Rescue - By Anita Shreve Page 0,54
an EMT’s yellow coat blocking Webster’s view. Webster is losing focus and has to exert his will to concentrate on the task at hand.
One, maybe two, dislocated shoulders. A contusion the size of a baseball at the back of her head. Blood pressure 110 over 72. Pulse rapid and thready. He presses lightly against her clavicle and can feel the break. She should have woken screaming at the touch.
“You stay here,” he says to the boy. “I’m going for the stretcher and the oxygen. Don’t move, no matter what. And do not let anyone step on her.”
Webster exits the vehicle the way he entered, most of the other medics using the side door that the cops have now freed. Webster runs for the stretcher and sees a unit pulling in from New York. He puts out a hand.
“Come with me,” he tells the medic. “Bring your backboard, your stretcher, and your portable O2. I’ve got a patient.”
Webster and the medic climb back into the bus. They turn the girl’s body into the aisle and slide her onto the backboard. They strap her on, and Webster applies a head restraint. They inch her toward the front door. Webster exits first, shouldering the weight, but the medic has the trickier maneuver—getting out of the bus without losing his grip on the backboard. They put Jill on a stretcher and walk her back to the waiting ambulance, Webster leading, the EMT and Edward following. The other EMT from New York has the back door open. “We’ve got it,” he tells Webster.
“Unresponsive, breathing shallow, pulse rapid and thready, BP hundred ten over seventy-two, one, possibly two dislocated shoulders, broken clavicle, suspect head injury, name’s Jill.”
Webster turns to the kid standing to one side. The boy is quivering like a heart in V-fib.
“Take this kid with you,” Webster says to the EMT. “His name is Edward. Give him a phone to call his parents or do it for him. Get him to tell you the girl’s last name and call it into Dispatch.”
Webster helps the kid, who has lost all his strength, up into the passenger seat. “You did good, Edward,” Webster says, buckling him in.
Webster shuts the door and steps back. He checks his watch, a digital. He’s been at the scene nineteen minutes.
As far as he can see up the hill, there are emergency vehicles, lights strobing in the thick fog. Critical injuries, some fatalities. The smart medics have made U-turns on the shoulders before stopping so that later they’ll be able to exit the scene. The other emergency vehicles will serve as mini–trauma centers with EMTs and medics dispensing urgent care.
Webster, being among the first to arrive, is almost the last to leave, negotiating the shoulder on his way to Mercy, with Koenig and two hurt but not critical patients in the back. Mother and son, from the Touareg, she with face and chest bruises from the air bag, the boy, nine, with a broken wrist sustained when he tumbled, long after the accident, from the passenger seat of the car onto the road, and otherwise unhurt.
Four dead at the scene, three of them children, the fourth the driver of the Hyundai. An unhurt woman from an adjacent vehicle hysterical, sobbing that she couldn’t stop in time, until finally a cop put her into a cruiser and took her home just to shut her up. Local news channels from two states criminally blocking the exit routes. Small children on shortboards, red and blue sweaters peeking through the thermal blankets. Webster has called in to Dispatch to find out where Jill was taken, but no one has an answer yet. Webster thinks of Rowan, of how the girl in the purple tank top might so easily have been her.
It isn’t the first mass-casualty incident Webster has had, but a school bus ups the ante, flooding the scene with anxious parents, some of whom had the good sense to dig in and help. The driver of the Jeep looked bad ten different ways when the stretcher carrying him raced past the bus. Webster treated broken bones, mild concussions, lacerations, two serious wounds. He kept his eyes averted from the parents who had to learn that their children hadn’t made it. Webster can’t bear the deaths of children; the images haunt him at night. It’s a parental grief he can imagine so well that he’s occasionally brought himself to tears.
On the way back from Mercy, Koenig, in the driver’s seat, says, “Fucking nightmare. They ought