“No, I mean a big group. Hundreds. They’re in the Theater. Apparently that’s the second location the captain herded the refugees in New York. There’s a lot of the tourists wound up with them now as well, the ones that had rooms in the back. It seemed like they’d overwhelm us here so I told them to send some representatives to come down here and coordinate with us and share information. They should be coming any time.”
Hesse nodded. As he rejoined Colonel Warrant, the crew member who had led the diving group returned.
Carts of food were continuously brought down; Travis and Conrad did not stop to eat. Bloodied, tired, and hungry, they continued. They set bones and splinted them, they stitched lacerations, they treated burns and intubated one man on a spinal board.
At some point, John Hesse returned to his perch on the bar and yelled for the crowd’s attention.
“We’ve gotten some reports back from most of the teams. Here’s our situation. First the bad news. The generators and engines are out of commission; of course, we’ll see if we can change that. We do have emergency power, as you can all see, but nobody in charge of it. That’s a problem we can solve. There is a watertight compartment shut off because of the collision, we have a twenty foot vertical gash. The compartments are designed to protect the ship from a leak filling the boat, and it’s working. We’re not in danger from the collision anymore. There was a ship fire crew already at work battling the fires. They’ve closed off several corridors, but they have taken more volunteers and have things under control. We have no communications. The communications room was adjacent to the bridge and was destroyed in the attack. Any emergency signal devices would have been in the same location. We can’t call for help. But this ship will be missed and will be looked for. We have to assume that authorities on land will eventually be performing sweeps of the ocean. This was done when the tsunami hit Southeast Asia, so we know we’ll be found eventually, we just don’t know when that will happen. Our best estimate is that there are between three and four thousand of us still on board. By my guess, that means some few hundred left by lifeboat during the night.”
Immediately screams came from the crowd. One voice carried over the others.
“Why don’t we use the lifeboats now?”
“There aren’t enough,” Hesse responded. “First of all, the lifeboats are intended for the number of passengers and crew on the ship, not for two thousand plus refugees. Second, the lifeboats are high capacity, but I don’t think that those that left during the night were very efficient about it. In fact, I know they weren’t because I watched my girlfriend leave in one. And I’ll tell you what else. Those lifeboats will never make it back to land. It’s just too far. Here, the ship can still support us until we’re found. Now the good news. The ship isn’t sinking. There are no major breaches of the hull, and any flooding is being contained in the watertight compartments. We also have plenty of food. That’s it.”
“That’s all the good news?” someone shouted. “We aren’t sinking and we have food?”
“What the hell do you want?” Hesse snapped. “The entire east coast of the Americas is lost, and for all we know, Europe or anywhere else could be flooded too, but we’re alive, sheltered and safe. Count your blessings. All we can do now is pull together, stay organized, and survive. That’s… that’s our mission. Guys, we can survive here. We have food, and medical professionals, and a safe ship. We’ll make it as long as we need to.”
Hesse stepped down. More questions were shouted at him, but he ignored them and took Colonel Warrant by the arm. The two of them strode to a shop off the side of the Atrium. Hesse kicked the locked door open and the two went in to set up a command centre.
The first porta-johns came down and were set up along the perimeter of the great room.
The medical staff worked their way through the ones and twos. No one died out of the patients Travis and Conrad had seen to, but now they were dealing with the threes. The first one they came to was already dead. The man next to him, holding up his three fingers, had been unable to look down at his father dying. He had never seen the old man slip away. He’d spent the whole day holding that arm up, supported by his other arm, three fingers held high.
The second number three had been shot in the chest. Travis called for a nurse to bring blood. As they prepared him for IV, Conrad cleaned and studied the hole in his chest. The man convulsed.
“Cardiac arrest,” Conrad said.
“Joel,” Travis said. He shook his head no.
He was trying to protect the doctor from the anguish, to give him permission to move on.
“No!” Conrad said sharply, then he smiled at Travis. “Are you ready for an adventure?”
Travis smiled in answer. If Conrad was ok to keep fighting, so was he.
“We’re going to do an emergency thoracotomy. I’ll need a Gigli saw, large clamp or forceps, a large scalpel and scissors, and sutures. We need to intubate, and we’ll need suction – the portable pump has a battery pack.”
Travis ran off. He retrieved the tools and portable oxygen supply and returned in less than three minutes.
“Here we go,” Conrad said. “You intubate, I’ll cut.”
Travis pressed tubes into the man’s nose, connecting them with the portable oxygen supply. Conrad doused the chest with antiseptic, and cut shallow incisions at each side of his chest. He cut deeper, connecting the two incisions in a smile-shape across the bottom of the chest. Travis watched, amazed, as the doctor inserted two fingers into one of the side incisions as he finished his deep cut.
“I’m keeping the lungs out of the way,” he said. “Now give me that Gigli saw and the forceps.”
The Gigli saw was a flexible wire saw with metal handles at each end. The skin was pulled back, revealing the sternum. Conrad used the forceps to pass the saw under the sternum. With smooth, long strokes, he cut the sternum through from the inside out.
“Now I need your help,” Doctor Conrad said. “Pull the skin open and hold it.”
Travis did as he was told. Doctor Conrad snapped the sternum open with his hands; the crowd which had begun to gather jumped back at the noise. Blood was spattered across Travis and Conrad’s arms and faces. They could see the heart now, clear and open. It was bathed in blood. Conrad used the suction, and they saw a small tear in the heart. The bullet itself had passed through the man’s back.
“First thing is to suture the heart,” Conrad said. “This is the only thing we’ve done today that I’m actually qualified to do.”
His fingers moved incredibly quickly. The heart though, was not moving at all.
“Now we need to massage the heart. Very gentle, this might work quickly.”
The doctor simply flicked the heart with his finger. After the briefest of pauses, it swelled and pulsed once.
“It’s not going,” Conrad said.
He began massaging the heart with both hands. One flat hand was applied to the front, one underneath. He milked the heart, moving his hands at a beat faster than once a second, yet so gently.
“Can you give me a free hand? Compress the aorta against the spine, this will maximize coronary perfusion.”
For almost a minute the two handled the heart in silence. Sweat was pouring off Conrad’s face. Then Conrad pulled away.
The heart kept beating.
“We’ve got it!”
Two women above them burst into tears, others cheered loudly.
Travis and Conrad leaned back for a moment.
“We just might save this man,” Conrad said. “Let’s close him up. We’d better anaesthetize him before he comes to.”
Thirty minutes later, the two men looked around and saw no hands in the air. They stumbled over to the food carts, throwing their gloves in a trash bin, then finding cold sandwiches.