William Meikle - The Hole

She hadn’t noticed that Bill had left her side, and was now on the squad car radio.

“We need backup out here. Everything we’ve got. And call County, the National Guard… anybody you can think of.”

Somebody replied, too faintly for Janet to hear at this distance.

“No… an ambulance and the fire truck won’t be enough,” Bill shouted in reply. “Get everybody out of bed and down here. And do it now.”

The big man was red in the face and shaking, whether in fury or grief Janet couldn’t tell, but he was working himself up into quite a state. Janet was about to head over to try and calm the sheriff when she heard a weak cry, then two more, from her left.

“Help. Please. Help us.”

She picked her way over to the edge of the hole and looked down. It was dark down there, but the glare from the car headlights behind her gave her just enough light to see by. A family of two adults and three kids were making their slow way up the precarious slope. They looked like something from a war newsreel; mud-stained, pale with the wide, unbelieving eyes of victims.

And there was blood. Lots of it.

Just looking down brought back a fresh spell of dizziness. She looked to Bill, but the big man was still on the radio, still trying to impress the severity of the situation on his subordinates. Janet turned her back to the hole and edged down over the lip, keeping her gaze on the wall of earth in front of her face as she went down, her doctor’s instincts overriding all caution. Luckily the ground here was more clay than earth and although that meant it was hard going reaching the family, it meant less likelihood of the ground giving way beneath her. Her feet sucked and threatened to stick. She dug her toes into the thick soil and lowered herself, inch by inch.

“Help,” a voice called out, much closer now. She chanced a look down. She was only a foot or so above the struggling family. She allowed herself to slide down to where the small group still struggled upward.

“Thank God,” the father whispered. “I thought we were the only ones left.”

The man looked near exhaustion. Janet took the weight of a young girl who was slumped, exhausted, against him. That gave the man a fresh jolt of energy, and he was able to free himself and another child from the thick clay. Between them, Janet and the man started to make faster headway, and Bill’s appearance at the top of the slope soon meant they were all able to pull everyone out of the hole and roll aside, tired, panting, but alive.

It took her several seconds to catch her breath. Bill helped her to her feet, looked her up and down and smiled grimly.

“Looking good on date night,” he said.

Janet looked down. She was caked, from neck to toe, in clinging gray mud.

“You can help me wash it off later,” she said, and turned away as Bill’s mouth fell open in astonishment.

She spent the next ten minutes tending to the family. Apart from superficial cuts and bruises the kids were little the worse for wear, but the mother had a bruise the size of an egg above her left eye, and seemed confused, possibly concussed. The husband had deep lacerations along the back of both hands that she was able to bandage using the first-aid kit in the squad car, and she was just getting round to a nasty gash at his thigh when the first ambulance turned up.

Getting the man into it turned into somewhat of a pantomime as first he refused to leave his family, then the family refused to let him go without them, and the whole thing turned into a shouting and screaming match until Bill finally lost it.

“Just bloody go. All of you,” he shouted, the force of his personality so strong it shocked everybody into obedient silence.

“Nice job, Mr. Shouty,” Janet said as the ambulance, with the whole family crammed inside, headed out.

“Ain’t gonna be a lot of quiet around here tonight,” Bill replied grimly. “Best get used to it.”

Over the next half an hour they started to get some idea of the scale of the disaster. Janet spent most of the time tending to a steady trail of walking wounded. They arrived in dribs and drabs, picking their way through wreckage and around collapsed ground. Bill was somewhere out in the night with his deputies and three paramedics, assessing the damage and looking for more survivors. Janet felt more tense and nervous with every minute that passed. She tried to keep her mind on her job, to focus on the patients, but the thought of Bill out in the dark, with the chance of a fresh collapse at any time, had her nerves frayed to breaking point. She almost sobbed when the big man walked out of the ruins.

He had three kids with him, all of them in shock. He sat on the squad car hood, more tired than she’d ever seen him, caked head to toe in grime, soot and blood while Janet assessed the kids.

They’ll live. But they might never be the same.

She packed them off in another ambulance before turning to Bill.

“How bad is it?” she asked.

She thought he wasn’t going to answer at first, and when he did, it was in a small, almost childlike voice far removed from his usual confident tone.

“A full third of the town’s gone. Just gone… fallen into new holes. The worst of the damage is over at the trailer park. We’ve got over two hundred folks missing, and that’s over and above the thirty bodies we’ve recovered from what little wreckage was left.”

Two hundred?

Janet’s mind could scarcely take it in. The big man looked ready to burst into tears, and she feared that if he did, she might join him.

We’re not equipped for this.

“We need to get the authorities here in force. And we need them now.”

Bill wiped a hand across his brow, smearing a scar of mud across his forehead.

“I’ve made the call. They say they’re on their way. God knows when they’ll get here though.”

Janet looked around her. The area where they’d stopped the squad car was now a makeshift recovery center, a hubbub of medics, cops and volunteer townsfolk. And patients… an ever-growing body of wounded and shocked.

“I need to get these folks inside,” Janet said. “And if there’s going to be more, we’ll need somewhere with space for them all.”

That seemed to get Bill moving. He stood up, straightened, and was once more the strong cop she knew.

“I’ll get them to open up the church hall. That’s in the area that still has power, so we’ll get heat, running water, and someplace we can get some food into folks. Big enough for you?”

“It’ll do. For now.”

Bill had the church hall opened, and Janet helped with getting it set up as an emergency center. Supplies were few and far between, even after scavenging what they could from the police department, the supermarket and shops, and Janet’s own surgery. Bill had put out calls for urgent emergency assistance to County but Janet knew all too well the glacial speed at which local, and hospital management in particular, came to decisions, and she wasn’t holding out too much hope of getting any help before morning. She had to make the best of what they had. With over a hundred walking wounded, and more coming in all the time, it was obvious the supplies weren’t going to stretch too far.

That wasn’t the only cause for concern. Many of the wounded had their heads down, hunched over their cell phones, attempting to make calls. Nobody could get a signal. One teenager wailed, inconsolably, as if he’d lost a member of his family. An elderly gentleman that Janet didn’t know said what was on a lot of their minds.

“What if it’s like this all over? What if the whole country, the whole world, is going to pot? Maybe there is no help out there.”