Yes, dear ones. It's the moment you've been waiting for... DrWho4U and her glorious chapter!!!! Syd now presents for your consideration the true beginning of our tale. All credit for this brilliance, indeed for the story idea itself, belongs to her.
An Stoirm A Chur Díot
Chapter Two
It wasn't the fear of dying that kept Natalie pinned helplessly in the darkness. Death, quite frankly, would be a fine occurrence as long as the smell of stagnant water and the sounds of groaning around her stopped. Pinned wasn't the correct term to classify her situation; Natalie had been pinned before, and in relation to months and the date, it hadn't been long enough for her to forget the pressure of wooden beams against her back or the creaking of the building that had collapse on her in Colima.
No, Natalie was trapped, surrounded by black water, the dying and dead. Without lights to chase out the darkness of the frightful night, she could no longer help the ill, although she tried. She had come to a single conclusion, as she sat beside Frank on the tiled floor, not happy but comforted to have a friend's arm around her shoulder, that in their harsh and unrelenting reality they were being forced to endure one natural disaster after the next. It was fair to question whether they would make it out of this one alive. Certainly luck and played a factor in Colima, but would it save them now?
She only hoped it would.
New Orleans was wasted, and everything that surrounded them signified that they should have been too. The sound of the levies breaking haunted her in the dark, and the sight of the halls flooding while patients disappeared under a wall of black water superimposed themselves over the horrors she had seen in Central America. Routine, she concluded, was not a word she could associate with her career. Routine was death, and it had been by a lucky drawing of straws that they'd survived this one.
"Natalie," Frank mumbled, drawing her attention to the window as the first rays of the morning began to peer through the clouds, bathing the drowned city in a gray glow.
She moved and stepped over the splayed legs of a man who had died over the course of the night. He had been the last of their patients to die, and Natalie had to will herself not to stop and check his pulse one more time. Just one more time. It had been that philosophy that had trapped them there in the first place, that had kept them from leaving the city for safety. Just one more time, was a train of thought Natalie wasn't sure if she'd ever let herself get stuck on again.
Through the window she saw wreckage and water and nothing. It was as if life itself had been stamped out in the city. The hospital around her moaned forlornly, and she had the urge to join it. Looking at Frank in the reflection, she felt for the first time in two weeks a surge of gratefulness that they had been the only two on the case, the only two in the city. With two in a disaster the chances of luck withholding were promising, with four it was impossible.
Four, there was a sense of discomfort, on a dissimilar level than what she was currently experiencing, that had attached itself to what the number represented. As soon as the familiar pang hit her chest she pushed it back and took a rattling breath. Stephen Connor was only on a sabbatical, she reminded herself, and there was fifty percent chance he would return eventually. Eventually being the term she forced herself to sticking to.
When Frank's reflection finally grew closer, she nodded, knowing very well what the morning sun had brought them. The disease they had been restlessly working to stop had been eradicated overnight by the fury of Mother Nature. Destroyed and personified in the figure of the man Natalie had stepped over on her conquest to see the dawn. The meaning was not lost on her; she had stepped over death to seek life but had found none. It was that knowledge that let her understand perfectly what the implications of their newest struggle were.
Natalie and Frank had survived to see day two. It was the task of staying alive to see another that might kill them.
Katrina, the perfect name for a tropical storm; a mockery shattered by the resulting hurricane.
The sunlight had a way of lessening the impact of the what had occurred overnight. Although the brown water sparkled menacingly under its rays, it provided the pathologist and toxicologist the ability to travel through the halls of the small clinical hospital that had remained above water.
"We won't be able to make contact with the NIH," Natalie stated somberly. "Our equipment is under water."
"Have you tried using your cell phone?" Frank asked, already knowing the answer. When the hurricane had hit, everything local had stopped working, making phone use impossible.
Natalie led them through a door that opened into a waiting room, her eyes surveying the space for possible company. Seeing none, she sighed and took a seat on one of the dark blue chairs, her hand raising to slide through her hair. "We need to assume that we won't be able to make contact with anyone for several days. What hit us wasn't a category two storm, it was the entire shebang. Power lines will be out, cell phone towers shut down, we'll be lucky if we see anyone so much as float past this clinic. Which means, if we want to live to see help, we're going to need a plan of action."
Pacing was never something Frank had been known for, but he crossed the shadowy room three times before taking a seat across from hers and scratching the back of his scalp. His hand drifted from his hair to his eyes, and he pressed his fingers against his eyelids to ease stressful pressure behind them.
"The vending machines in this room should have enough water to last us a week. If they aren't empty, of course," he added as an afterthought. Looking up at her, he gave his version of a apologetic shrug before speaking again, "The others are full of food, but we need to check the rest of this floor and the one above us to see if there is anyone else here."
Not for the first time, Natalie was thankful that only a skeleton team had remain behind after the evacuation drill had been called. Only three people had volunteered to help with the five patients, and only one of those three had been at the clinic when the bulk of the hurricane had hit.
Which meant, there could only be one other person alive in the clinic. Whatever patients had survived the initial flooding had deteriorated over night without adequate heat and power. Not even the generator had kicked on to help Natalie in her quest to keep any of her patients alive. She couldn't think about that right now, though. What she had to think about was finding the nurse who had been working with them, and to make sure that if she was injured, that she would be taken care of while the sun was still hanging helpfully in the sky.
"Okay," she nodded, pushing her hands to her knees as she stood. "I'll check this floor and upstairs, you get the vending machines open. This may be over-doing it, but don't leave this room unless you absolutely need to. I want to be able to find you in case there are any unexpected emergencies."
If it were any other situation, Frank would have no qualms about teasing her, telling her that she was sounding an awful lot like Connor. But he understood that her caution was warranted. Just because the storm was over did not mean they were out of danger. The initial water damage could have harmed the clinic's foundation or carried with it a disease. They would have to be wary of what they did, at all times.
"I'll be here," he promised, standing as she walked toward the set of double doors that led to the hall. "Be careful!" He called, not wanting to be the one to explain to Connor that she had survived the Hurricane to only die from falling down a flight of stairs.
They had made it through this much already, Frank told himself as he began working on his designated project, which meant that surviving until help arrived was doable. If anyone could make it through this alive, it was a couple of scientists.
This couple of scientists, he thought firmly, his eyes surveying the seal on the vending machine in the half light.