We All Sleep Alone (Finley Creek #11) - Calle J. Brookes
1
It was going to happen, going to hit them straight on.
Dr. Allen Jacobson wrapped his arms around the nurse next to him and yanked her behind the intake counter. It was the two of them now. Everyone else had evacuated the ER with the warning siren and headed toward the inner corridors, following the hospital’s tornado warning plan. But this nurse had been ahead of him in the parking lot.
He thought. He hadn’t been paying much attention. Just running from the storm. He hadn’t even looked close to enough to see which nurse it was.
The woman and her daughter who’d come in after everything was secured were curled on the floor together a good twenty feet away from him and the nurse.
Allen wouldn’t be able to get to them. To get them away from the glass entryway.
Glass could be so deadly.
The roar of the wind drowned out their screams.
Glass shattered around them. It hadn’t stopped. Ceiling tiles bounced off his back. Allen tightened his hold on the woman in his arms. She screamed—once—as the storm struck.
He’d never forget her scream. The fear.
The wind pulled at him, yanking at his clothes. Allen pulled her to her feet. They had to get to some sort of better shelter.
He shoved her toward the underside of the desk. She was small; she fit. He managed to get himself partially under the large desk with her. He covered her head with one hand and pulled her to his chest.
She had short hair, soft as silk.
He didn’t know why that stuck with him, but it did.
Allen’s arms tightened around her.
Even the desk could turn deadly if the wind grabbed it. He wasn’t about to let her go. He yelled that it would be ok, would be over soon. He doubted she heard him. Small hands tightened on his arms.
She felt so damned breakable.
Metal and wood scraped against itself, a shrill sound unlike any he had ever heard before. The sprinklers turned on.
He prayed it wasn’t because of fire. Fire would make this so much worse.
Dust flew sideways around them. Stealing breath.
Everything crashed down around them. Leaving them in total darkness. He didn’t move. Not yet.
There were backup generators located at the rear of the hospital. They might kick on—but if the generators had been hit, the hospital would be in darkness.
He had his phone in his pocket.
Allen pulled back from the nurse in his arms. “You ok?”
“Yes. I think so.” Her words were shaky. He couldn’t blame her. “How badly were we hit?”
“Hard.” Allen shone the flashlight on his phone at the woman. He knew it was one of the ER nurses—he’d recognized the familiar green scrubs—but he hadn’t had time to get a close enough look to see which one it was.
Izzie, the third-shift nurse who liked to snip at doctors, stared right back at him out of terrified dark eyes. Eyes that dominated her pixie-cute face.
He’d never seen her scared before.
“The woman and her daughter?”
He turned the phone toward the last place he had seen them.
A child’s booted foot was all he saw. Debris covered everything but that one tiny foot.
Allen jumped to his feet, kicking ceiling tiles out of his way. Izzie was right behind him.
When he touched the little girl’s leg, she cried out. He gave a quick prayer of thanks that she was still alive. Alive meant hope. He tossed his phone at the nurse. “Point the light this way.”
By the time he got half the debris off the girl, people were moving back into the ER.
What remained of the ER looked like a war zone.
Three nurses he recognized pointed their phones in his direction to get him more light while doing what they could to shift the rubble.
Another crew worked nearby to find the girl’s mother.
Allen pulled the last of the rubble off the child. An orderly had a backboard ready. “On three.”
Allen counted it off. He, Millie, and Jade lifted the little girl carefully. Allen knew the procedures for a major catastrophic event involving the ER. He knew what his role was going to be.
He looked at the man heading the team to extract the mother.
“Do we have any portion of the building still operational?”
Rafe Holden-Deane, chief of medicine, nodded. “But we may have to do large-scale evacuations when we’re certain the weather has stabilized.”
“In the meantime?”
“Your department is still standing—running backup generators for now—but we’re going to have to carry patients up stairwells to get them there.”