Page 29 of Scorched Hearts

Standing in front of the mirror brushing her teeth, she suddenly felt a strong jolt. All her cups and bottles of soap fell in a rumbling chaos on the floor tiles. She instinctively held on to the sink, confused, clutching its edges with her toothbrush still hanging from her mouth.

She barely managed to set it on the sink and rinse her mouth when a wave of trembling shook her house, making her fall to her knees. The glass pane of the shower cabin shook dangerously, inches away from breaking, but not quite breaking just yet. The toothbrush and all other cosmetics that up until this moment had been tucked somewhere away, still keeping their place, finally fell to the ground. She thought of all the cautionary videos her teachers had showed her class, people hiding under their tables and waiting for the earthquake to be over. There wasn’t a single table for her to hide under, and the shaking was still violently tugging on her apartment. She thought it must’d been at least a minute, which meant the earthquake would have wreaked havoc upon the city.

It quite simply meant disaster.

Once the shaking stopped, Maya weakly stood up, holding onto the sink. The wall mirror remained intact, as well as the glass shower pane, and she began deepening her breaths. The building had been recently constructed recently and apparently could withstand plenty. Maya grabbed her phone, going out to look whether everyone in the adjacent apartments had had as much luck as her. Knocking door to door, she encountered faces in shock and loud with gratefulness, people pulled their children close to their chests and prayed to whatever god had a hand in their safety.

Back in the disheveled apartment, Maya’s phone exploded with messages from worried friends and family, but before she had time to respond to anyone, she received a call from her hospital.

“Dr. Monroe, are you safe and well?”

“Yes,” Maya responded, her mind slowly catching up with the gravity of the situation.

“We need all our ER teams up and ready in the face of this sudden emergency. A large number of citizens have been trapped under collapsed buildings and other structures, we predict many rescue operations in the days to come.”

“I’ll be there within the hour.” Maya glanced at the clock. It was 4:34 a.m. She shook herself out of self-pity. There were people whose life might depend on her professionalism and readiness.

Driving through the city, Maya felt as if she’d stepped into a different world. Even at the raw hour of dawn, chaos was already unfurling all around. Extravagant, one-family houses along the road had simply fallen to the ground, seemingly crumbling on their foundations. The wooden panels had broken to pieces like elongated dead hands sent chills down Maya’s spine. The thought of families potentially stuck within their indented walls made her speed up toward the hospital. Her hands on the wheel felt as steady as during surgery, when the cold-minded focus would take over any of her emotions and lead her body, ingrained by years of training movement. She experienced a laser-sharp kind of focus, and the words calm in the eye of the storm bounced around her mind. Emotions would come before and after, but during the crucial moments, she had to be a machine. She had to let her hands lead her to believe she could save lives and remain impartial at the same time.

Driving through the neighborhoods full to the brim with housing complexes, she watched human tragedy unravel from the safety of her driver’s seat. People stricken with ugly, animalistic fear, or hideously face-twisting grief. She had to keep herself in check – four a.m. thoughts have the crawling, overreaching quality that spreads about one’s mind like slime, and even though Maya’s body remained alert, her thoughts swam through ponds of muddy imaginations. Grief and pain could make even the most innocent faces resemble something terrifying, but as a doctor, she wasn’t supposed to be thinking about that.

Police cars and fire trucks seemed so tightly knit to each other that they resembled strings of pearls pushing through the cracked open roads. Men and women in uniforms had so much work on their hands that they seemed lost. To Maya, they appeared to be so weighed down by the scope of their responsibilities that their steps became heavier than usual, their shoulders a few inches more slouched. Something sinister lay in the image of cars associated with emergency populating every corner of the city.

The sky, stretching out its last minutes of dawn, rolled out heavy clouds, only fittingly ominous, prophesying rain. Maya’s throat felt dry and raspy, her head pulsing with the fire of a sleepless night and a taste of catastrophe.

Maya had never before seen the hospital so crowded, seemingly on the brim of bursting. She imagined the walls pulse and bend, almost like a living tissue, trying to accommodate the amount of victims from the earthquake.

The bustling noise unsettled her, its intensity carrying a form of unison. While the ER room was usually full of cries, pain, and anxiety, now it seemed like a new kind of experience altogether. These people were suffering for the same reason, their pain like invisible strings tying them all together. Maya set her bag aside and changed into hospital wear.

Busy discussing the way they’d dispatch the ambulances, Maya caught a glimpse of a policewoman being carried in.

“Hit by debris,” her colleague clarified on the side.

A feeling she hadn’t felt up to this point tied a thick, tight knot in the pit of her stomach, an emotion she reluctantly identified as dense fear. She knew her family was safe. Their building had withstood much worse, its sturdy architecture keeping them safe. And she’d received all of their worried-to-death-for-her messages. She couldn’t know whether Elle was safe, as she’d probably be on duty rushing into the carnage, and that was what scared her. The awareness of Elle existing in the same city where the same massive earthquake had happened and caused so much death made Maya feel sick. The complete helplessness of not knowing whether Elle was safe at this exact moment washed over her like an ice-cold wave of anxiety.

I love her.

The team finally got inside the ambulance, driving out to the most affected sphere where most of their hospital’s crew had been sent. They’d work closely with the firefighters to retrieve people from fallen buildings, most of them from their own homes.

“What a terrible fate,” Maya said out loud, directing it more at the space ahead of her rather than any crew member in particular, “to be buried within your own home…”

They grimly nodded, and the driver sped up, feeling the same grasp of tragedy on his back.

11

ELLE

The second hour of the area assessment was nearing its end, and they still couldn’t agree on how to retrieve the victims or conduct the search the most effectively. Elle, wildly out of her depth, could not offer anything besides following the operation plan once it was settled upon. Ramirez, Hunter, and Thompson had been discussing the matter with various technicians and emergency workers, seemingly without much progress.

The situation was looking grim, and all the firefighters seemed to catch reflections of their thoughts in each other’s faces, worn-out and haunted by lack of sleep and an abundance of witnessed destruction.

It almost seemed inappropriate to Elle, the way the day simply continued on its path as if nothing had happened. The clouds rolled above their heads, but the sun had awakened, too, making them a bright and angelic color. The birds had begun their hunt, flying around in broad, peaceful circles. Everything in nature seemed to Elle so undisturbed, as if the disaster itself had not come strictly from nature. There were people barely holding onto their lives beneath the debris of buildings, and the captains couldn’t agree on a safe way to retrieve them. Elle’s eyes felt swollen and sore, needle-poked by the day’s light. Not many firefighters were talking. The general ambience of grief took over their conversations.

“We know what we’ll do.” Thompson turned around to inform the team. “Twenty minutes and we’ll be getting ready for the extrication.”

The search dogs began barking, contributing to the bleak atmosphere. Kaia Montgomery stepped forward. “Is it a…rescue or …recovery?” she asked Hallie Hunter in a quiet tone and Elle overheard.

“Rescue, as far as we know. There’s a significant void within the collapsed building that we believe to contain living persons,” Hunter explained, and there was an intimate moment between the two of them.

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