Dziwna Kapliczka P4
In the next minute the hospital staff was pulling extra gurneys from storage and placing them in the wards with enough space for a skinny man could squeeze through if he went gut sucked. The rooms full the halls were lined and wheelchairs were positioned as a backstop for overflow. A quartermaster was setup on each floor for the prejudiced distribution of supplies. Behind each desk were big linen baskets overstuffed with tall mounds of bandages or tourniquets or stockinettes or rolls of cast tape or cast paddigns. Pallets of antiseptics were brought up from the basement and the bottles were removed and the pallets covered first in linen then in blankets and leaned against walls fore surely there would be use. Stacks of EKGs were presynched to the master server and left in stacks of forty in each room. The pharmacy was oped and the pharmicists stood ready with tandem runners at their command. The front desk was converted to triage and the lobby chairs were stowed and extra cots were setup in grid.
All this was accomplished in seventeen minutes but the ambulances did not arrive for nearly a half hour. But hundreds were arriving. By car or transit or shod. A mass havoc bowling through the doors in a clamor of confusion and blood. Janda heard this permeate through his feet and him on the third floor. A muffled undertone of terror and pain like noises rumored to be heard when standing above the hollows in the earth rumored to connect to the pits of hell. Janda was at the nurse’s desk requisitioning autoinjectors when the elevator first pinged. He looked with others towards the sound with dark foreboding.
When the doors opened a man wet in blood and born under the arm seat of two nurses and followed by three men shouting at their hinds appeared.
We need a bed!
303! shouted Janda rushing to make a quick appraisal of the wound.
They gnawed his fucking foot off! said one of the man’s friends.
Janda pulled backed the blood heavy bottom of the man’s jean leggings. The friend had told truth. The forefoot was mostly gone though the metatarsals remained albeit fleshless. The foot proper hung by a skinflap from the posterior of the leg. The achilles tendon was dangling like a angler’s bait and enough calf was missing that Janda could see the tibia. The man was palefaced and blood was leaking out of his wound. A belt had been cinched tight to his thigh offcenter. He loosened and repositioned and retightened it on the inside of the thigh.
Take him to 301-I mean 303. Get this thing, he tugged at the belt, off and put on an esmach.
There mores on our ass, said one of the bearers and as he spoke the doors to the stairwell opened and folk bypassing the lobby queue came pouring in.
Janda flashed a look at the elevators. The numbers in the lintels were illuminated 5, 3, 1. The up arrow of the rightmost hall lantern illuminated. He ran to the elevator. The elevator chimed just as he slid to it. As the doors opened blood freckled his front. The patient was a tall bearded brawler and he must not have understood what had happened for he backed into a corner and then he began the panic that would end his life. He held his hand to his neck and he fended the physician’s assistant who was now trying to see what had happened. He shoved the man back cursing at him and he was becoming unsteady on his feet and the blood was dropping on the floor and he slipped and went to the floor.
Let me see let me see.
But the patient was thrashing in sacrificial terror, raging against the red light and now pummeling his restrainer. Janda tackled the big man to the floor.
Calm down, calm down.
But the big man was dying and he flailed. Janda was trying to see the wound. An avulsion in his neck below the ear, a small nick in the carotid. The doors shut. A down arrow appeared in the
Calm down, we can fix this but you have to hold still.
He wasnt bleeding before! screamed the assistant. He fucking looked at me. I told him to keep his head straight! Stop moving goddamn you!
Get me a clamp! Run!
The assistant was hugging the dying man’s legs together and when he let go the man began kicking himself clockwise in that bloodstained space.An elbow caught Janda in the face. The assistant sprawled back down.
Stop moving youre making it worse!
A gargled invective of bubbling froth was sputtering into Janda’s ears. Hands grabbed at his hands. The man’s face swung and he could see pupils constricted to pinholes. The face averted again and in the doing the jugular nick tore wide and blood sputtered as thought out a spile.
The elevator chimed and the doors parted to reveal a theophany of hell or else a passable pantomine surmised in the lower regions where confusion reigns and hope fails eternal. A bedlam of misery. Men running. Men bleeding, voming shitting blood. Everywhere the dead lay as they had fallen and those who were knocked down were rampled underfoot and the wounded staggered and sloughed, some of the wounded articulating dumbly the strange gait of bustards and others who held the stumps of arms or legs and others tottering hunchbacked where they had been gutshot and some hemmoraghing all at once great gouts of blood that splashed in gothic fleuorons on the floor. The cots were gone. The triage station was overrun. In this welkin were some who wore the garb of doctors but they were lost and none could ultimately bestead these victims brought to murderous excitement mayhaps by some faultyvaccine for the rabid that had imbrued in the nerves the degenerative chaos it sought to forefend. A stench of human nidor assaulted the nostrils and there were men tangled together in violence and a man holding in his arms the limp forms of his children and men striking each other with fists, chairs, pipes, a woman cored with a boxcutter and her intestines uncoiling like a rope and a blind man kneeling dwelt upon a maze of vomit as though some portent might be divined in that awful purge and everywhere in this monstrous bedlam were the forces of order confounded by the imminence of death, their features gurn and gored and raising their shrieks and two old laicy orisoning for an intercession in this this fraction of a froth fleck that is the killing of this world.
