Mount Mercy

What would Corrigan do?

I looked around and found one of the walking wounded, a bald man with a gash on his cheek. “You! I need your help!” He came over. “Run to the hardware store and get me all the dishtowels they have. And a knife, I need a small, sharp knife.” He hurried off. I found another person, a woman in her sixties. “And you: I need you to go into the stationary store and get me bulldog clips. The smallest ones you can find.” She ran.

While we were waiting, I told the man’s wife to show me her arm. “You’ll be okay,” I told her. “The bullet went straight through. Keep pressure on it.” Any other time, she would have been rushed to hospital. Only in this hell could a bullet wound be minor.

The supplies began to arrive and I started frantically treating people, using dishtowels as bandages and bulldog clips to clamp arteries. The father looked like he’d make it. The store owner I treated next was touch-and-go: he’d been shot in the leg and had lost a lot of blood. Then a teenage girl who’d been hit in the neck by flying glass. She was shaking with cold and shock and I realized I was still wearing my thick winter coat, so I pulled it off and wrapped it around her. One man had been thrown against a truck by the force of the car exploding and was lying on the ground with a possible cervical spine fracture. I didn’t have a neck brace to put on him so I mounded snow up all around his neck and packed it in tight to immobilize him.

I wish Corrigan was here. I felt stupid thinking it because I knew he was going through hell himself, trying to save lives in that dim, cramped cafe, patching wounds in freakin’ candlelight. And I felt guilty because who cared if I was upset and panicking, when people were fighting for their lives all around me? But I did want him. It didn’t matter that I was a surgeon, I was still human and part of me just wanted to cling to him and cry my eyes out.

But they needed me. So I kept going. Why aren’t the ambulances here yet, I wondered.

Then it hit me. Oh Jesus: nobody’s called it in! We’d come to rely on people using their cell phones: after any shooting, a whole flood of people would dial 911 within minutes. But the phone lines were down. The hospital had no idea anything had happened.

I grabbed a teenage boy who’d escaped uninjured. “Run to the hospital,” I told him. “Ask for Doctor Bartell and tell him we have twenty or more wounded with at least ten criticals. Tell him to send everybody. Everybody. You got that?” He nodded and I pushed him away. “Go!”

For maybe fifteen minutes, I ran around treating everyone I could, holding the hands of the ones I couldn’t. Corrigan still hadn’t emerged from the darkness of the cafe. I wanted to check on Earl but Taylor was kneeling over him and there were too many others who needed me. Is he alive? Dead?

Vehicles started to arrive, skidding and slipping on the hard-packed snow. We’d used all our ambulances to evacuate patients when the blizzard arrived so Bartell, expert organizer that he was, had begged, borrowed or stolen anything he could: pickups, vans, SUVs, all driven by nurses. Krista led the way in a postal truck.

We got the most urgent patients loaded and I was turning from the truck when Corrigan suddenly appeared in front of me. He looked as if he’d been through a war. Like me, he’d given away his coat and his shirt had been torn to rags: I realized he must have been tearing strips off to use as bandages. His jeans were stained with blood and his eyes had the same haunted look that mine probably did. “Are you—” I began.

He grabbed me, lifted me right off my feet and folded me into his arms. He didn’t say anything for a moment, just crushed me to him. I could feel the pain throbbing out of him. We knew we had to go but this couldn’t wait. I didn’t know what he’d seen in that cafe, maybe I never would. I just knew he needed me to make it okay again, just as I needed him. He buried his lips in my hair and laid a trail of kisses down my scalp, kissing me to make sure I was still real. His chest pressed into me, heaving with emotion. “Sorry,” he muttered. “Just….”

I nodded frantically. “I’m the same.”

He pushed back from me and cupped my cheek, his hand wonderfully warm against my skin. There was shock in his eyes, even though this sort of hell wasn’t new to him. Since he lost his wife he’d been in all sorts of disaster zones and war-torn cities. What was new to him, I realized, was having someone to come back to. A big, hot swell of sympathy hit me. He’s had to go through this so many times on his own….