Starvation, Heart of Fire, No Turning Back, Safe and Sound, 21 Guns, probably some others why did I delete this list...?
Hello, Act 2 of this story! So glad everyone's still reading. As a progress-update for those of you not on Tumblr: I'm currently working on chapters 17 and 18 right now, so if I start whining about another double-update be sure to scold me for it.
Hope you enjoy this chapter, it's one of my favourites.
Recovery
Heroic Tragedies
If a disaster was going to strike, you wanted it to happen at night. Not night as the sun rose or night by the charges on your phone plan, but night by Society's pattern of work and sleep. Because if a disaster was going to strike, you wanted to know where your family was going to be, and you wanted them to be as close to you as possible.
You didn't want your children to be at school with too few teachers and too many peers.
You didn't want your parents to be at work across the river.
You didn't want your best friends to be sitting on a train under the city streets.
You wanted them to be at home, in their beds, fast asleep, so that when disaster struck and the world was torn apart, you'd know where all the little pieces were and could dig them all up at once out of the rubble. You wanted them to have food and shelter and clothes, even if the shelter had collapsed and the food began to spoil and the clothes were filthy and torn and buried under the rest of their lives.
If disaster was going to strike then you wanted it to happen at night, and as soon as it hit you wanted the sun to come up and show you what had happened. You wanted to know that the world would keep spinning and that time would keep moving, and that everything that remained wasn't about to be lost and consumed in the darkness that had taken everything else.
But the people of Verona couldn't just wait for the sun.
"Hey! Over here!"
Not every building collapsed, not every house lost its foundations. The red tiles that made up the rooves of the city were scattered across the ground, entire blocks of houses slanting to the side and holding one another up- or pushing each other over. It was hard to walk without tripping over stones or shattered tile, but it was harder still with only flashlights and small fires to see by. The power grid was down, this didn't surprise anyone, in fact it probably kept unintentional fires from sparking and spreading through the debris. It made the night very dark, and very scary.
A residential neighbourhood, even one in distress, was a wealth of resources in a crisis. With a 'camp' built close to a main road and safe from any listing buildings, several families pooled their energy and gathered food, water, bedding and anything else that could be quickly pulled from their destroyed homes. First-aid kits and extra batteries and someone's pocket radio, canned goods and jars of preserves, spare clothes and containers for filling with fresh water. When a neighbour came running down the lane calling for help, shouting that someone was trapped under the rubble, there was no hesitation to hurry after them and help.
"Please! I can't reach them, they're just-!" A section of fallen wall and the glow of a flashlight reflecting off broken glass. "I told him to wait for help, but then we heard-"
"Mama!" A child and a young man. When the rescuers got there they could look down the narrow gap in the rubble and see the two victims wedged under the debris. Someone was sent running to try and find more help from the other neighbourhoods, and a cell-phone was used to try and figure out if they were in the right part of the city to get help from the army yet- or any help at all.
The child was crying loudly but the young man had his arm wrapped around the little girl's torso, keeping her safe where he was braced on his knees, shoulders pressed up against the solid chunk of wall bearing down on them. When the rescuers shone the light down all they could see was the pink the girl was wearing and the man's yellow nightshirt. Was he really holding that weight up by himself? There must have been some other kind of support.
"No! No I'm scared! Mama!" There was space for the girl to crawl and the rescuers started ripping and tearing away at the entrance, using just their bare hands and whatever makeshift tools they could find from the rubble around them. "Please don't make me go!" The actual opening was only a few inches wide, but after a few minutes of fast digging one of the men got down on his chest and reached his hand through the jagged mouth.
"Let's go, sweetheart!" The child was holding the flashlight now and shaking her head quickly, fighting to hold onto the arm the young man was trying to unwind from around her. "You just have to crawl a little ways! C'mon!"
"No!" The man flinched suddenly and the rescuer tried to get his own light angled properly to see what was wrong. Before he could see anything, the girl cried: "He's hurt! Send help!"
"We are the help, and we need to get you both out of there, okay?" It wasn't safe for them to stay down there, one aftershock and- "Young man, are you alright?"
"He can't talk! He's hurt!"
"It's okay! We have a doctor!" No they didn't, but one of the people in their neighbourhood was a nurse, and that was almost the same thing right now. "Sweetheart it's okay, you just have to crawl up and he'll be right behind you, alright? We're gonna get you out." The rescuer was just a banker, he didn't know how to talk somebody through a crisis, nevermind a child... "So come on, it's okay, just take my hand..." It was a long ways between his hand and hers, but the rescuer didn't pull his arm back and the others kept digging, kept trying to open up the jagged pit keeping the pair trapped inside...
It took another twenty minutes before the little girl was safe in her mother's arms again, but it was clear that the young man wasn't coming out as easily. If he moved then that concrete slab was going to fall right down on his legs...
"Listen just- just hang on! Help is coming!" Was help coming? There had to be something they... "Give me that."
"What?"
The rescuer pointed at a short, thick timber beam resting in the light of a dropped flashlight. It was about two feet long and splintered at one end, thick and cumbersome. The other man he spoke to quickly fetched it and the rescuer stripped off his jacket, swearing at himself under his breath.
"No way, no, you're not seriously-"
"Where's the army? How long are they gonna take?" He was just a banker, just a banker, just a banker... "Do you have a bulldozer parked nearby that we don't know about? I'll fit, just give it-"
"You're crazy." Yeah, yeah he was, but he could see the pained, confused expression on the man's face trapped down in that filthy hole and he knew this was the right decision. Climb down, prop up the slab, climb back up, get the guy to climb out after. It didn't have to hold for very long, just long enough...
'I don't know him...' He looked like a student, maybe, or a tourist. His left arm was wrapped in bandages and his hair looked slightly red under the dust; he was dressed for sleep and bleeding from several small scratches down his arms and back. 'But he climbed down there and saved that little girl... I can do this...'
If a disaster was going to strike, you wanted it to happen at night. You wanted everyone you knew and cared about to be safely within reach so that if they needed your help, you could give it immediately. You wanted your neighbours to become your family so that that family could protect itself. You wanted to have someone close by to hold you in the dark until the sun came up and showed you that the world, your world, was shaken, and damaged, and unsafe...
"Hang on, I'm coming."
But that that world was still there. And that that family was too.
"I have two crush injuries! Make way!"
"Four more incoming, one lost vitals en-route."
"Every bed! We need every bed!"
"Where's that medivac!-?"
In a private hospital, you weren't supposed to receive treatment unless you had insurance to pay for your care. The medical staff in Florence's largest private institute knew this, but they were also aware that the Hospital Chief had already stated that he was willing to lose his job tonight if it meant saving even one extra life.
The Emergency Room was flooded, the operating rooms were full to bursting, the east wing was listing dangerously to one side and all patients had been removed from the unsafe oncology department. But the danger didn't stop nurses and technicians from racing through the cracked hallways looking for supplies. Beds, breathing machines, blankets, medications- from simple headache and fever medicine to life-saving penicillin and morphine, anything they could carry was pulled off shelves and out of store rooms.
They couldn't tell non-critical patients to get up and leave the hospital at half past three in the morning, but those who could give up their bed did so to lie on blankets in hallways, or take up chairs in waiting rooms. When the hospital's back-up generators finally kicked in, technicians went scrambling to boot up machines and reprogram frazzled diagnostic tools. Stranded ambulances kept in radio contact with the major hospitals throughout the city, paramedics either digging their way through broken streets or abandoning their vehicles to help find victims on foot.
The hospital was the brain of the emergency state. Firefighters, police, construction workers, preachers, electricians, engineers: everybody knew somebody who was injured, and in the family-only areas that was where previously off-duty police officers finally made contact with their superiors. Firemen spoke to paramedics out in the field and bridged the communication gap to halls and fire engines throughout the city, and military officers from the Florentine base brought information regarding when and where the government would begin distributing aid.
People were frightened and in tears, but no longer panicking. Victims clung to one another in prayer circles and adopted the lost and abandoned into their families without hesitation. When a young medical student gave up her bed despite the bandages wrapped over her left eye and the cast over her leg to help a father with his sick child, that was humanity.
"Time of death, four-thirty-six."
The surgeons and nurses didn't have much time for humanity though, they could barely feel time passing in the blood and noise. Every time there was a moment of peace in the chaos, they would hear a distant siren or watch the Emergency Room doors burst open with more struggling victims. This time it was an ambulance, the lead paramedic pushing the swinging doors open while pulling the first of three gurneys behind her.
"Four coming through! John Doe: GSW to the leg and upper torso." GSW? Gun Shot Wound? Tonight? "Jane Doe: GSW with a punctured lung," no, no this wasn't happening, it wasn't possible for another shooting tonight of all- "John Doe: lost vitals in the field, blunt trauma to the head, possible skull fracture, lacerations on his right arm and torso."
"Where's number four? And what about the shooter?" The first surgeon there stepped up, letting a nurse take the first John through, voices rising as the previous wave of patients was shuffled and pushed as far out of the ER as they could manage. The paramedic just gave her a sharp look, the woman's lips twisting before she rolled her eyes and looked back out into the pre-dawn shadows, the ambulance lights twirling outside as the third gurney came rolling in.
The surgeon didn't see anything but a pair of legs, then the person crouched on top of the body formed from the twilight, both palms braced down on the victim's chest, pumping firmly while someone else pushed the gurney inside. The man doing compressions was wearing a jacket, but otherwise looked like he'd just rolled out of bed with his messy red hair and bare feet. The victim he was trying to save had a pair of metal handcuffs keeping his wrists attached to the gurney. The surgeon could barely hear the lead paramedic's voice over the chaos.
"You walk into a blown out restaurant with a bunch of bullets and one guy covered in bruises?" The shooter. On a night like this someone was soulless enough to go on a rampage, and more than that, the paramedics had brought him back. "No gun, but if it weren't for that kid on his chest I would of just left him behind."
"Who...?" Things were moving very fast and leaving the surgeon behind, but as the third victim passed her by she caught a glimpse of the kid's face, the one fighting to keep him alive. He really was young, filthy too with all the dust and blood on him. The jacket wasn't his and under it he just had a yellow night shirt and a pair of shorts on. But he was staring down at the shooter's unconscious face like it meant everything in the world to get him breathing again. As someone shouted for them to clear a bed and prep a team for surgery, the surgeon standing there heard the paramedic's words like a dream.
"Fourth John Doe. He won't say a word, but by the time we got there he'd put a tourniquet on the first John's leg and had a compress over Jane's bullet wound." Something about him... that intensity, that earnest expression...
"...Did it save them?"
"You bet." Something about him...
"We took oaths." The surgeon said, and then she started walking, patting the paramedic on the arm to show that her part was done now, and that it was up to the hospital to finish the job. "Let's make it three-for-three."
In a crisis, most people chose to behave like heroes.
That's not to say that they suddenly became persons who jumped in front of buses, or climbed up trees to rescue kittens, but there were different kinds of heroes. The kind most people become in a crisis is the one that's so determined to survive that there's no sense or logic in targeting others. They may not always help one another, but in a crisis most people would choose not to lash out and harm others.
But this was a choice.
"On your knees! Move!"
And not all men made it.
The store behind them was on fire, the dawn light touching the eastern sky over Milan. The horizon itself was hidden by the towering structures and piles of rubble making up this quarter of Italy's largest metropolis. The street was eerily silent, because either the neighbourhood surrounding the tiny, still-standing business was empty, or the witnesses were too scared to come out.
"Please stop! My family!"
He'd made a mistake. After the noise and the fear of the Earthquake they hadn't left their home: it was still standing above the shop they made their living from. Some neighbours had fled, others perhaps had died, but they had all agreed to wait for the dawn, to hide in their homes and wait for the police or the army or whoever came first to rescue them in this country. But he had made a mistake; he had heard looters, not the army, and shouting at them to leave his livelihood alone had brought him to this:
"Shut up, Rag-head!" On his knees, then on his side as one of them kicked him. Them: the angry young Italian-born men who had been tearing apart displays and ransacking the empty cash register. Them: the wild men taking advantage of the fear and the chaos. Them: the ones who had gone upstairs to his wife and his child, dragging his son out and throwing him on the ground, ripping off his wife's veil and slapping her while she screamed.
Now they were all out here on the broken concrete, smoke from the fire blowing past their heads. There was blood on his wife's face and she was crying, hugging their son to keep him down, the teenager thrashing and swearing- broken Arabic and Italian mingling in the air. He could hear the looters laughing, but his ears were ringing too loudly from the blow to his head to hear them properly.
This was not the country he brought his family to.
These were not the neighbours he had lived next to for twenty years.
One of his ears popped, and he could hear his son's screaming voice:
"I am Italian! I was fucking born here!"
That didn't matter: his skin was brown, his religion was different, the accent from his parents' tongue was painted over his words. Nothing mattered, just that they were different; they weren't like these men and now that something had gone wrong it was all their fault. They were taking the blame and the black gun in the white morning light was going to deal the punishment. Just or unjust, it didn't matter.
"That's right, try to run!" No-
"I'll put the first one in your knee, and the next one-" No!
Take his money-
Take his home-
Not his son-
Please-!
"-the fuck are you?"
There were four, five men with guns and loot from the burning shop. There was him and his wife on their knees beaten and sobbing. There was his son who'd been scrambling back on all fours to escape. And now there was the man standing in between the weapon and the frightened teen, a man with red hair and no shoes, a suit jacket thrown over his shoulders and bandages wrapped up and down his left arm.
The challenger didn't answer the question, he just stared over the gun at the looter and raised his chin slightly. It was an unspoken question and a serious demand, familiarity running off him like the sunlight blooming in the east. They knew who he was, they all did: the looters with their weapons, the immigrant couple on the ground, their son laying on the pavement. He was familiar, they couldn't remember his name, but they knew him...
"Get out of the way."
He didn't move.
"I said fuck off!"
He didn't do that either. Instead, one of the other men made a terrible sound; a sob ripping up his throat before he dropped the goods he'd ripped from the store, his gun hitting the shattered concrete before he took off running in the opposite direction. The others spoke quickly amongst themselves but their leader didn't take his eyes off the man in front of him.
From the corner of his eye, the man on the ground saw movement between the buildings on their street.
"You think you're some kind of hero?"
More movement; faces, bodies, hands, heads with curly brown hair, and straight black, and wavy blonde…
"I'll shoot you first, damn it! Get out of my way!"
Hands holding weapons: iron pipes, timber beams, chunks of concrete.
Another looter lost his nerve, slowly turning out his pockets so the stolen money came tumbling to his feet, the gun-belt he'd found somewhere else slowly finding its way to the ground. He had his hands up slightly as he backed away, but he froze when he turned and saw the crowd forming behind them.
"This fucking country can't even keep its wackos locked up- fine!" The hammer on the gun came down, a dramatic click that just caused the quiet one to lift both eyebrows at once. His eyes hadn't been quiet open, now they were wide and staring: contempt and anger were boiling under the light copper. Tension was written into the lines of his shoulder and spine, and he lowered his head like a dog preparing to bite an offensive hand.
Bang!
His wife screamed and their son jumped to his feet with an outraged yell, but the strange, silent, familiar man reached out and grabbed the teen by the arm before he could throw himself at the gunman. It was impossible to the eye: he was shot but he didn't fall, just stumbled, his blood forming a red cloud that hung for a split-second in the dawn light behind him. That one hand acted on its own and stopped the fifteen-year-old dead in his tracks, and the crowd reacted instead.
It was over before it started. None of the guns had a chance to go off; pipes swung and voices yelled, rocks flew to chase the looters who retreated. The man who took the brunt of it didn't get a chance to die however, there were neighbours surrounding the family, holding husband and wife and child safe behind arms and worried chatter, but their assailant wasn't killed.
He was beaten, and bones were broken, and his face was bloody, and he couldn't move or speak, but he did not die. The same silent man pulled the mob apart without a word before it could happen. Gestures with bloody fingers and the scuff of his bare feet sent people away; he brought the neighbourhood together and redirected them to the fire. Find a water main, find buckets, find anything to help stop the blaze from spreading. Find food for the family, bring clothes, gather the money, erect a shelter.
Without words that was what he told them to do.
That was what the country they loved told the heroes to do.
So there was supposed to be a fourth scene in this chapter since I had two page-breaks right after each other, but I can't find anything drafted, and the only thing in the spare content was a ridiculously sad prompt for a train wreck. I really don't want to write someone dying in a tight, airless metal heap with Italy there holding their hand anymore. Holy hell, Self, that's just depressing. And it was cooked up before the real earthquake anyways, so nyah, no, we don't need that…
Thank you so much for your kind comments last week, guys, they really meant a lot to me. I'll see you all next Sunday!