not stop to eat. Bloodied, tired, and hungry, they continued. They set bones and splinted them, they stitched lacerations, they treated burns and intubated one man on a spinal board.

At some point, John Hesse returned to his perch on the bar and yelled for the crowd’s attention.

“We’ve gotten some reports back from most of the teams. Here’s our situation. First the bad news. The generators and engines are out of commission; of course, we’ll see if we can change that. We do have emergency power, as you can all see, but nobody in charge of it. That’s a problem we can solve. There is a watertight compartment shut off because of the collision, we have a twenty foot vertical gash. The compartments are designed to protect the ship from a leak filling the boat, and it’s working. We’re not in danger from the collision anymore. There was a ship fire crew already at work battling the fires. They’ve closed off several corridors, but they have taken more volunteers and have things under control. We have no communications. The communications room was adjacent to the bridge and was destroyed in the attack. Any emergency signal devices would have been in the same location. We can’t call for help. But this ship will be missed and will be looked for. We have to assume that authorities on land will eventually be performing sweeps of the ocean. This was done when the tsunami hit Southeast Asia, so we know we’ll be found eventually, we just don’t know when that will happen. Our best estimate is that there are between three and four thousand of us still on board. By my guess, that means some few hundred left by lifeboat during the night.”

Immediately screams came from the crowd. One voice carried over the others.

“Why don’t we use the lifeboats now?”

“There aren’t enough,” Hesse responded. “First of all, the lifeboats are intended for the number of passengers and crew on the ship, not for two thousand plus refugees. Second, the lifeboats are high capacity, but I don’t think that those that left during the night were very efficient about it. In fact, I know they weren’t because I watched my girlfriend leave in one. And I’ll tell you what else. Those lifeboats will never make it back to land. It’s just too far. Here, the ship can still support us until we’re found. Now the good news. The ship isn’t sinking. There are no major breaches of the hull, and any flooding is being contained in the watertight compartments. We also have plenty of food. That’s it.”

“That’s all the good news?” someone shouted. “We aren’t sinking and we have food?”

“What the hell do you want?” Hesse snapped. “The entire east coast of the Americas is lost, and for all we know, Europe or anywhere else could be flooded too, but we’re alive, sheltered and safe. Count your blessings. All we can do now is pull together, stay organized, and survive. That’s… that’s our mission. Guys, we can survive here. We have food, and medical professionals, and a safe ship. We’ll make it as long as we need to.”

Hesse stepped down. More questions were shouted at him, but he ignored them and took Colonel Warrant by the arm. The two of them strode to a shop off the side of the Atrium. Hesse kicked the locked door open and the two went in to set up a command centre.

The first porta-johns came down and were set up along the perimeter of the great room.

The medical staff worked their way through the ones and twos. No one died out of the patients Travis and Conrad had seen to, but now they were dealing with the threes. The first one they came to was already dead. The man next to him, holding up his three fingers, had been unable to look down at his father dying. He had never seen the old man slip away. He’d spent the whole day holding that arm up, supported by his other arm, three fingers held high.

The second number three had been shot in the chest. Travis called for a nurse to bring blood. As they prepared him for IV, Conrad cleaned and studied the hole in his chest. The man convulsed.

“Cardiac arrest,” Conrad said.

“Joel,” Travis said. He shook his head no.

He was trying to protect the doctor from the anguish, to give him permission to move on.

“No!” Conrad said sharply, then he smiled at Travis. “Are you ready for an adventure?”

Travis smiled in answer.  If Conrad was ok to keep fighting, so was he.

“We’re going to do an emergency thoracotomy. I’ll need a Gigli saw, large clamp or forceps, a large scalpel and scissors, and sutures. We need to intubate, and we’ll need suction – the portable pump has a battery pack.”

Travis ran off. He retrieved the tools and portable oxygen supply and returned in less than three minutes.

“Here we go,” Conrad said. “You intubate, I’ll cut.”

Travis pressed tubes into the man’s nose, connecting them with the portable oxygen supply. Conrad doused the chest with antiseptic, and cut shallow incisions at each side of his chest. He cut deeper, connecting the two incisions in a smile-shape across the bottom of the chest. Travis watched, amazed, as the doctor inserted two fingers into one of the side incisions as he finished his deep cut.

“I’m keeping the lungs out of the way,” he said. “Now give me that Gigli saw and the forceps.”

The Gigli saw was a flexible wire saw with metal handles at each end. The skin was pulled back, revealing the sternum. Conrad used the forceps to pass the saw under the sternum. With smooth, long strokes, he cut the sternum through from the inside out.

“Now I need your help,” Doctor Conrad said. “Pull the skin open and hold it.”

Travis did as he was told. Doctor Conrad snapped the sternum open with his hands; the crowd which had begun to gather jumped back at the noise. Blood was spattered across Travis and Conrad’s arms and faces. They could see the heart now, clear and open. It was bathed in blood. Conrad used the suction, and they saw a small tear in the heart. The bullet itself had passed through the man’s back.

“First thing is to suture the heart,” Conrad said. “This is the only thing we’ve done today that I’m actually qualified to do.”

His fingers moved incredibly quickly. The heart though, was not moving at all.

“Now we need to massage the heart. Very gentle, this might work quickly.”

The doctor simply flicked the heart with his finger. After the briefest of pauses, it swelled and pulsed once.

“It’s not going,” Conrad said.

He began massaging the heart with both hands. One flat hand was applied to the front, one underneath. He milked the heart, moving his hands at a beat faster than once a second, yet so gently.

“Can you give me a free hand? Compress the aorta against the spine, this will maximize coronary perfusion.”

For almost a minute the two handled the heart in silence. Sweat was pouring off Conrad’s face. Then Conrad pulled away.

The heart kept beating.

“We’ve got it!”

Two women above them burst into tears, others cheered loudly.

Travis and Conrad leaned back for a moment.

“We just might save this man,” Conrad said. “Let’s close him up. We’d better anaesthetize him before he comes to.”

Thirty minutes later, the two men looked around and saw no hands in the air. They stumbled over to the food carts, throwing their gloves in a trash bin, then finding cold sandwiches.

“Doctors, come here.”

It was Hesse calling him from his new office. It was an art gallery, in the line of shops behind the wood columns. There was a desk near the front, where Hesse sat, calling through the open door. The door frame had been cracked around the bolt where Hesse had kicked it open. On the window, the name of the shop read, “Inspiration”.

They walked towards him, filling their mouths with the sandwiches.

“Look to the left,” Hesse said as they entered the room. “They brought down a few cases.”

On the floor was a tub of ice and beer bottles, below two modernist, jazz-inspired beach scene paintings. Conrad reached down and took two, passing one to Travis.

“I remember you,” Hesse said to Travis. “Your boy’s ok?”

“Yes,” Travis said.

“When you guys get cleaned up and rested come back and we’ll catch up,” Hesse said.

Travis was not ready to return to his family yet. He felt, as he walked along the wall of the Atrium with Conrad, like the two of them were separated somehow from the crowd that still filled the room, just as he’d always felt separated from the refugees he worked with in Sudan.  They were the desperate, he was there to help. They found a quiet sitting area under a staircase and sat down on the couch.

“Good work,” Travis said.

“I can’t believe we saved that man,” Conrad said. “I’ve read about that technique, but I’ve never done it. I just… with all the death today, I wanted one man to live that fate wanted to take away.”

“You did it,” Travis said. “You saved him.”

“At least for now. If he can escape infection, or internal hemorrhaging or anything else that could go wrong with a cracked sternum.”

It was so sudden, the return of Conrad’s face to that horrible exhibition of pain.

“Are you alright?” Travis asked. “Are you… did you leave family behind in New York?”

Conrad couldn’t reply. He nodded his head and made a noise through his closed lips.

Travis waited.

“I left them all behind,” Conrad said. “I couldn’t find them. I… yesterday morning, when it all happened, I called and couldn’t find them. I called home and there was no answer. I called my wife’s cell and there was no answer. I have two kids and I don’t know what happened to them. I left them. I left them to die.”

“Joel, it’s not your fault. It’s not your fault. Look at me, Joel. It’s not your fault.”

Joel Conrad looked at him as he tried to hold back sobs. “I was with another woman.”

Travis could not hide his reaction. His eyes opened wide and his head jerked back under Conrad’s stare.

“I was with… I was with a woman. I’d worked until three a.m. and went to her apartment and we were together when we heard the noise all around us, and we looked out the windows. The sun was just coming up and people were pouring through the streets. That’s when we turned the news on. It was already too late to find my family. That’s how I left my family, Travis.”

“Jesus, Joel. I’m sorry. But you’ll find them again, Joel. You have to believe that.”

Conrad breathed deeply, and he allowed a softness to return to his face.

“Do you have a family?” he asked.

“Yes,” Travis said. “They’re here with me. My son and… my ex-wife and her husband.”

“Why were you and your wife divorced?” Conrad asked.

“I had an affair. She found out.”

They stopped looking at each other.

“I was in Africa,” Travis began. “I was volunteering with the Red Cross in Sudan. I was there for two months that time, but it felt like years. She was a doctor from Italy. We worked closely together and my wife was back in New York, and her husband was in Florence. We fell in love, we were… in another world there, surrounded by death, fighting against it. There was a childish feeling of adventure. It wasn’t real love, that was what I had with my wife. It was the idea of falling in love there, in a faraway land, with a faraway woman who had come there for the same reasons as me. I don’t even know exactly how my wife found out. The woman had gone back to Italy before me, and when I came home my wife was gone, my son was gone. I realized the gap then between what I felt for that woman and how much I love my wife. I’ve been living in a kind of prison since then. Separated by just a few miles from the two people I love.”