Crash (Brazen Bulls MC #1)(47)
“I don’t understand this world, Willa. I don’t understand at all.”
Willa didn’t understand it, either.
oOo
Her fellow travelers had a few raised eyebrows when a bunch of big Harleys thundered up near the bus, but no one was overly scandalized. In fact, as they got on the road, Willa heard stories from some of her colleagues about the club. Most were stories about their charity work, or about them helping out stranded motorists. A few stories were about violence. Overall, though, people sounded positive. Rad had told her more than once that the club didn’t ‘shit where they ate,’ so their reputation in Tulsa was good.
No one in the bus knew she was with Rad. She kept her private life tightly controlled and didn’t talk about it with anyone outside it. None of her work friends were close enough to be private-life friends. She had no one in Tulsa that close.
Except Rad. He’d crashed right into her private life. Not even Ollie had slowed him down.
She sat in the bus and listened to the talk around her. She thought about their destination and tried to prepare herself for the horror they’d find. And she watched Rad and his friends ride around the bus. Their escorts. Knights on shining Harleys.
oOo
They arrived in Oklahoma City before noon. As they entered the city limits, a leaden silence came over the bus, even before the Murrah building was visible.
Then it came into view, and the bus filled with sounds of shock and dismay. Janet screamed and buried her face in Dr. Rheingold’s chest, weeping.
When they got off the bus near the EMS command post, they all stopped and simply stared. They’d seen the images on television. They’d heard reports on the radio. But seeing the building, its remains, in actual space, its true size and scope, hearing the sounds of suffering and rescue, smelling the smells of destruction and death—it was too enormous to comprehend.
It stood there, its guts exposed from top to bottom, wires and pipes and ducts hanging out like intestines, a wide drift of rubble slanting into the street. Smoke, or dust, or both, rose up in plumes. Bright yellow spots moved across the devastated scene—rescue workers in safety gear.
“Let’s go!” Dr. Rheingold called, and Willa’s colleagues followed him to the command center. Rad and the Bulls were right behind them, and they arrived as if one team.
At the EMS post, they were told that most of the survivors were believed to have been evacuated. They were still in active search and rescue, but they were preparing to shift their efforts to recovery—which meant finding and identifying the rest of the bodies of those who had not survived.
Willa was assigned, with three of her colleagues, to the primary triage center on site. The others were dispatched to local hospitals. Rad and the Bulls were sent to talk to the Oklahoma National Guard to find out how they could help.
Rad grabbed her hand before she could follow the EMS operative to the triage site. “I don’t like this.”
“There are police and firefighters and military everywhere. I’m safe. We’re here to help. Let’s help.”
His eyes burned into hers for a moment, then he kissed her hard and let her go.
“You take care.”
“You, too. I’ll see you soon.”
oOo
They were moving people out of the triage center and to local hospitals as quickly as they could. But hundreds and hundreds of people had been hurt, and the center was full of suffering and the evidence of even more. A temporary morgue had been set up. Willa tried not to focus there, to focus instead on the living.
She spent the day triaging patients, tagging them as ‘red,’ ‘yellow,’ ‘green,’ or ‘white.’ Red tags meant they needed immediate, intensive assistance. Yellow-tagged patients were stable but seriously hurt. Patients with green tags were those who needed sutures or had simple fractures or mild concussions. They needed care but were in no danger of death or serious complications. White tags didn’t need a doctor. They were shaken and stressed, possibly bruised and scraped, but an ice pack and a hug would do for a prescription.
Most of the children had been evacuated quickly, first thing, and had already been dispatched to local hospitals. The triage center was mainly full of adults, and wounded were still coming in, but slowly now.
Rescue workers were arriving at the triage center, too, injured by falling or unstable debris.
As she worked, a front-line fellowship cohered among the volunteers. Most didn’t know each other, most didn’t even know names, but they watched out for each other. When a particularly devastating case came in—someone who’d had a limb amputated without anesthesia so that he could be extracted from the rubble, for instance, or a small child who’d been pulled out alive but hadn’t made it to triage—there was an almost palpable sense of unified support among the rescue workers. Strength and resilience was shared among those who helped.
Emergency medicine was always stressful. Devastating injuries happened all the time, not only when evil reared its head. Car wrecks, work injuries, gun violence—Willa had seen it all, and it had all taken its toll.
But when such pain was caused intentionally, with malice and intent, and on such a scale? How could one make sense of something so senseless?
She hated this work, important as it was. She could feel it changing her, dimming her. She’d never learned to detach from the people who were her patients, and she’d never learned to keep her back turned toward the cosmic questions such barbarity as this provoked: Why was innocent life so easily taken? And how was a mind who could take it formed? How could God sit by and let madness and evil tear down this beautiful thing He’d made?