Post Grid: An Arizona EMP Adventure (2 page)

“Lift your arm,” Kelly directed the mother. “I'm going to tie your baby to you. We'll be as gentle as we can, but getting you out of here may be a little rough. Let us know if you're hurting.” The patient just sobbed.

The fabric made a big loop around the patient's back and under one arm. The mother clutched her newborn to her chest as Kelly adjusted the makeshift sling, then snugged the knot.

“That should hold him. Let's go.” Kelly looked Bridget in the eyes, then steered the wheelchair toward the main stairwell, ultimately headed for the ER on the first floor and outside.

As they rounded the corner, people were streaming from the stairwell fire doors. With the doors held open, Kelly could see into the seven-story stairwell. Blades of sunlight filtered through huge cracks in the masonry walls, illuminating the thick smoke that swirled in the air.

“What's going on?” Kelly shouted into the throng.

“Stairwell's full. I don't think they're getting out downstairs,” an old man said.

Just then, an out-of-breath nurse came bounding through the door, sweat dripping from his face. “Don't come down,” his voice boomed, directed at everyone. “The doors are jammed.”

“What do you mean
jammed
?” Kelly cried, noticing his nametag said Ryan.

“Just what I said!” Ryan retorted irritably. “There's dozens of people down there, but the doors on One and Two aren't budging. Stairwell's warped. The door opens inward, and we can't get enough pull.”

“The only other stair off this floor is destroyed, on the crash end,” Kelly's tone was treble. “We'll have to get the doors open from below.”

“Good luck with that,
sweetheart
,” Ryan said in his best Humphrey Bogart impression.

Kelly glared at him. “Okay then, we'll have to find another way out. Get these patients as far from the fire as you can and wait for me to get that door opened,” Kelly directed Bridget.

“I'll go with you,” said Ryan.

“Okay,” said Kelly. “Bridget, I need you to get whoever is still in that stairwell away from the door. We'll try to ram the door in. If we can't do that, we'll be back and find another way out.”

Kelly placed her hands on the mother's shoulders, forcing her to make direct eye contact. “We will get you out of here. I promise.”
The mother squinted her eyes, pinched her lips together and barely lifted their corners; it was half sob, half smile. “I'll be back.” She gave a quick glance toward Bridget, who looked just as scared.

Ryan, moving nervously back and forth, said, “Come on already! Which way do we go?”

“I have to think,” Kelly said. “We can't go through ICU.”

“What else is on this floor?”

“Day surgery. It's Saturday, it's closed.”

Both took off in a dead run for the surgery doors. Grabbing the handles of the double doors and rattling them soundly showed them to be secure. All doors into surgery were electronically controlled by swiping a badge in the card reader, or from the secured nurse's station.

“So much for
state-of-the-art security. Nothing works without electricity
,” said Ryan. “Isn't there a waiting room that looks over the cafeteria courtyard?”

“Yeah, but it's on the other side of surgery.”

Smoke
began filling the room,
hanging stormily overhead. “The window,” Kelly said spotting the reception window. “Help me get that table.”

Kelly threw the magazine rack and lamp from the end table, breaking the pottery lamp into pieces.
Together, they hefted the table.

“Man, it's heavy,” Kelly said,
her face scarlet from the effort
. Arms straining, they heaved it at the glass window. The window shook with the impact and the pair jumped back as the table flew back at them, crashing to the floor. They had only managed to crack the safety glass.

Smoke now cascaded down from the ceiling vents. “It's probably being pushed through the air conditioning ducts,” Ryan said. “They're probably open to the crash site.”

Kelly started to cough, subconsciously bringing her hands up to cover her mouth without relief. Crouching, she tried to get away from the volatile gases.

“Help me!” Ryan yelled at her. “Grab the table again.”

“Here.” Kelly picked up the broken pottery from the lamp and proceeded to bash at the window with it. Ryan followed suit. They managed to bash a hole the size of a trash can lid in the glass.

“I'll go first,” said Ryan. He wrapped his arm in his scrub shirt and wiped the glass pieces off of the counter, then hoisted himself up through the hole.

“Come on,” Ryan motioned to Kelly. “Be careful.”

She placed her hands on the counter and pushed until she could get her knees up there too.
If only I had made the hole a bit bigger
, she thought as she squeezed through the hole and glass ripped through the skin of her upper arm. Balanced on her haunches, half in and half out of the window, she reached up a hand to inspect the sudden jolt of pain. Blood coated her hand.

“You're bleeding,” Ryan said.

“Leave it be, just go!” Kelly could feel a tightness in her chest, the tightness she always felt before it made its way up her throat and out onto her cheeks in the form of tears. She swallowed hard, then leaped from the counter, landing in a squat.

As she crawled after Ryan, blood ran down one arm, both hands making sanguine handprints on the linoleum tiles. Her lanyard allowed her car key to scrape along the floor as she went. Crawling battered her knees, but it got her to their next destination: another door. They went out into the surgery's clinical hallway. Darkness crowded around them as the door to the reception area inched closed.

Bruised and bloodied, Kelly groped along the baseboards until her eyes adjusted. She could see Ryan crawling ahead of her, and then a faint slit of light appeared low to the ground ahead of him.

“There are no windows in the surgery suites. Is that sunlight?” Kelly asked.

Suddenly her hand did not find baseboard to her left. Her fingers rammed into something; a rolling cart, she guessed. There were alcoves in the hallways for supply and linen carts, to keep them out of the way. She trailed her hand along the plastic cover, another six feet, then found the baseboard again.

It wasn't long until she and Ryan were at the thin strip of light along the floor. Smoke was being sucked out under the door.  

Knees aching and her arm throbbing, Kelly reached up and pressed on the door's latching bar. It gave easily.

“All of these doors let you out, just not in. This must be out,” Ryan said.

“If this is another dead end, we might need to get back in here. Don't let it close,” Kelly directed. She emerged into a third-story hallway with floor-to-ceiling windows, now shattered. Pieces of glass littered the floor. The smoke was heavier outside the building than in, and curled in through the gaping holes in the glass. Day was rendered twilight.

Kelly crossed the hallway, dropped to her knees in front of a hole in the glass, and peered down into the cafeteria courtyard. Air streamed in around her sweaty body,
cooling her and offering renewed hope.

She leaned out to inspect the structure below. Panic filled her again. More broken glass,
Ugh
!

Kelly crawled back to where Ryan sat, holding the door open. “We can get out, but it's a long way down.”

“What do we do?” asked Ryan.

“I learned rappelling in the Navy.”

“We don't have any rope. What about a fire hose?”

“Not long enough, and I don't think I could keep a grip on that.
Sheets!”

Kelly pushed Ryan aside, scrambling back into the darkened hallway. “I'll be right back.”

“Where you going?”

“Right back,” Kelly repeated. “I'm getting sheets.”

Ryan let out a sigh. “You have one minute!”

Standing was out of the question; the smoke was too thick. Kelly bent at the waist, eyes watering with each step. The coughing became constant as she made her way back to the alcove.
She unzipped and threw up the plastic cover. It held supplies. The one next to it held sheets, pillowcases, blankets and towels.

How many?
Not waiting to run a mathematical calculation in her head, she grabbed a tall stack of sheets that towered from her waist to her chin, and started in the direction of the outside hallway. Her air was running out. She bent forward as far as she could, still running. Some sheets from the top of her stack fell to the floor. She started to bend even further to pick them up.
You can come back for them if you need them
, a panicked voice said from inside her head.
Get out!

She pushed past Ryan, coughing and gagging. “We can't go back that way,” she said.

Ryan pulled a sheet from her hands and stuffed it into the doorway, keeping the door from latching shut.

“I like to keep my options open,” he said.

Next thing she knew, they were both sitting in a pile of sheets in front of the broken glass, hands struggling to tie the large sheets end-to-end.

“Too bulky, we need strips.”

Ryan grasped a sewn hem and tried to rip it. Kelly watched him struggle, then had an idea. She made a quick scan of the hall, what she could see of it through the smoke, then looked down. Her car key hung around her neck. She flipped the metal emergency key up and out of its fob and raked it against the sewn hem. It took two or three passes, but finally, a slit was made.

“How many strips do we need?” Kelly asked.

“Let's see... six feet in sheet length times three—no, make it four sections—should be one story's worth of rope.”

“We'll need extra for the knots and the tie-off.”  Kelly n
otched the sheets and passed them to Ryan, who made short of work of tearing them.

“Smoke's pouring out from the surgery door now.” Kelly told Ryan. “Faster, faster...” Her breath came in quick pants.

“That's five sheets, we have twenty lengths,” Ryan announced, coughing.

Kelly sorted through the stack to find the ends and then started tying the lengths end-to-end, with
Zeppelin
knots.

Ryan watched. “How do you do that?”

“B over Q, B over Q
... That was how I was taught the Zeppelin.” The memory aid still produced a vivid picture in her head of how to tie the knot.

“Here, watch.”

It took Ryan quite awhile and a little practice to get the knot right, but he was finally able to help.

“What did that take? Fifteen minutes? I hope this holds,” Kelly said, more to herself than to anyone else.

The tall windows were about four feet across. They had a three-foot-tall pane at the bottom and an eight-foot-tall pane at the top. The two panes were divided by a midrail. Kelly picked a section where both the top and bottom panes had been shattered.

Ryan kicked the remaining glass pieces from the frame, then tied the end of the rope to the window's midrail as close to the brick building as he could.

“Try to keep at least one foot on the bricks. The windows below you probably aren't in any better shape than these,” Ryan said. “If they're cracked, they'll give way when you touch them.”

Kelly inspected the tie-off knot and gave it a few hearty tugs.
No give—good
. She positioned a sheet over the rail to try to protect her rope from the window's frame and glass shards. The ground was a
long
way down, but it looked like the rope fell to within a foot or two of the gravel. Kelly ripped two more four-inch strips from the remaining sheet and made a few loops around her hands to protect them from rope burn, then sidled up to the window.

“Wow, except for training, I never rappelled once in the Navy. Thank God I learned.” Kelly said, glancing at Ryan and then looking down.

“You have one on me,” said Ryan. I've never done it. Don't you need a fancy harness or something?”

She stood, put the rope between her legs, brought it around her right hip, up and over her left shoulder, then back down so that her right hand could hold it snugly.

“This this a Dulfersitz rappel; I learned it in my ROTC confidence course.”

“You sure you've got this?” Ryan asked, as much fear in his eyes as she imagined she had in hers.

“I've got it,” said Kelly.
I've got this, I've got this, I've got this
, she repeated over and over in her head. Tentatively, she put one leg out over the window rail. She snugged the rope against her body, then straddled the rail. For just a moment, she shut her eyes so tightly that her cheeks hurt.

“Just walk down the building, walk slowly down the building,” she said to herself, out loud.

Putting her second leg out, the bottom frame separated under her weight.

Ryan grabbed her by her upper arm, the one that wasn't bleeding, and steadied her as she pivoted. He yanked her instinctively, digging his fingers into her flesh. “Whoa there,” he muttered.