Chapter
17
“Katie!” I knelt beside her. She had fallen at the side of the beam from the patrol car’s spotlight. My body was between the light and her body, casting a shadow that prevented me from seeing anything other than her outline in the darkness. I moved so she was between the light and me. With her body illuminated, I tried to assess her condition. I could see her chest rising and falling slightly. The left upper corner of her shirt was saturated with blood.
“Help me!” she begged, “I can’t breathe.”
I pushed down on the knobby extension of the back of my knife blade as I pulled it from my pocket. Pushing the extension opened the blade some fifteen degrees and then the spring assist took over and the blade snapped the rest of the way open without any further effort on my part. I placed the knife blade under the collar of her shirt. With an upward motion, I pushed the knife toward the waist of her pants. The razor sharp blade parted the fabric to the bottom of the shirt without resistance.
With the shirt removed, I was able to see the damage. A bullet had struck her in the chest. I lifted her torso off the ground to look at her back. There was no exit hole.
“Matt, Katie’s been shot! I need the med kit from the car!” He had been examining the bodies to make sure they were all dead. He quit his inspection and ran back to where Katie was lying on the ground.
“How bad is it?” he asked as he knelt across from me.
“I’m not sure. It’s high enough, I think it missed her vitals. There’s a lot of blood, though.”
“I can’t breathe,” Katie gasped again, her body writhing as she struggled to fill her lungs with air.
“We need to bandage her up and get her to the hospital.”
Matt’s long strides to the car bespoke his concern for Katie and her injury. He returned with the med bag. He opened it and pulled out several packages of dressings. He had more first aid training that I did so I allowed him to work. He applied a dressing to her wound and taped it in place.
“Help me get her into the back of the van,” he ordered desperately.
I placed my hands under Katie’s arms and Matt picked up her legs. Together we moved her to the van and set her on the back.
“Stay in the back and keep pressure on the wound,” he said. “I’ll drive.”
He moved to the front door and pulled the expired driver from the seat, letting the limp body slide onto the roadway. He took a pack of gauze from the med bag and wiped the blood and big chunks of the driver’s exploded head from the seat. When he was satisfied, Matt scooted into the driver seat and turned the van around. The engine screamed as it attempted to accelerate the lumbering frame of the full size van toward town. The urgency of getting Katie to medical care drove Matt to push the van beyond what prudence dictated was safe.
And then he pushed it harder.
While Matt drove, I maintained pressure on Katie’s wound in an effort to staunch the flow of blood. I periodically checked her pulse. It was weakening. Her next gasping breathe was her only concern. Each one became more laborious than the previous.
Matt pulled into the hospital parking lot and brought the van to a stop in front of the emergency room ambulance entrance. “Stay here!” he exclaimed. “I’ll get a stretcher and the doctor. Keep pressure on the wound!” He hurried to the sliding door and rapidly punched in the numerical door code. The doors slid open, allowing him entrance. After he had passed, the doors silently slid back together.
Less than a minute later, Matt returned alone, without a stretcher.
“Where’s the doctor?” I asked shortly as he got back into the driver seat.
“They’re all dead,” he stated flatly without turning around. “The containment team sterilized the place. Everybody in there was shot: nurses, patients, everybody.”
I swallowed hard, “What about Doc Baker?” I asked urgently, holding onto hope.
“A bullet right through his gas mask; he probably wasn’t even infected. Dr. Ferb and Dr. Nelson were also there. They had both been wearing gas masks and both had bullet wounds to the head. I was around infected people all afternoon and the gas mask protected me,” he answered. “There was no reason for it. The hospital was the last place they should have shot up. They killed the only three doctors in town. I don’t understand what they were thinking.”
“What about Dr. Kemp?” I asked, referring to a retired surgeon who lived in town. He had spent his career working in a trauma center in the city. After retiring, Dr. Kemp moved to Lost Hills saying that he wanted a slower life around friendly people. “He’s more qualified than Doc Baker was anyway. His place is on Ash Street. Get us there!”
Ash Street was five blocks from the hospital. Once again, Matt pushed the van to its limits through the deserted streets of Lost Hills. I saw two different people running down side streets as we drove. Judging from the stiff way they moved, I was pretty sure they were infected.
Matt turned onto Ash Street and I pointed out Dr. Kemp’s house. “It’s the third one on the left, the brick house.”
Matt crossed over the southbound side of the street and parked facing the wrong way along the curb. Before the van had come to a stop, I opened the sliding door on the right side, ran around the back of the van and jumped onto the grass strip between the road and sidewalk. I ran to the house, my feet scarcely touching the ramp that led to the front porch. Encouraged by light emanating from the etched glass panels on either side of the door, I pushed the door bell twice and then pounded relentlessly, hoping my urgency would spur Dr. Kemp to answer the door.
Since his wife died last year, Dr. Kemp had kept mostly to himself. He quit attending church and social functions. Katie and Toby had tried to reach out to him, going to visit him and inviting him to dinner. He never accepted her invitations and rarely opened the door when they tried to visit. He was alive, but not living.
I prayed silently that he would open the door.
“Stop that banging,” I heard him yell from inside. “When your knees are eighty-nine years old, you won’t move fast either.”
I thanked God for answering my desperate cry for help. Looking through the etched glass, I could make out a distorted form moving toward the door. The uneven glass surface dispersed passing light randomly, and prevented details from being discerned. I heard the
clackity clack
of the wheels on his walker moving across the grout lines in the tile floor.
As the seconds dragged by, I willed him to move faster. He continued to plod at the same lethargic pace. He struggled to unbolt the door. It was all I could do to refrain from kicking it down.
Finally the door cracked open four inches, the security chain keeping it from opening further. “Connor?” he asked, puzzled. “Why are you banging my door down so late at night?”
“Katie’s been shot. I need your help,” I pleaded urgently.
“Katie? Shot? You need to get her to the hospital. I can’t do anything for her.”
“Dr. Kemp, please. You are the only one who can do anything for her. Everybody at the hospital has been killed. She needs your help.”
“Killed? How? I don’t have any equipment to work with,” he objected. “And I haven’t operated in over fifteen years.”
“Don’t worry about that. We’re taking you to the hospital. Is there anything here that you need?”
“No, I guess not,” he said as he closed the door. I could hear the chain rattling inside as he removed it from the door and swung it open.
I helped Dr. Kemp to the van as fast as his eighty-nine year old knees would allow him to move. I attempted to answer his questions as he hobbled. No sooner had I closed the sliding door than Matt gunned the engine and navigated a u-turn which resulted in the two right wheels actually losing contact with the road as the centrifugal force caused a massive lateral weight transfer to the outside of the turn. Matt returned us to the hospital. I picked Katie up and carried her into the emergency room while Matt helped Dr. Kemp inside.
The inside of the hospital looked like a war zone. Bodies were strewn across the floor and atop other bodies. Blood smears blotted the walls and floor. Carts and wheel chairs had been tipped as people fled before their slaughterers. The walls were speckled with holes from stray bullets.
Dr. Kemp stopped as he entered the hallway. The grizzled carnage overwhelmed him. He kept looking back and forth saying, “What happened?” Then he didn’t say anything. It was like the horror before him shocked him into a wakeful coma.
I laid Katie on a bed in one of the rooms and righted a wheel chair in the hallway. I moved it behind Dr. Kemp. Matt and I sat him in the chair. His open eyes stared straight ahead, unblinking.
Leaving Dr. Kemp in the chair, Matt and I moved into the room with Katie. We picked up Sally Kolinsky’s stiff body and gently placed her in the hallway. She had worked as a nurse in the hospital for twenty years. Every time I saw her at work, she was cheerful and happy to be caring for the sick and injured. Even in the midst of death and destruction, we both felt obligated to treat the body with respect. We returned to the room and moved the second body, someone neither of us recognized, out of the room and laid it next to Sally in the hallway.
I frantically opened cabinets until I found the one I was looking for. It was the linen cabinet. Sheets were piled neatly upon folded sheets. I removed the top sheet from the stack and wet it in the sink. Using my foot, I moved the wadded sheet back and forth over the defiled areas.
The blood didn’t yield to my efforts. I was about to give up when I noticed that small patches were starting to come clean. Larger and larger blotches of the floor began showing with each pass of the sheet. Once the first small area of floor came clean, the rest followed like a chain reaction. In short order the floor was spotless.
While I worked on the floor, Matt cleaned the blood spatter from the walls. Within minutes the room was pristine again.
I went back to the hallway and wheeled Dr. Kemp into the room, hoping that sanitizing the room to the visual senses would bring him out of his catatonic state. Containing the welling panic I felt, I talked softly to him, telling him that Katie needed him and he was the only one who could help her. His eyes blinked and slowly began moving from side to side, taking in the room.
“What happened?” he questioned. “Who would do something like that?”
I gave him the
Reader’s Digest
version of the story. He took it better than I thought he would. Appearing satisfied, he stood up and moved to Katie. Decades of experience resurfaced and he instinctively assessed her condition, explaining as he went.
“It looks like a glancing shot. It broke the fourth left lateral rib, but the bullet didn’t actually penetrate past the rib,” he said, looking at me over top of his glasses, which were perched halfway down his nose. He extended the index and middle fingers of his right hand and tapped her chest, which reverberated with a dull thud. “Give me the stethoscope on the counter,” he barked at Matt. Placing the earpieces in his ears, Dr. Kemp positioned the circular chest piece over the right side of Katie’s chest and then moved it to the left side. He shook his head back and forth as he announced, “Absent breath sounds on the left side. Notice how her trachea is deviated to the right and the veins in her neck are bulging. She has a pnuemothorax. I need a chest tube kit, now! Look in those cabinets over there,” he said, pointing toward the wall. “It will be in a sealed packet. And make it quick. She doesn’t have long if we don’t relieve the pressure.”
Matt and I scurried around the room, opening drawers and cabinets. “I have it,” I exclaimed triumphantly as I held up a package marked “Chest Tube.” Dr. Kemp had moved to the sink and was scrubbing his hands and forearms. When he saw that we had completed the task he had assigned, he hobbled back to Katie’s side. She continued to moan intermittently. Her chest heaved as she struggled to draw life-sustaining air into her body.
“Open the package,” he said, nodding toward my hands. I easily peeled the plastic seal off the top of the box. It was full of more sealed packets on top with instruments on the bottom. “Set it on the bed next to her,” he ordered, “And don’t touch the instruments. They are sterile.” I gingerly set the box beside Katie.
Dr. Kemp opened a packet marked “gloves” and placed them on his hands. He picked up a pair of curved clamps from the bottom and asked me to open a packet labeled Betadine wipes. He grasped the swab with his clamps and instructed Matt to pull Katie’s arm up toward her head. He swabbed the area below her arm pit. When he was satisfied it was clean, he picked the syringe out of the bottom of the package. He told me to hold the ampule of Xylocaine. Dr. Kemp plunged the needle through the rubber top of the glass container and withdrew a syringe full of the liquid. He punctured Katie’s skin with the needle and pushed it all the way into her side. The muscles on her side quivered as the needle penetrated. He slowly pulled back on the plunger of the syringe as he started pulling the needle out. As he pulled the plunger backwards, the syringe began sucking air. Suddenly air ceased entering the syringe and fluid began rushing in.
“Okay, the needle is out of the chest cavity and is in the parietal plura,” he stated as he stopped pulling the plunger and stopped withdrawing the needle. He moved his thumb over the back of the syringe and pushed the plunger down as he slowly resumed pulling the needle out. “Now I'm injecting the Xylocaine as I pull the needle out. As the needle moves through her side, it is leaving a trail of anesthetic which will deaden the tissue from the inside out.” he informed us. By the time he had pulled the tip of the needle from her skin, he had deposited all twenty CCs of anesthetic from the syringe into her side.