Dr. Aiden Bailey thrust his hands into the man’s chest cavity and squeezed life back into the dead heart.
Squeeze. Squeeze. Pray.
“Catch, damn it, catch,” the seasoned surgeon muttered with each massage of his fingers.
The canvas wall creating the makeshift operating room flapped from movement on the other side, another surgical team to tackle the insurmountable flood of injured. Aiden focused, worked, even though he’d been in the Bahamas to adopt a son, not ply his trade.
Squeeze. Squeeze. Pray.
He’d volunteered his services in the improvised hospital after the earthquake hit. His Hippocratic oath, his call to heal, wouldn’t let him turn away from the masses of injured.
Squeeze. Squeeze. Pr—
Through the thin membrane of latex gloves, he felt the warm blood, the fibrous muscle, the tips of his fingers tuned in for the tiniest hint of a… throb.
His imagination?
No.
The heart expanded against his palms. Again. And again, as life returned to the waxy, middle-aged man sprawled on a stretcher in the half-standing church that had been turned into a temporary hospital. Supplies and conditions were rustic, to say the least.
NGO workers and military medics on loan from other countries brought freshly wounded faster than he could treat them. Groans filled the air, mixed with the crackle of shortwave radios. A couple of people had been lucky enough to get a cell phone connection and a rare few had satellite phones, but none of that had helped him find out what he needed to know.
So he worked. And waited. His mind filled with the worst-case scenarios. Joshua. Amelia. Helpless in the face of more than just the destruction. Looters. Worse. He understood how far seemingly normal people would go better than most.
God, he had to keep busy or his mind would explode from worrying about his sister and Joshua.
Once he was certain the patient had stabilized—as much as anyone could be considered stable in these crappy conditions—Aiden extended his hand, ready to suture layer after layer to close the gaping chest cavity. He didn’t even need to look or ask. His nurse—his wife—had worked with him for five years on Doctors Without Borders missions before they’d recently swapped to Operation Smile to repair cleft palates in children. They’d known each other far longer, having met as undergrads at Auburn.
They didn’t require words anymore when operating.
The terror he saw in the eyes around here, though, would require more skills than he possessed. So he focused on what he could accomplish rather than dwelling on the grief gripping his chest as tightly as any fist wringing life back into a dead human hull.
His sister and his son were somewhere out in that post apocalyptic hell, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do. His little sister was out there, the sister he’d taught to drive, helped proof her college papers, vowed to take care of since their father died. And his son… already he hadn’t been there when his child needed him.
If only he and Lisabeth hadn’t jumped in that cab to pick up lunch at her favorite place a few blocks away. Joshua had been napping, and they’d wanted to treat Amelia to a special meal in thanks for all she’d done for them with the adoption.
And yeah, he’d wanted some time to absorb becoming a father, something he’d never expected to happen. He’d thought he and Lisabeth had a life path in place, dedicated to helping other children. He’d needed to take in how that course had shifted.
Then the world had shifted in a different, all-too-real way.
He and Lisabeth had spent the first six hours after the quake hit searching for Amelia and Joshua. They’d tried to get back to the hotel, only to be blocked and sent to the site where survivors had been taken. Then they’d been told patients had been sent to multiple locations. Some names appeared on multiple lists, but no list carried the names he was looking for.
Still, they’d searched without turning up any leads. They’d been turned away again and again at barriers and checkpoints as martial law quickly slid into place. They were just two of thousands desperate for information.
They’d given Amelia and Joshua’s names and descriptions to rescue workers, who made notes with fatalistic compassion. Lisabeth’s silent tears had tracked paths through the grime that coated everything. They hadn’t even been allowed near the hotel, the epicenter. Instead they’d been shuttled to another site… this crumbling church-turned-hospital. Now nearly three days since the earthquake, he’d lost count of how many lives he’d saved—and lost.
He stepped back from his patient.
This man, at least, was alive. For the moment. He’d patched up a forty-seven-year-old father caught looting an overturned market vendor’s booth for untainted food. The guy had sprinted away with a burlap sack full of bananas and pineapples, slipped on loose gravel, and fallen into a pile of rotting fish—impaling his chest on a metal rod.
Aiden flexed his fingers. He’d caught shit for saving a thief when earthquake victims waited. This place was a lawless hell full of scared, desperate people, and no doubt it would only get worse. Even if his Hippocratic oath hadn’t already demanded he stitch up the man, Aiden still wouldn’t have been able to turn away from a father putting his family first, defending his children, something far too rare in his experience.
Backing away from the stretcher, he left the church’s social hall, which had been turned into an operating room. As he charged down the corridor, he kept his eyes off the frescoes and crosses. A helluva time to realize he hadn’t been in a church since his wedding, and then only because his wife had insisted on a service in her childhood chapel back here in the Bahamas.
Pushing through double doors, Aiden retreated to the chapel’s kitchen. Clean scrubs and gloves were stacked on a shelf beside the sink. Some military group called RED HORSE had dug latrines and drilled a fresh well for showers. Except on a day like this, he didn’t think there was a shower long enough to wash away the destruction.
He peeled off the bloodied gloves and pitched them in the trash, slap, slap.