No power meant no elevators so we pounded down four flights of stairs. We crashed into the ER and were greeted by an ear-splitting, discordant wail: every ventilator alarm going off at once. Bartell, Taylor and the nurses were running between patients, using their cell phones as flashlights.
Maggie emerged from the door to the basement, her hands held up in front of her to ward off our questions. “Generator’s dead,” she panted. “Either the fire damaged it or the water from the hoses.”
“Can you fix it?!” demanded Bartell.
“Maybe,” said Maggie, “But it’ll take hours. We need to get another generator. The mining company will have one.”
“How long for someone to drive over there, grab one and get back here?” asked Corrigan.
“In this snow?” Bartell shook his head. “Fifty minutes, an hour?”
“How long will the batteries in the ventilators last?” I asked breathlessly.
“Five minutes, tops,” said Maggie. “Shit!” She sounded close to tears. I grabbed her hand and squeezed. I understood: keeping the hospital systems running was her job and she felt responsible. But no one could have prepared for this.
We all looked around at the patients. We had nine people on ventilators. Jesus, this was unbelievable: this was a US hospital, not some refugee camp, and these people were going to die because we couldn’t give them something as basic as electricity. How did this go so wrong? My eyes fell on Rebecca and my chest went tight. I was the one who’d demanded we keep the ER open. She could have been evacuated to Colorado Springs. She might have made it—
“It’s my fault,” I whispered to myself.
Corrigan’s hand grabbed mine. I looked up at his moonlit face and he pinned me with his gaze, then sternly shook his head. “We need to do CPR,” he said firmly. “Until the new generator arrives.”
“There’s not enough people!” said Bartell.
I looked around desperately. He was right: we’d only had a skeleton staff and then the shooting had injured more people. Maggie couldn’t help: she’d need to go and get the generator and she’d need someone to go with her to help move it. Out of habit, my mind went to Krista. She knew CPR and she was reliable, so that was one patient taken care of—
My stomach lurched. Krista was one of the patients. She’d die along with Rebecca and the others. Even if we could somehow find enough people, the patients were too weak to survive a solid hour of CPR. They needed ventilators. They needed power.
An idea came to me. A crazy, last-ditch idea, the sort of thing Corrigan would do. I grabbed his arm. “Get everyone you can find! Get them doing CPR!” I started to run.
Corrigan grabbed my arm. “Wait! Where are you going?” He pulled me close, his eyes going from me to the darkened hospital. That fierce protective look in his eyes: I don’t want you out there alone.
I gently pried his hand free. “You have to trust me. I have an idea. Send two people to get a generator, but leave Maggie free, I’ll need her!”
Corrigan looked frantically around the ER. Patients. Nurses. A few cops. “Most of these people don’t know CPR!”
“Then teach them!” And I ran to the basement.
49
Dominic
IT WAS TOTAL CHAOS. The ER was pitch-black save for a few cell phones. People were crying out in pain and calling for help, nurses were trying to run between them without running into each other and the frantic, high-pitched alarms of the ventilators made it impossible to think. The nurses were flustered and panicked. Bartell, even with all his years of experience, was sweating. All of them were used to the twenty-first century, where things like this just didn’t happen.
But I wasn’t. I’d worked in field hospitals, out under the stars in remote villages in the Congo, where the generators used to pack up all the time. All that time trying to bury my loss had been good for something. “Alright!” I bellowed.
People stopped and looked up, startled.
“You!” I yelled, pointing at Lloyd. “Do you and the other cops have flashlights in your cars?” He nodded. “Go get them, all of them, and hand them out. Then I want you to drive all the cars up to the doors—”—I pointed—“and shine your headlights in here. Go!”
He ran.
“Everybody else! If you’re a cop, if you’re a patient, if your family visiting, if you can walk then I need you over here!”
They looked at each other uncertainly and then started trickling over, stumbling in the darkness. Eventually, I had two cops, one with an injured leg, a guy in his forties who’d been visiting his mother and a woman who’d just barely struggled out of bed, bandages wrapped around her head. I sent the uninjured cop and the visitor to go and get the generator. The others, I gave a crash course in CPR. Before I’d even finished speaking, the first ventilator failed, its alarm changing to a long, continuous tone that faded away as the batteries ran flat. I rushed forward and started doing chest compressions on the guy. But the other ventilators would start failing any minute. Where the hell is Beckett? What’s she doing?