Day of Wrath (17 page)

It was a woman, clutching a child to her side, announcing that she was a teacher. Someone from another news crew was already focused on her.
 

“I’m Margaret Redding. I’m a teacher here,” she cried. “When it started I ran out into the hallway, saw this child, grabbed her and we hid in a closet. Thank God I was at least able to save this child as we were trained to do."

Steve turned back to face the cameraman who had joined him.

“One of our camera people is with me now. We’re told we can get closer but there is still the risk of explosives. It’s confirmed that at least six classrooms filled with students were secured in the opening minutes of the attack. Authorities are having them stay in place until the IEDs are disarmed so that they can be safely moved, though medical personnel and a security team are now getting into those rooms.”

“At least some good news there, Steve,” the anchor replied.

The image suddenly was pointed to an empty sky, and there were loud cries around Steve.

“Steve, what is going on there?”

“Don’t want to show this,” his voice was breaking again. “A number of parents…”

He paused.

“Oh God,” again a pause. “Parents rushed the building, some of them armed. A number of them are dead outside the building, I do not want to show that. Medics are checking them now, some appear to be alive. Some of the parents and police officers were able to gain the building in the rush and are coming out now, having found their children… This is too much to bear.”

A pause.

“Turn that damn camera away,” and Steve was stepping in front of the lens. A voice, the cameraman, was apologizing, agreeing. Images leaked from the side of the screen where Steve’s body was not blocking it: a police officer was collapsing to his knees, rocking back and forth, and crying, “It’s hell in there, it’s hell, they’re all dead…"

Steve forced the camera lens up to focus on his face.

“It’s bad here, very bad, I can tell you they are not all dead, I’ve seen some children come running out in the moments after the final rush started. They are bringing some out now who are wounded.

“I see a stretcher team. It’s an adult; he’s strapped to a back board.”

Steve broke eye contact with the camera, turned his back to it, and shouted a question. A state trooper, wounded and clutching his left arm, approached.

“He’s a teacher,” the officer announced, nodding back to the stretcher team, “He blocked a hallway and killed one of the attackers and held off another. The man’s a hero.”

For a nation that needed heroes, the news media now had a focus and Steve told the cameraman to follow him to the stretcher. The stretcher team had put their burden down on the ground. EMTs were working a plasma and medication line into the man's arm, securing a neck brace, hooking up a pressure cuff and electronic leads to monitor his vitals, and leaning over the man, whispering assurances. He was looking about, glassy-eyed, squinting under the afternoon sun after the hours trapped in the smoke and gloomy mist of the school.

“He broke the law!” someone shouted. The cameraman turned toward the woman who had led the child out. “He had a gun inside the school against the law. Someone arrest him now!”

Confusion erupted around Margaret Redding. An officer came up to her, asking her to explain. Margaret shouted that because Bob had broken state and federal law, had defied the training procedures of the school, more children had died, and the results were his fault. But she was engulfed by angry parents shouting back.
 

“I’ll see you in jail, Petersen!” Margaret cried.

“James, turn back here, damn it!” It was the reporter Steve, forcefully pushing the cameraman to shift back to where Bob lay, medics working frantically to stabilize him.

The police officer near the doorway, who had gone into hysterical collapse, was being led away by comrades. Numbed parents and dazed children, who had managed to feign death by remaining perfectly still as their mothers and fathers had coached them to do if ever a “bad man” came into their school, were starting to come out now, but the camera stayed focused on the team that was working to stabilize Bob before loading him into an ambulance.
 

“He’s an incredible hero,” it was Roberts, "and to hell with what that damn woman said about the law! He had a pocket Ruger. A lousy pocket-sized gun with maybe six bullets in it against all their firepower and he dropped one of them cold and mortally wounded another. If not for him, we’d have a hundred more dead children in there. In there, my God.”

Robert’s attention drifted, overwhelmed by the memory of what he had seen inside the building.

“Don’t go in there, no one should see what is in there…” he whispered, going into shock.

The camera remained focused on Bob, the cameraman snapping on a light above the lens. Though it was mid-afternoon, it was hard to see Bob’s face due to the shadows of the two EMTs leaning over him.

The bright light in his eyes startled him. Bob winced and tried to turn his head away. Someone with warm hands was holding his neck, preventing him from moving, and whispering to him not to move.

It was difficult to comprehend where he was. The front lawn of the school? He looked up at an EMT leaning over him, a young woman, blood smeared on her face, a wisp of red hair peeking out from under her baseball cap.

“My daughter, her name is Wendy Petersen, do you know where she is?”

“We’re sorting it out sir, just remain still as I get this neck brace on you.”

“I pushed her out the window by the playground. Can you find her, tell me she’s okay?”

“We’re taking care of it now sir, trust me. She’s okay. If you got her out, the children that ran, they all made it.”

He knew that her words were not all true. He had seen too many bodies collapsed on the playground.

“She's wearing a pink scarf.”

“I promise I’ll look for her as soon as we get you on your way. Now please lie still and don’t talk. We’re trying to help you. You want to get through this for your daughter, don’t you? You've got to work with me for your daughter’s sake.”

He could see that the young woman was trembling even as she secured the brace around his neck.

She leaned back from her patient, signaling that the neck brace was secured. They already knew he had a bullet hole in his back, it looked like just below his sixth vertebrae. His spinal column was almost certainly shattered. There was a second wound in his shoulder, a bullet or bullets having entered from the top, smashing his rotator cup and shoulder blade. It was so badly mangled it might be a fight to save his arm.

There were no exit wounds, so the bullets were still inside him. No blood frothing up in the mouth, so lungs were intact. She double-checked the straps securing him to the back board. If there was a remote chance that his spinal column was not completely destroyed, there might be a hope of saving some ability to walk. No exit wound was in his lower abdomen so the round had, without doubt, driven bone fragments into his lower abdomen. Chances were that there were multiple punctures of his intestine; it was going to require hours of major surgery to clear him out to prevent the onset of sepsis. He was still alive after more than two hours, so definitely no major artery or vein was hit; otherwise he’d have bled out by now.

She was in awe of him as she and her teammate ran their checks. The wounds were horrific. She had seen over and over while deployed as a National Guard nurse in Iraq that, many times, it was the sheer force of will that had kept a wounded soldier alive. Others just surrendered to the quietness of death. Keep them focused on their loved ones at home, tell them to hang on for them. This man had been motivated to stay alive to protect the kids. She had to keep him motivated, now that his task was complete.

“Tell me your daughter’s name again?” she asked.

“Wendy Petersen.”

“And you are?”

“Bob Petersen.”

“Bob, for your daughter, I need you to fight along with me. Keep with me. You got that?”

He looked up at her, his gaze drifting. Every hospital from Lewiston-Auburn, across Portland, and down clear to New Hampshire would be flooded with hundreds of casualties and the terrible task of triage would have to be applied to more than one. He needed hours of surgery, not tomorrow but now, today.

She used a Sharpie pen to make a few marks on his forehead, indicating that he had received an injection of painkiller. She jotted a couple of coded numbers on a tag that she clipped to his shirt with the same information: time of injections and readings of vitals. Her prognosis, though she was no doctor, and her observations in the field would help the doctors in emergency rooms with their decision-making as to how to prioritize those coming in, and initialed it.

She stood up, tearing off her latex gloves, fetching a fresh pair from her pants pocket but not yet putting them on.

“Get him out of here now!”

“Wendy…”

“Bob, you've got to hang in there. I’ll find your girl and personally bring her to you. I swear to God I will.”

Her voice was beginning to break. It was a promise she was not sure she could keep, but felt she had to make, and inwardly she prayed that she could return to his side with his daughter… alive.

The four taking care of Bob Petersen’s backboard gently started to lift it as she prepared to go back into hell.

“Wait!”

He struggled as if trying to sit up. She looked back at him.

“Don’t move, Bob, just relax, we've got you taken care of.”

“Wait, oh please wait.”

He tried to raise his arm to point and she went back to his side. She had been trained that often the wounded bonded to their first caregiver and were frightened when taken from their side. But he had to be moved up the next step of care while she had to go back to the next victim, then the next and the next. She leaned over and kissed him gently on the brow to offer reassurance.

“Calm, Bob, just chill. Okay?” she whispered soothingly.

“That’s my wife. My wife!”

He was trying to gesture to a prone body lying limp and broken on the blood-slick lawn only feet away from where he had been set down for treatment.

“Stop! Oh God, please check her,” he begged.
 

It came out as a strangled cry. He was unaware that the television camera was still focused on him.

The medic who had been preparing to go back in to face the carnage within the corridors of Joshua Chamberlain Middle School, stood up, turned from Bob’s stretcher and walked over to the collapsed body on the lawn. She already knew the answer. In that first minute of taking back the building, even before the shooting had stopped, medics, herself included, had gone rushing in to check the fallen outside the building.
 

They did so heedlessly. They did so knowing that, unlike the traditions that had existed in western civilized society for well over a century or more, those wearing the red cross on helmet or sleeve were not exempt here. On other battlefields, in other wars, to deliberate shoot a medic on the enemy side was an act beneath contempt, an actual crime. But with this enemy, those bringing aid, compassion, a final soothing word and injection to still the last moments of pain, drew fire and were defined as the most tempting of targets to kill. Jihadists were trained to kill them even when far more deadly opponents were attempting to kill in reply. To kill a medic was an act to be praised, for it would help to break the enemy's morale or, even better, trigger an act of angry reprisal that could be used against them in the world’s media.

The body that Bob was trying to point out had already been checked and left where she had fallen, to be cared for later after those still living could be saved, or those whose dying could be eased, were tended to first. Nevertheless, the medic made the effort to kneel down by the woman’s side. The dead woman’s eyes were wide open and sightless, the ground beneath her soaked, the blood which had poured from her shattered heart and abdomen beginning to congeal.

The medic made a gesture of putting two fingers to the woman’s neck, looked back at Bob and nodded.

“Bob, she’s alive, she’s alive, we’ll get help for her now.” Her gaze told the stretcher bearers not to wait around, to get him the hell out of sight of the body of his wife. They lifted him high and started off, Bob trying to crane his head back to look, but the neck brace kept him locked in place.

And Bob knew his young guardian angel was lying, a final glimpse showed the medic lowering her head and placing her hand over Kathy’s eyes to close them.
 

The camera crew focused on that, the reporter stood in numbed silence, those in the studio watching were unable to speak. A nation watched as the medic stood up, hands sticky with yet more blood.

“There are still hundreds of children in there, maybe I can at least find his daughter alive," was all the medic could choke out and then she turned and started for the door, her walk jerky, slow, and swaying. A police officer, crouched low by the door, yelled to her to get through the entryway quickly, there was a hot IED but feet away. She did not pay him the remotest heed and just went on in.

Even as the attacks continued, the killing continued, and the rage built, it was the beginning of a nation in mourning.