The day after: An apocalyptic morning (139 page)

              "Skip," she said, shaking her head violently, "one of my team is dead. I had to leave her out there with the militia!"

              "You did what you had to do," he said. "This is war, hon, and things like that happen in war."

              "You told us that we had the safest fucking job!" she accused, looking for a target to discharge her grief and anger upon. "You told us that this wouldn't happen!"

              "I told you it shouldn't happen," he corrected. "And I'm sorry that it did. But its over now and we have to take care of Hector."

              She had no answer for him. She simply buried her face in her hands and cried.

              "El Dorado Hills, this is Garden Hills helicopter, do you copy?" Jack asked on the frequency assigned for that particular communication. They were currently passing over the eastern guard positions of the town, flying at a relatively low 1500 feet above the ground, slowing, but still moving at well over ninety knots.

              The reply took a minute but at last the familiar voice of Pat came on the frequency. "This is El Dorado Hills," he said. "Go ahead Garden Hill. It looks like you wish to land?"

              "That's affirmative," Skip said, taking over the communications channel. "We have a wounded man from a skirmish. He has a gunshot in the back. Can you assist?"

              "Bring him down," Pat said without hesitation. "Go ahead and land in the parking lot outside. I'll get Renee moving."

              By this point, nearly twenty minutes after being shot, Hector was barely conscious, his usually dark complexion pale and clammy, his eyes glazed. His breathing was rapid and deep, as if he couldn't get enough air.

              Skip circled once around the parking lot just to make sure that there was no one lingering near his landing zone, and then brought them down quickly, almost as if he were doing a combat drop. He quickly began the engine shutdown procedure. Before he was even halfway through it, a group of men and women came running out of the school admin building. The rolled a gurney that looked as if it had come from an ambulance with them. Renee the doctor was among them. By the time the engine wound down, leaving the rotor blades spinning freely and silently to a halt above them, the group was at the side door.

              Paula, still with tears running down her face, opened the door for them. Renee was the first to stick her head in.

              "Is he breathing?" she asked.

              "Yes," replied Doris, who was cradling him and holding pressure on his bleeding back. "He looks like he's working to do it, but he's breathing."

              "Okay," Renee said, more to her people than to Skip's, "let's get him out of there."

              Three people, all of them wearing latex gloves upon their hands, reached in and pulled Hector free of the helicopter, dragging him directly onto the ambulance gurney. No sooner was he out of the aircraft then Renee was looking him over, her eyes searching for the source of the bleeding. Skip, watching all of this, noticed that her hands were shaking a little.

              "How many shots?" Renee asked, addressing no one in particular.

              "Just one," Paula answered. "It hit him in the butt and came out his back it looks like."

              "Any idea of the caliber?" she asked, feeling at his wrist for his pulse. She frowned a little at what she felt.

              "No," Paula said. "The militia uses M-16s, AK-47s, and hunting rifles mostly. It was a lucky shot."

              "Okay," Renee said. She looked at Hector's face. "Are you with me?" she asked him in a loud voice.

              He mumbled back something that sounded like: "I think so," but his voice was very weak, his words thick and slow.

              "Let's get him into the treatment room," Renee told her people. "Sally, get some blood from him right away and put it through the type and cross, just like I taught you. Do it twice just to be sure and then start looking through the index cards for a donor. It looks like he's gonna need it."

              While Sally told Renee that she would get right on that, the entire group began trotting towards the front of the building, four of them holding onto a corner of the gurney. Within twenty seconds, Hector had disappeared through the doorway, leaving his team and his pilots behind.

              Pat had wandered out at some point during he activity and he remained behind. He was dressed in the customary rain gear and had a pistol strapped to his waist, although he carried no rifle. His face was concerned as he walked over to the group of four climbing free of the helicopter. He shook hands with Skip.

              "They'll give him the best care possible," he said to Skip, although his words were meant for everyone. "We've been drilling and preparing for just such an emergency."

              "It shows," Skip said. He had been expecting a frantic clusterfuck upon landing but had instead been treated to a well-disciplined and seemingly competent medical team. "We appreciate your help."

              "It's the least we could do," Pat told them. "Renee has been reading through her texts on the treatment of traumatic injuries ever since we agreed to help you. She's also blood-typed everyone in town so we'll have donors once we figure out what kind of blood your man has."

              "Very smart," Paula, seeming to calm a little, said. "And again, thank you very much."

              "Why don't we go inside?" Pat suggested. "We'll have some tea and wait for the word to come down. And you can tell us how your war is going. Obviously it's started, right?"

              "Oh yes," Skip said. "It's started all right."

              Hector was wheeled into what had once been the school nurse's office but was now the primary treatment area for the town doctor. It was a room that had electric lights powered by the outside generator and cases and shelves of medical equipment scavenged from Renee's office prior to it being washed away in the first of the landslides. They kept Hector on the gurney they had brought him in on, not wanting to risk moving him again.

              Renee was terrified of what she was about to do here. Though on the outside she was doing an admirable job of projecting the calm, coolness that was associated with a MD after her name, inside she was on pins and needles. For some reason the public - meaning, to her, all those who had not been to medical school - was under the impression that a doctor was a doctor was a doctor and that no Micker what they specialized in, they would automatically know how to handle anything medical that crossed their path. Some doctors actually believed this themselves. But it was simply not true. She was a Goddamn family practice specialist, not a trauma surgeon! True, she had dissected cadavers in med school more than ten years before and true she could tell the difference between a kidney and a spleen and a liver once she was looking at them, but she had never done anything like operating on a gunshot wound victim before. She had never even cut into the abdominal cavity of another human being before except to perform the occasional C-section of a delivering mother. She was not a surgeon. Her specialty had been treating runny noses, ear infections, sore throats, hypertension, depression. She had diagnosed pregnancy and provided pre-natal care, she had looked after babies and small children, she had taken care of sore backs. For everything more complicated than that, for everyone that needed to be admitted to the hospital down in Folsom (a hospital which had been washed away by the breaking of the dam), she had referred people to specialists.

              But now there were no more specialists. There was only her and her undertrained team and this man would live or die because of what she did now.

              "Renee, are you okay?" asked Jenny, who had been her office assistant in pre-comet life.

              Renee looked up at her, the second most highly trained medical specialist in El Dorado Hills - a woman who had a six-week course from a tech school under her belt. Jesus help us. "I'm okay," she said. "Get him on his back and let's put him out."

              "Right."

              "You get the IV," she said (that had been part of the training they had gone over since learning they would be treating the Garden Hill casualties). "Be sure to use blood tubing and the largest diameter IV needle you can get into him. We'll use that line to sedate him so I can intubate him. Once that's done, I want you to start a second line in the other arm with more blood tubing. Sally's already working on cross and type. Chances are, we'll need to give him a lot."

              "I'm on it," Jenny said, pleased to have something to do.

              There were three other helpers in the room, none of them with previous medical experience, all of them members of the crash course in emergency medicine. Renee had them strip off Hector's muddy clothing and then had John, the only male member of the team, set up a ventilation bag while someone else tried to get a blood pressure. It was 70/24, not particularly encouraging in light of a bleeding injury.

              Jenny stabbed in a large gauge IV catheter and began running fluid into Hector's damaged circulatory system.

              Using this IV line, Renee injected a strong paralytic drug into Hector's vein that rendered him completely unconscious and brought his breathing to a halt. Working quickly she opened his mouth with a laryngoscope and inserted a breathing tube into his trachea. She tied this down with a length of tape and then had John attach a ventilation bag to it to begin forcing air down into his lungs. Since their oxygen supply was very limited she was stuck with using only room air, which was not the desired method of ventilation but you went with what you had in this world. Once Hector was securely intubated, she injected a more powerful, longer-lasting anesthetic (something which had been part of her office inventory but she never, in a million years had thought she'd ever actually use) into his IV to keep him under indefinitely.

              Renee spent a few minutes arranging instruments and supplies that she thought she would need on a table next to the gurney. She had scalpels, retractors, sterile swabs, various varieties of stitching threads, a tissue stapler, bottles of betadine and saline, an electric cauterizer. As she arranged them in the order she thought she would need them, her hands continued to shake. Everyone noticed this. No one commented on it.

              Finally she instructed her team to carefully roll Hector onto his stomach, taking care to not dislodge the breathing tube. She cleaned the area around and between the two wounds - which were both steadily oozing small amounts of blood - with betadine, sterilizing it. And still her hands continued to shake with nervous fear.

              At last she was ready to begin. This man would now have his life placed in her hands, having to rely on skills and procedures that had been explained to her during a few classes in med school but which she had not studied since and which she had never practiced. She picked up a scalpel and moved it towards the larger of the two wounds, the one on his back. That would be where the worst injury was, probably the kidney, and that would be where the blood loss was worst. As she prepared herself to make the cut, a strange calm seemed to come over her and her mind cleared. Her hand stopped shaking and she made the incision.

              "A bitch!" Bracken said, looking down at the bloody mess that had once been Leanette. She was splayed out on her stomach, her face and head almost unrecognizable since at least six of the bullets from the final barrage had struck her there. The .45 pistol she had used to kill one of the men and disable the other enough so that he had been forced to kill himself, was lying two feet to the right of her, having been kicked from her lifeless hand by the first soldier to reach her. "They're using fucking bitches on their hit teams? Bitches!" he screamed, strangely offended by this fact.

              "She wasn't the only one," said Livingston, whose squad had been in on the final pursuit. "I'm pretty sure that two of the other three were bitches as well, including the one with the M-16."

              Bracken shook his head. "This is just unbelievable. Not only are they arming their bitches up, but they're using them as special forces teams as well. And they're fucking kicking our asses!" In a rage he delivered a stern kick to the bloody, lifeless head of Leanette, sending a good-sized chunk of her skull flying through the air.

              "And look at this, sir," Colby said, holding up the bullet-holed remains of her backpack. The fleeing hit team had stripped her of her rifle but had not had time to take her pack with her. He opened it up and carefully pulled out two of the mines that had plagued them earlier. "The shotgun shells aren't in them but they're in the pack, just ready to be used. And look at this." He pulled out a crumpled, bloodstained piece of paper and unfolded it. "It's a map of the area around here. A very detailed map that looks like it might even be to scale. It's divided into very small grids."

              Bracken took the map from him, unmindful of the blood that covered much of it, and took a look. Sure enough, there was the mudfall they had gone around a few days before and there were the various hills around their current position. "They made this by taking aerial shots of the area," he said. "I'll bet you anything they're sending out a recon team in the morning to plot our advance and then using their radios to drop the next team right along it."