3.
The fourth car had been through a much more violent ride than the fifth car, which detached itself from the train before attempting to negotiate the sharp S turn in the tunnel. The fourth car had been yanked off the rails by the car in front of it, and slammed into the right hand wall of the tunnel. The impact demolished the front of the car and sent wooden slivers flying into its rear section. Some of the passengers were hit by this shrapnel, which accounted for the blood pooling on the floor of the train. The rest of the injuries were caused by bodily impact with the floor and walls of the car, as the occupants were thrown about in the crash.
The doctor worked quickly using makeshift tourniquets to control the worst of the bleeding. He set several broken arms and legs making splints from broken wood from the shattered front of the car body. He only treated the most seriously injured of the passengers, bypassing those whose wounds were either minor, or most likely fatal.
They made their way towards the front of the car to find there was no way out via the front door because of the damage to that part of the carriage. The doctor then smashed out a side window that had already been damaged enough to practically fall out on its own. He managed to lower his medical suitcase out of the car onto the roadbed below, and then he climbed out. Pinoko crawled out the window into Black Jack's arms.
"Follow me, carefully!" the doctor ordered. They inched their way around the fourth car, towards the third. This part of the train was even more heavily damaged. The third car had slammed into the second, and the two of them seemed to be fused together, filling the tunnel with debris. The doctor and Pinoko carefully climbed over the pile of wood that had once been an El railway car, and slowly made their way forward. Black Jack scanned his flashlight back and forth, looking for bodies. Most of the passengers were buried under the wreckage. They would stop here and their to check for a pulse, or a sign of breath, but many of the occupants of the third car were too badly injured to help. They did manage to pull some of the luckier ones out from under the debris, and some others had begun to free themselves.
"Give us a hand!" the doctor asked of a gentleman who was walking past in the tunnel. The man's face and hands were covered with lacerations, but his loss of blood was minor, and his wounds mostly superficial. Black Jack retrieved a flashlight from his medical bag which he handed to the gentleman. who at the doctor's instruction, treated some of the broken bones and bleeding while Black Jack sutured the wounds of others.
It had now been some twenty minutes since the crash The doctor and Pinoko had traversed their way through the wreckage of the third and second cars which had been fused together in the impact. The top of the second car had been decapitated at the floor line as this carriage had hit the roof of the tunnel when its wheels had jumped the track while trying to negotiate the S turn at high speed. In addition, the car had jackknifed almost sideways in the tunnel before being rammed by the third car.
They then came upon the rear of the first car. Its front wheels remained on the track, while the rear ones had derailed. The rear of this car had hit the right hand wall of the tunnel. As the doctor and Pinoko climbed into the front car, they could make out other passengers who had made their way forward ahead of them, and were now attempting to escape down the tunnel towards the Malbone Street station.
Suddenly the lights in the tunnel ahead of them came on, and the tunnel behind them was lit by an intense blue color. The third rail that had been shorted out in the crash had become live again, and giant sparks flew down the length of the tunnel. Ahead of them the doctor spotted a man lying face down in the space between the rails, his body convulsing violently. Black Jack quickly grabbed a plank of wood that was torn from the floor of the train in the collision, and ran towards the man. He used the board to push the victim from the third rail, and then tossed it aside.
Irving Melton walked back into the tunnel from the Malbone Street station. He'd been carrying wounded passengers with broken limbs down the short stretch of the tunnel, helping the police rescue those injured in the train. Irving had been seated in the very front of the doomed train, right next to the motorman's cab. Neither of them had been injured, just badly shaken about. Now making his way back to the train, carrying a lantern given to him by one of the cops, he came upon a man lying in the roadbed with another kneeling next to him.
"What are you doing?" he asked the Asian man with a head of black and white hair, who was pumping on the chest of the victim with a double fist.
"You!", the doctor yelled at Melton, "What's your name? Do exactly what I'm doing so I can prepare an injection."
"It's Irving, Irving Melton," Irving answered. "Show me what to do."
At the doctor's instruction, Melton knelled down on the track bed and placed the palm of his left hand over the mans heart, and used his right hand to push down on the left. "Like this?" he asked.
"Good!" Black Jack replied. "Keep it going, you're doing the work of his heart!"
Pinoko had already retrieved a syringe and a stoppered bottle from the doctor's bag, which she handed to him. The doctor quickly filled the syringe with epinephrine, and attached a long needle. He motioned for Melton to pause, and then he jabbed the injection home.
"What did you do?" Melton demanded. "Are you a doctor?"
"You could say that," the doctor quickly explained. "I just injected him with epinephrine directly into his heart, he was just electrocuted by coming in contact with the third rail. I pulled him free with a plank of wood. Let's hope this works."
As Irving continued the CPR as the doctor had shown him, Black Jack felt for a pulse. Suddenly, the man lying face up between the rails coughed. "You did it!" Melton cried out.
"I got lucky this time," Black Jack nodded. "Normally a jolt of electricity at that voltage should be fatal."
"Help me move him out of the tunnel," Irving said.
The two of were about to pick up the semi-conscious victim, to carry him down the length of the tunnel, when a man wearing a motorman's uniform staggered past them. He was holding the brake and motor handles from the train in his fists with a death grip. "I'm sorry!, It wasn't my fault! The brakes failed!", he kept repeating over and over.
As they neared the mouth of the tunnel where the tracks entered the Malbone Street station, a policemen met up with them.
"Officer," Black Jack blurted out, "Someone needs to get the power to the tracks shut off. There are people still in the tunnel trying to escape from the wreck, and they are being electrocuted. I was barely able to resuscitate this poor person."
"Right!," the cop agreed. "I'll get word to the BRT right away."
"I need to go back in the tunnel and see who else I can help," the doctor told the cop.
"No," the officer held up his hand to block the doctor. "We've got more police going in there now to remove the accident victims from the train. What we don't have are any doctors to treat them, and I see that you are one. Please remain here in the station, we'll bring your patients to you. My men are trained in first aid, they can apply tourniquets if necessary."
"Very well," Black Jack replied. Just then, several Brooklyn police officers emerged from the tunnel carrying more victims, several who were unconscious. "As I was saying...", the cop voiced.
The doctor and Pinoko spent the next several hours treating those that had been pulled from the wrecked train. While Black Jack was stitching up the wounds of one woman, he looked behind him to see a man in a suit standing next to a reporter and a photographer from the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper.
"Don't mind us, just keep on working," the man in the suit said. "I'm John Hyland, Mayor of this city. I got here as soon as I could, once I heard about the accident. My office intends to find the cause of this and see that the responsible parties are punished. I'd also like to thank you for your help. I assume you're not from these parts."
"If you don't mind, your honor," the doctor voiced, "I could use you out of my light."
"Yes, of course," the mayor replied stepping back. The doctor turned about just long enough for the newspaperman holding the camera to flash a picture of him and Pinoko stitching up the last of the womans wounds. "You can take her off to hospital now," the doctor motioned to one of the policemen.
"Pinoko and I arrived here from Japan to treat a patient in Coney Island," the doctor said, carefully choosing his words. "Fortunately, we were in the last car of the train which was unscathed in the accident."
"Lucky for all of us," the mayor replied.