Climate
By Hamish
- 709 reads
Recent events.
Climate..
She was Persian and apart from the shard of glass jutting from her femoral artery this was a normal girl on the way to work.
Imagine her surprise.
I massaged her heart and breathed for her a while. I listened for sirens. "Hey you! I shouted at a suited onlooker "Press your thumb here, hard!
Saphia Iman you are allowed to lose three pints. You have already lost two and a half and are receiving C.P.R. Saphia Iman it seems very likely you are dying.
Brace..
A back-pack full was enough to sardine can the roof and shred the life right out of twelve people. The death mule was a fidgety boy. The maniac, as ever had baggage.
A paramedic dots the "i in cardiac with more pressure than usual. "Blood loss, trauma, failed resuscitation. All underlined. "Things will get forensic very soon thinks the ambulance man. Coping strategies kick in all over town. No-one is really coping.
Giles Beere sat in the dark remembering the girl slip from wide-eyed to comatose. "If I had just put pressure on that artery sooner, I could've stemmed the flow. At around three in the morning everything went deep vein red and black and Giles Beere fell asleep, foetally positioned on his couch. He slept for two days through phone calls and knocking and slowly became a missing person.
"Where the fuck have you been? screamed his sister. There was no embrace, the woman was too angry and Giles had slept off large chunks of guilt, grief and caring. He was full of holes, riddled with gaps in his most important emotional processes. He had nothing to bridge them, it would be weeks. There was no embrace.
Nicky Beere was a nurse and although she was exhausted working eighteen hours straight she could have understood her brother. She could have understood the insidious, creeping tell-tales of shock. Her hospital hallways and rooms oozed the stuff, indelibly. Nicky Beere, empathy?
The atrocity stretched them badly in accident and emergency. Nicky normally theatre nursed for plastic surgeons, she volunteered her secondment to triage.
"Y'know shrapnel sounds like what it is and what it does she told her mother down the phone with the wobble voiced vibrato of jangling nerves. "Has anyone heard from Giles? "Does anyone know how this happened?
In another wing, in the burns unit Cavan Ronsmith performed emergency skin reconstructions at a pace he was wholly uncomfortable with. Like his senior nurse Nicky he wanted to do something to turn the despicable wheel of atrocity back on itself in some little way and so here he was. He had helped disfigured folk before but never like this, red and raw, only hours after their affliction. "Scorch sounds like what it is and what it does he thought half way through a graft from thigh to neck.
"Mrs Sprackman, I'm afraid your nose re-build will have to be re-scheduled, Dr Ronsmith is heavily involved with helping victims of today's outrage. Sabine Sprackman's initial knee-jerk was anger. She was phobic about surgery, no matter how routine and wanted it over¦today! "Today's outrage she thought, the last time she had watched television their were reports of a handful of people killed in the middle of town, an accident. "Outrage? She turned to the news channel where it flashed and blinked words like "Extremists and "Heavy loss of life across the bottom of the screen. Her initial knee-jerk was surprise. Her second response was the petrol emotion of terror.
Kieran Sprackman was an evacuee along with the rest of the law firm. Out on the street they mingled with the disarray only panic-buttons can imbue. People not sure what they were desperate to get away from moved away from it anyway. Panic was permeable and leaked from one scene fleer to another. The intangible osmotic of fear. Amidst the exodus here are three rumours Kieran heard in no particular order: 1. It was a gas explosion 2. It was a massive power surge 3. It was a terror act. Personally he was leaning gut felt toward number three.
"Hey, you, press your thumb here, hard! Kieran Sprackman knew nothing about first-aid but he did what he was told. He could see the shard of glass jutting out of the woman's leg. She had bled absurd, unbelievable amounts of blood. The man giving her mouth to mouth glanced at him as he compressed her chest fifteen times. "Do you know how to do this? I'm getting really tired The lawyer shook his head. Kneeling on the grubby asphalt he saw the casualty ashen. Pallid was the grey. The mouth to mouth man stopped and Kieran Sprackman pulled his thumb away assuming the position of someone distraught.
He had heard and read about the dead now he leant by a murder that stuffed all that he knew of death up his nostrils and fair into his brain.
Serkan Iman stood accused and galleries of people checked their bated breath as he stepped forward. In the dock he sat higher than Kieran Sprackman but he did not look down on him. His fixation was with his own fidgety hands and some other things a lot further away. His tribulation was tangible, everyone guessed and guessed right at the heavy, racing heart of an atrocity chemist. Kieran Sprackman, tarred with a not entirely dissimilar brush knew that defending this man was a dirty job. A murderer by proxy? As heinous as carcinoma? Not yet. Technically.
"Really my love, there are big problems today with public transport, big delays Safia Iman hated delay, did not like delay in her employees, would not compromise her own punctuality. Her husband's lie had touched one of her rawest nerves and so she would take the car, walking the last two hundred yards from the underground car park. Serkan Iman was not an animal.
Giles Beere went into the city the same way he always did, six days a week full of pot noodle and cold pizza.
Nicky Beere was on a rostered day off, she'd kick back at home and take a long, long bath.
Cavan Ronsmith visualised a couple of his operations for that day and even allowed himself to imagine what his private health pin money might buy him.
Apprehensive Sabine Sprackman, primed for her surgery had a cab ordered for mid morning. In profile she looked at her nose and smiled at the mirror.
Kieran Sprackman had left home earlier than usual that day, his clientele for the next while warranted extra ordinary effort.
Somewhere over France Serkan Iman looked at his watch. Using a compass in the toilet he ascertained Mecca and prayed for success in the correct direction, standing up. He prayed for a new and terrific climate.
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