He bent down and kissed me, slowly tasting me and then drawing me in. The pleasure and happiness rolled down my body in a slow wave, making all the horror drop back. I put my hand on his arm and I could feel his body relaxing, too.
We allowed ourselves that one, slow kiss and then jumped into the front of the truck with Krista. We’d done what we could here. Now we had to get the injured back to the hospital. My stomach twisted as I saw the convoy of vehicles behind us in the wing mirror. How are we going to cope with this many patients? Corrigan was sitting next to me and I squeezed his hand in fear. He nodded: he was thinking the same thing.
The ER was about to be utterly overloaded.
40
Amy
I’VE ALWAYS BEEN SCARED of the ER. But I’ve always been a little in awe of it and the people who work there, too. It’s loud and it’s chaotic and things move too fast, but those things are also strengths: I always felt like the ER was crazy enough, fast-moving enough, to cope with anything.
But it couldn’t cope with this.
When the fourth critical case was wheeled in, you could feel the panic in the air. By the time we’d reached the seventh, the place was in uproar and there were still three more outside. We would have been swamped even with our full staff.
What made it worse was the mix of patients. Some of them were gunmen, handcuffed to gurneys. Some were cops, still with loaded guns. Both had seen their friends killed by the other side. Then there were civilians who’d all been shot or injured by one side or the other. Some were crying, some were threatening, everyone was yelling. It was my own personal hell, a crowded, deafening pressure cooker that could explode at any time.
Corrigan caught my gaze from across the room and nodded at me. You can do this.
I took a deep breath and kept going.
Within a half hour, though, Taylor, Corrigan and I were all stretched to breaking point. We were trying to take the most urgent cases first, but we had to keep swapping as more patients crashed and threatened to bleed out. We were panting, desperate, trying to hold it all in our heads at once: this guy needs to be intubated now, this one needs a chest tube, this one’s vitals are failing. Even Corrigan started to lose his cool. There were just too many—
“The hell with this,” said Bartell suddenly. He’d been standing in the center of the room, keeping an eye on things, but now he marched into his office. Through the open door, I saw him wrench off his tie and toss it aside, then pull something out of the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet. When he marched back in, he was shaking out a crumpled, decade-old white coat. We all stood there open-mouthed as he pulled it on.
“I was a doctor, you know.” He indicated his suit. “Before all this bullshit. Now: what have we got?”
And he pulled on some gloves and started saving lives with the rest of us.
My next patient was Earl. He’d taken two bullets to the chest, one missing his heart by about a millimeter and one nicking a lung. Taylor had done her best to stabilize him in the street, but he’d lost a lot of blood. Maggie was right beside him, her eyes red from crying. There wasn’t really room for visitors, but from the look in her eyes, no one was going to make her move. Lying handcuffed to a gurney next to Earl was one of the gunmen. He’d only been shot in the leg, but he’d lost more blood and his pressure was dangerously low. “Get another bag of O-neg into both of them,” I told Krista.
Lloyd suddenly got in my face. He’d taken some shrapnel in the arm and was walking around the ER hooked up to a drip, jacked up on adrenaline, shock and guilt. “Why are you treating him?” he snapped at me, pointing to the gunman.
Corrigan stepped protectively in front of me, hands up to placate him. “We’re treating everybody!”
“This is bullshit!” yelled Lloyd.
Krista appeared from behind me and I sighed in relief. I turned to take the bags of blood—
She was only holding one.
I took it but frowned at her. “Thanks, but we need two.”
She was white-faced. “That’s the last one.”
What? I shook my head. “No it isn’t. It can’t be, we always keep at least ten bags on hand.”
Bartell overheard that. He turned from his patient, saw the bag I was holding and looked ill. The whole ER quietened down as he pressed a hand to his forehead and wiped it down his clammy face.
“It’s my fault,” he said. “We were due a delivery. The truck was on its way from Denver when the blizzard warning came. I completely forgot.”