Blackout

Chapter 17

Imaia Island

Max

Present

He was gone.

It was as if he had never existed in the first place. One day Callan had been kissing me openly in the middle of the noon and the next one he had disappeared without any notice. Nobody knew where he and his men had gone. The soldier I asked for information about him only shrugged at me, giving me this pitiful smile that had me seeing red. I didn’t even know why I was asking about him in the first place, but for whatever reason I couldn’t stop myself from trying to find clues about where he had gone.

“Who knows where they are,” said the soldier while I cleaned a third degree burn on his shoulder, “With special corps nobody ever knows. They can be relocated at any moment's notice and deployed anywhere in the world.  If they stay one single week in one station that has been too long already.”

I processed his disappearance slowly. 

At first I’d been kind of in shock. Callan had warned me that he might need to go into service suddenly but I never imagined how fast that might be. I simply couldn’t believe it. Then anger came. How dare he leave without saying anything? Was leaving a note too hard? Was texting and calling something he couldn’t do like any other normal person? Little by little my anger transformed into a weird stage of bargaining. I started trying to see things from his perspective. Maybe he didn’t have enough time to leave me a message. Right? It could have been an emergency.

I’d seen it back in Miami, when he had received a single phone call and he needed to leave the place at once. His job was hard, risky and he could be in danger right then, while I was angry at him. Which led me to a deep sense of sadness. If I’d thought finding the right person was hard for me as a doctor, then it was pretty much impossible for Callan. His line of work and mine were like the opposite sites of the same road. Yes, we might be trying to save people’s lives in different ways, but when I was planning on rooting myself back in Miami and finding a stable income and a husband, he was a wind vane, moving in whatever direction the wind was flowing.

I laid up awake at night, trying to imagine how a life at the side of a man like Callan could be. There would be no birthday celebrations, no anniversaries, no holidays. If my car ever broke down and I needed someone to take me to work I would still need to book an Uber. If I needed him, chances were that he wouldn’t be there to help me. And all of that was only thinking about us, deciding to have children with someone like that seemed to me like pure madness. What if I needed someone to help me take the kids to school? Yes, kids, as in plural because I wanted more than one. What if they got sick and he wasn’t there to help me? What if they fell and broke a bone? All the responsibility would be in my shoulders. How could I walk into that kind of commitment knowing full well that I would be in a relationship with myself? There were simply not enough good things to balance the scales in Callan’s favor. 

  He had been trying to tell me this from the very beginning, but I’ve let him get close enough for me to consider giving him a chance. Now things have changed. Finally I accepted the fact that Callan and I couldn't have a relationship. It was just impossible for us. I was a surgeon, fully committed to my career and my principles of waiting until marriage to have s*x and Callan was a soldier that would never be a reliable partner. If-and this was a big if- we ever saw each other again, I would let him go. Instead of over analyzing what ifs and thinking about him I directed my full attention back to my work. 

A month after Callan was gone the hurricane season started. I've lived my whole life in Miami and I’ve learned how to read the signs of upcoming storms. It all started a week before the hurricane was spotted in the radars. The days began to become hotter and hotter, until drops of sweat  ran down my forehead from the simple act of walking between the dorms and the medical unit. The air became hotter too and the wind stopped blowing the palm leaves. The mosquitoes disappeared, almost as if they could sense at a cellular level how close to danger we were. Then a small cone shaped dot appeared on the meteorological radars and chaos descended on us. A hurricane named Irina was moving in direction to the island. It was soon given a category five on the Saffir-Simpson scale. Doctors were mobilized to the highest inland formations, miles and miles away from the coast. The buildings prepared for evacuations couldn’t hold enough people so doctors were relocated to the rural areas, away from the populated coastline towns but near the main roads for easy access in case of emergency.

In one single week our team was relocated three times. By the weekend Irina hit us, and with it we lost all electricity and internet. The heavy rain was so dense that it formed slopes on the terrain after just a couple of hours of fluvial density. I saw with my own eyes horses being carried down roads from the strength of the currants. The wind achieved 157 mph, which was a record for the books and all along we never stopped tending people. The majority of our patients were seniors presenting phlegm and respiratory obstructions. The pressure levels in the island had changed and older people found it harder to breathe than the young. We spent the entire weekend trying to find ways to ration our oxygen tank usage but by Monday there were only a dozen tanks left and more people were supposed to come by night.

“We need to go to the nearest clinical station and ask for more oxygen tanks!” Dr. Spencer yelled at me over the clatter of rain falling outside the rural hospital we were stationed at. The hospital was lit by candles and large flashlights we had hung to shelves and window sills. By the other side of the small vestibule I could see the rain falling in strong showers and the wind pushing palm trees out of the land so fast that they disappeared out of sight in a matter of seconds. I’d never seen a hurricane of that magnitude and it was insane for any of us to try to go anywhere in those conditions. The sound of coughs behind me made me look back, to the group of thirty patients waiting to be treated. There was no way we could treat all of these people with the materials we had. We needed Albuterol and Prednisone to fight the bronchopulmonary inflammation I could hear in everyone’s cough. Not to mention more resources like oxygen cylinders, nebulizers and antibiotics for possible infections.

I risked a look outside and to the upcoming night knowing quite well this was our time to act or we would be stuck another night in that tiny hospital without the resources to treat patients. I nodded, turning to Nathan and Rosie.

“We are going to look for more medical supplies,” I informed them, winning identical looks of shock from my friends. Nathan and Rosie shared a worried look and turned to the entrance of the hospital, from where we could see hills covered in mud and heavy rain.

“How exactly are you planning to find the nearest clinic in this area?” asked Nathan and I shook my head at him. I had no idea where we were stationed and I sucked at directing myself without a GPS. Dr. Spencer motioned for us to follow him to the reception area and extracted a map from the main desk drawers. After spreading the map of the island over the desk we surrounded the table and tried to make some sense out of it. We were doctors goddammit, surely we could find our way on a small island.

“We are here,” stated Dr. Spencer, fixing his glasses and pointing to a small red dot in a line of blue crosses that I had a hard time understanding. Was blue supposed to mean road lanes and red dots hospitals? If that was the case… “The next clinic is right here.”

We all grew quiet while we studied the map. In the middle of a hurricane reaching the next clinic might take us a whole day, two if we run into complications and that was considering we didn’t end up getting lost. The military had only given us two humvees at our disposal before leaving us to own devices three days ago. That meant we could only use one car to displace our numbers in case the other car was needed for more urgent emergencies. All communication lines were off until the storm passed and engineers could establish safe landlines. We were completely uncommunicated, so there was no way for us to ask for help from the army. In other words, we were screwed, and we needed to make a decision before nightfall.

“I’m good at driving but I will need someone to help me carry the oxygen tanks,” I said and Nathan shook his head at me.

“There are security policies to carry inflammable tanks. Transporting oxygen tanks in the middle of a storm on a muddy road is like a recipe for instant death, Max,” I raised my eyebrows at him.

“Excuse me for pointing out the obvious but...do you see any policy manual at hand for the type of shitshow we are in? These people are going to get very sick very soon if we don’t get them treatment. Do you have any other bright ideas to share with our group?” Nathan rolled his eyes at me and Dr. Spencer smiled, staring at me over the rim of his glasses.

“If we get out of this situation alive I would like to invite you for drinks, Dr. Cruz,”  Rosie and Nathan wiggled their eyebrows at me behind Dr. Spencer’s back. I raised my own eyebrows at the invitation for drinks from my supervisor. Seriously? In the middle of a hurricane when we were up to our necks with sick patients? I decided for the good of the situation to ignore him and go back to the matter at hand.

“We could take one of the humvees and some phone radios to keep in communication between us. If we leave now we might make it to the clinic by midnight and be back by noon tomorrow,” Rosie started chewing at her thumb’s nail.

“What if we get lost?”

“Or we get blown by an oxygen tank going kaboom?”

“What if we stay here and can’t help people?” I asked them while I started moving, grabbing my backpack from a shelf and checking the flashlight I’ve packed for emergencies. It worked, and so did the batteries I’ve recharged before we were relocated and lost electricity.  Dr. Spencer passed me a phone radio and we both checked if we could hear each other. It would only work on the medical frequency but at least we could keep each other informed about the hurricane status and patient’s conditions.

“This is insane,” informed Nathan in a hurry, while he grabbed his own backpack and some water bottles on our way out. Rosie rushed after him, already holding the yellow raincoats the military had given us to be easy to recognize in the dark.

“I know it is, but there’s nothing else we can do right now,” I took the raincoat that Rosie passed me over and put it on top of my own clothes. Nathan took the car keys out of my hands, giving me an once over before smirking.

“You are good at driving, yeah right,” he pointed a finger at me, arching his eyebrows comically, “You forgot I saw you take twenty minutes to parallel your park back at St. Mateo hospital.”

“I hate parallel parking,” I admitted, fixing the hood of the coat over my head and Rosie lifted her hand by my side.

“Yeah, me too.”

“Women,” murmured Nathan, shaking his head at us and ducking under the water on his way to the humvee. Rosie and I grabbed our hands and started running after him, making sure to stay close under the downpour and strong winds. I looked over my shoulder at Dr. Spencer, who was already directing a new patient to the next available medical room.

“We will try to be back by tomorrow noon!” I screamed at him and Dr. Spencer nodded.

“Good luck everybody!”

Good luck? We would need a miracle to find the clinic in the first place and be back in time, but I didn’t have the patience to think about that right then. I was more focused on reaching the car in one piece and getting inside without being blown away by the wind. At the end we reached the humvee and rushed in between groans and grunts. Nathan and Rosie took the front seats and I sat at the back, between boxes of clinical incident reports and ethical manuals. Funny how all of that didn’t matter  in a moment of emergency. All that mattered at the end was that someone could save you in whatever way they found possible. All that mattered at the end was the time we had to make a change.

You are a doctor, you know better than anyone else that time waits for no one…

That’s what Callan had said to me and for whatever reason, for whatever illogical motive, he was all I could think about in a moment of crisis. I realized Callan lived in the moment and maybe that didn’t make sense before, but after volunteering and seeing chaos in the raw, I was starting to understand things differently.

I screwed my face and my tired eyes when Nathan turned over on his seat, bracing the back of it with an arm before staring pointedly at me. 

“Let’s do this,” he said and I nodded, fastening my seat belt.

“Let’s do it.”