[notes: thanks to Reaper Nanashi, who dedicated her time and creativity to helping me get a little more descriptive power into this. So…hope you like it.]
At the Kingsgrove shelter, all three were immediately checked out and assessed by a triage officer. While both Herc and Chuck were treated for dehydration, Kylie was considered Emergency Red Priority 1 and seen by medical staff right away. Before Herc could get a hold of her, she was put into a helicopter and flown out to Camden Hospital, as all the nearer hospitals were already flooded with patients.
Herc and Chuck remained at Kingsgrove, together with thousands of others who had lost everything in the attack. Once released from medical attention, Herc left Chuck with the nurses, he didn't think it was a good idea to drag him around, he had been through so much already. And what Herc had to do next was not any better than what Chuck had already witnessed.
He had never been the type to take the long road and so he simply brushed through the crowd that had gathered in front of the communications tent, waiting for updates on missing persons. There were long lists published on the bulletin board left of the entrance to the tent and Herc stopped to browse through them. Each shelter would communicate all arrivals to all the other shelters so that split up families would be able to find relatives. His wife's name was not on there and that smallest of hopes of Angela even being alive still faded away. He could not be sure after until he saw her body but as he had so rightly pointed out to Kylie, nobody could have survived the nuclear bomb. Still, he approached the personnel to ask but all he got as a reply was to keep checking the lists as updates came in every five minutes.
Unsatisfied with the answer – knowing fair well that everybody would receive the same response and that he was not any more important than all the other people who were looking for their relatives – Herc stomped off to find the officer in charge to turn himself in for insubordination and theft of military property. He was a very principled man, and even though he had set himself above the law when he unlawfully, even though only temporarily acquired the chopper, he sought to be dealt with accordingly. The officer in charge, Colonel Ferguson, however didn't feel the necessity to deal with Herc at all. He listened rather impatiently to Herc's matter-of-fact but still circumlocutory explanations – careful to not expose Kylie any more than necessary, he hated the thought of her getting into trouble over helping him out – and finally dismissed him with a "Duly noted, it will be addressed and handled later on."
Herc walked back to where his son was waiting. He felt a little light-headed and dizzy but blamed it on the adrenaline rush that had finally depleted. Something deep inside told that Angela had perished in the attack, her office had been too close to the impact zone of the nuclear bomb. Saint Ives, or what was left of it now, bordered Garigal National Part towards the west – way too close, the explosion or the radiation would have vaporized most of the surrounding area.
Pushing into the nurses' tent, he caught himself hesitating in his tracks when he saw Chuck sitting on a makeshift stretcher in the far corner of the tent, pale in his dirty dark blue shirt, sullenly staring into nothingness. The realization that this boy had just lost his mother because of the incompetence of his father nearly broke his heart. He had failed them both. In that very moment, Herc wanted to disappear from the face of the Earth.
It must have been at least a couple of moments he had stood there until Chuck realized that his dad had returned. A sad smile lit up his small face when he got up from where he was sitting and walked across the room to wrap his arms around Herc and it was then that Herc made the silent promise to not let him down another time – ever again.
"I want mom…" the boy said and Herc had to bite back the tears.
"I want mom, too…" he whispered into his son's hair while he told himself that he would not rest until he had found Angela – dead or alive. He would scour every shelter list, every hospital, every military register. He would not leave a single stone unturned until he could be more than absolutely certain of her fate.
Kylie arrived at Camden Hospital together with four other people, two of them being victims of car crashes like herself, one who had been rescued from a collapsing buildings and one got injured during a reckless stunt which resulted in a broken spine – the man had tried to hold off the Kaiju on his own, and had a bus thrown at him. The paramedic staff of the helicopter had run out of painkillers, so the level of moaning was quite intense. Kylie herself was in pain but the shock was still too present, or maybe it was because she simply didn't want to be alive that she wasn't feeling the pain she should have been feeling.
She had asked several times over – the triage officers and the paramedic staff – if there was any way to finding out if her family had survived but when she mentioned the region, they had only looked at her sadly.
Two of the patients had died during the 25 minutes of flight, the young and reckless man was one of them. The other was an elderly woman with a broken arm who had suffered two heart attacks during transport. The accompanying paramedics had done their best to keep their passing a secret but Kylie could tell from the desperate look on their faces once they ceased CPR that they had not been able to save their patients. It was quieter after that – Kylie hated herself for even thinking that.
The helicopter set down on a field next to the hospital parking lot – which was already packed with ambulances, fire engines and police cars – and Kylie was lifted out of the cabin and wheeled across towards the main entrance. She wanted to tell the men pushing her stretcher to be more careful as the ride was bumpy but kept quiet, their stressed out faces told her more than she cared to know.
There were even more ambulances, police cars and privately owned cars blocking the entrance and there were constantly coming and going more, bringing in casualties. Kylie could only imagine how it would be like inside the building. Sydney had never suffered a calamity of that proportion ever before and she silently prayed that at least someone inside had gotten a grip on things but from what she could see, this was not the case. Everybody outside, police, firefighters and medical staff were frantically working in the triage funnel they had created to better control all incoming units to identify the injured from people who had come to find family members, and those with catastrophic prognosis from those critically wounded with urgent need of treatment and surgery. It escaped her how anyone could even determine who needed more help and who needed less, but she witnessed a young girl on a stretcher – at least Kylie thought that it was a young girl, her body was almost entirely charred and blistered – being pushed over to a nurse who only nodded sadly at the doctor's dull 'no chance'.
Kylie was quickly examined and re-tagged, and then wheeled through the ER, past several automatic sliding doors and into an immeasurable hustle and bustle among the people, patients, nurses and surgeons alike. Even though the hospital personnel made every effort to organize themselves, the large number of people that kept on streaming in every minute presented a challenge – as did the lack of space.
Just like each hospital in the city, Camden was on mass casualty protocol, the focus was on the patients that actually had a chance to survive, an automatic non-resuscitation order was put on any patient. The med bays were overcrowded with up to four patients sharing a ventilator, patients were treated in the hallways, the waiting area and even in the cafeteria.
She was pushed along the many rows of beat-up chairs filled with people who had all sorts of injuries, but most were severe, as far as Kylie could determine in her blurry state of mind. Adults and children alike were either screaming in pain, sobbing or silent and trembling in their shock, largely untended due to the nurses and doctors being occupied with the most severe cases, and left to their own private hells because they had no serious physical injuries.
Kylie ended up being placed against a wall at the far end of the general admissions hall at the end of what seemed a long line of stretchers– all waiting for examination with one nurse constantly circulating from one end to the other to check on each person and make them feel as comfortable as possible while they were waiting for treatment. She began to notice an intense reek, odors of burned meat and blood mixed with urine and feces as the hysterical and dying lost control of their bowels.
She saw people with parts of their bodies charred black – just like the girl that had been left outside but apparently the ones in this line had been determined with better chances of survival – people with parts of their bodies missing entirely or crushed or twisted the wrong way. Many others, mostly with no or only slight injuries, were clinging to some patients on the stretchers, crying or praying. It made her sick to the stomach to having to witness the constant influx of people with severe burns and wounds caused by debris or ensuing accidents being brought into the ER, many of them children, and it was heart wrenching to see the parents pray for them to survive. Many would not, Kylie was sure.
Like Emma… Maybe, only maybe, it had been mercifully quick and painless. Hopefully Emma hadn´t even realized what was going on, but then again, what would that change? Nothing much. She was dead, as were her parents, and she was surprised at herself that she could accept that fact without too much inner commotion.
Losing a child was always one of the most horrific things to experience one could think of, much worse than losing a sibling, a parent or a friend. And Kylie now knew why. In more lucid moment, she would wreck her brains about how much of a joy Emma had been, how little she had seen from the world and how much there was left undiscovered. She would reminisce about not having been a good mother – after all, she had gone to work instead of staying with her family during the Kaiju attack – about how all of this most likely was her fault, about how she had not tried hard enough to save them.
She felt as though her mind wanted to slap her brain in a feeble attempt to shut it down, as she very well knew that all those thoughts were pointless. She was not to blame for anything. She did not make the Kaiju appear and attack Sydney, she did not order the military to chase the creature into Garigal National Park nor had she been the one giving the order to fire a nuclear missile into a densely populated area. All she had done was her job to help ensure the safety of everybody else. Yet it was much easier to simply blame herself and reel in a deep puddle of self-pity.
When the next patient was lined up behind her – unfortunately right in her line of view – she had to close her eyes and turn her head. The man was lying on his stomach, apparently he had been running away from the nuclear blast or so the nurses whispered, with his back so severely blistered by radiation as his clothes had burned away and his flesh had begun to cook. Maybe it was still cooking, Kylie thought judging the smell that exuded from him. It made her dry retch. The man however was quiet and smiling vapidly, the doctors must have given him an arsenal of painkillers. He seemed to be absolutely oblivious to what had happened to him or what was going on around him. Kyle wished that she had been given some drugs, too.
The noise however was the worst, it reverberated in her head and made her nauseous. Even though she had her eyes squeezed shut tightly to keep out the horrible sight of injuries, she couldn't keep out the sound. Everybody around her – including herself – was in pain, there were groans, whimpers and some sporadic shrill shrieks with intermittent distressed coughing and wheezing, and there was continual screaming broken only when the sufferer struggled to take another breath.
Kylie tried to raise her hands to her head in the desperate need to cover her ears but it caused too much pain. Instead, she began to cry silently and hoped that someone would come for her to put her out of her misery, but that didn't happen. Time seemed to be standing still, and it felt like an eternity until a nurse softly touched her shoulder to let her know that it was her turn now.
She was wheeled around some more and finally pushed into a treatment booth that was being vacated while she came in – the middle-aged woman that had been treated there before had died from chemical burns from the toxic Kaiju blood, suffered while the injured monster had still been on the loose. The smell in the room was sickening, it was a mix of burnt plastic, rotten meat and sweat – the latter mostly from the doctors and nurses that had not stopped working since the attack had started three days ago. Absentmindedly, Kylie wondered about where they would leave all the dead bodies.
It was still loud around her, the closed doors didn't help much with keeping the noise out. She had expected a little more silence in here, kind of. After a few moments it felt as if the multitude of screaming, moaning, crying and choking was all she could hear. She saw the doctors move their mouths but didn't understand much of what they were saying. Instead, her mouth moved and incoherent words tumbled out – Emma, Lindfield, mom and dad were some of them. The nurse patted her head in a futile attempt to soothe the psychological pain away but then stopped, most likely realizing that it was of no use.
Without prior warning, she felt sick. Even though she was close to fainting, she somehow found the strength to throw up, emptying herself over the closest nurse who endured the ordeal without as much as raising a brow. She must have been through worse, Kylie thought. All she did was rip off the apron and pull on a new one, which she procured from a closet next to the door, together with a set of fresh gloves.
That very same nurse now pushed her back onto the stretcher with an understanding smile and proceeded to check her airways, set an IV drip and remove Kylie's clothes to check for injuries. Kylie followed her with her eyes and was only then able to understand the extent of the accident she had suffered. Starting from right above her left shoulder, a huge dark purple bruise had formed, spreading out across her chest and down to her right hip. The sight scared her even more than the pain she had been experiencing but slowly, everything began to feel as if it were far away. The pain, psychological and physical, became a dull shadow and somehow turned into a memory, and even her fear slowly dissipated.
The doctor – Dr. Sloane by the name tag, a bald scrawny man with a frown so deeply edged into his forehead, Kylie thought that it had come to stay for good – appeared behind the nurse and explained that she had been given strong painkillers and that they would now examine her. He also wants to know what exactly had happened to her. Slurring in her speech, Kylie tried to put into chronological order what she remembered of the crash. Dr. Sloane insisted on an accurate description of tiny details such as speed and angle at impact and Kylie thought that he was being hilariously meticulous. Man, those drugs they had given her were awesome, it was as if she was floating on a cloud with the Care Bears.
A handful of x-rays and echographies later, he diagnosed her with a ruptured spleen, 6 broken ribs that had caused a tear and bleeding in her left lung, a minor concussion, a broken collarbone and a sprained wrist. Nothing much, she thought, in comparison to what you would expect just imagining the velocity at impacting a motionless tree and the extent of damage to her car. Broken legs or hips were a usual consequence, broken noses and shattered orbital rims from the airbag or steering wheel, sometimes even serious and irreparable organ damage.
Sure, if she had clipped the tree rather than impacting it head on, it most likely would have killed her. The car's crumple zone was designed to proportionately deform upon impact to absorb the energy from a crash, reducing the degree of injury to passengers and the likelihood of death from injury. Generally, the longer the front of the car – and her Holden Commodore had quite a long snout – the slower the car decelerated in a frontal accident, and the longer the slow-down period, the better for passengers and drivers. But when only a small percentage of the front of the car hit the stationary object, only a fraction of the crumple zone was left to absorb the impact, and deceleration time decreases in milliseconds, which usually was the arbiter of life and death. Almost instantaneous rotation would set in after contact, moving occupants rapidly to the side as well as forward. Rotation makes you miss the airbag. Why was she actually spending energy on thoughts like that? The drugs were making her light headed and she had no willpower to stop her brain from reminiscing about the most stupid things – like crash test statistics.
The doctors were surprised that she had actually been able to walk the 9 km from the place of accident to the Kingsgrove shelter. Yet she knew that she was only alive because of Herc. Herc had come for her, Herc had saved her. He could have just taken his son and wallow in despair – pretty much what she was doing now – but he had come to save her. A fleeting thought of how he was doing crossed her mind, but couldn't get any deeper into it as Dr. Sloane began prepping her for surgery. The anesthesia took over almost immediately.
She woke up with difficulties breathing and she now really wished she could just die. The swishing sound of the ventilator didn't help much. The pain might not have been as excruciating as before but the intubation tube down her throat and the incapability to breathe in deeply had her on the verge of desperatation. She clawed at the machinery taped over her mouth and set off an alarm. Feeling all the cables attached to and tubes going into her arms didn't help either, but suddenly a nurse appeared in front of her, gently pushing Kylie back down onto the led, pulling at her arms, pinning them down.
"It's ok, Ms. McLeod, you just had surgery! I need you to lie still and not fight the intubation tube, you might hurt yourself. I will call the doctor so that he can take it out now that you seem to be breathing well on your own." She pressed a button next to the bed and smiled benevolently at Kylie's questioning face. "Try not to speak!" She warned softly. "The anesthesia didn't sit well with you, we had to connect you to a ventilator to up the oxygen levels in your blood. But it seems that you are saturating well now. The important thing is that you are awake. It's been over 24 hours…" The nurse seemed sincerely worried and Kylie heeded her word. The woman in white pushed some remedies from a syringe into one of the tubes that lead into her arms – painkillers, Kylie thought when a warming numbness quickly spread through her veins and clouded her mind.
The doctor, a different doctor, not Dr. Sloane, came – over an hour later but Kylie did not insist. She could imagine the amount of patients that needed tending and right now she wasn't a top priority. She used the time to get her bearings straight. She was in a white room with a window to the left, together with 5 other patients, hospital bed against hospital bed with only the smallest space left for the medical staff to walk around. The room must have once been a double suite, there was a panel of plugs on each side but now the 6 occupants were sharing the appliances in trios.
The antiseptic smell was much stronger now, but still couldn't really drown out the smell of decay. Kylie didn't care much, the painkillers had her nicely dazed, but it was bothersome to some degree. Just like the emergency room, the hospital mortuary was not equipped enough to deal with the amount of dead people, and the point had been reached where the stink of decay – either from the corpses stacked against the walls of the hospital mortuary or the rotting of un- and undertreated injuries or both – was occupying most of the air in the building.
One of the other patients – the one in the bed opposite of hers – was burnt and disfigured beyond recognition by what she thought to be the acid released by the Kaiju but according to the machine monitoring the vital signs that person was alive.
The smell that radiated from him or her however was irritating. If she had been in a clearer state of mind, it would most likely have made her throw up.
In the bed next to her was a man whose shallow and labored breathing reminded her of how she must have sounded. He had a blank expression on his face, but his eyes that were tied to the small TV screen above the door betrayed his calm, they were full of terror. Kylie had to twist her head to the side to be able to see what he was seeing that had made him so petrified.
The news were on, in silent mode, and it was only then she understood the full extent of the damage caused by the Kaiju. Much of the coastline from Manly Beach to Mona Vale was destroyed, Harbour Bridge was badly bleached by the blast and the wing of the Sydney Opera House that contained the Opera Theatre had collapsed. The rest of the once majestic structure looked like it would pretty much cave in on itself any second. From there on, North Sydney pretty much had disappeared, all that was left were smoking ruins.
It was devastating to watch. Lindfield was one of the completely destroyed areas with what the anchorman made out to be a zero possibility of finding any survivors. Kylie knew better than to keep her hopes up. Well, they hadn't been high up anyways as she knew about the magnitude of the nuclear missile impact. She had seen the bright explosion right before she had passed out again, trapped in her car. Lindfield and the surrounding areas of Garigal National Park had been lit up like the US 4th of July fireworks she would always watch on TV.
One shaky video showed the carcass of the monster, hundreds of scientists were already swarming the place, on the mission of containing the Kaiju Blue. Kaiju Blue was bad news, it caused a kind of shock reaction the human body suffered when recently dead kaiju started to off-gas toxins in the hours after they died. It was highly toxic, contaminating the environment immediately after decomposition set in, its blood became a vapor – the anchorman referred to it as blood mist, a term coined by something called K-Science division – that spread throughout the city and had already killed a lot of people in the aftermath of the other three attacks in California, Manila and Cabo.
Apart from the damage done by the monster, fallout was a major concern. Fallout was the mess of bomb material, soil, and debris that had been vaporized and made radioactive, that now sprinkled as dust and ash across the land. The late September coastal winds spread the dangerous particles even more. Radiation could kill you in a variety of ways, and none of them were particularly quick or painless. Victims – either dead or alive, Kylie wasn't sure which was worse – would be brought in for the next couple of weeks.
She had to close her eyes and leant back into the pillows, so that she wouldn't have to see the TV screen anymore. Thankfully, the doctor came soon after to free her from the tube down her throat.