The Jupiter Plague

It was a nightmare scene. The ambulance had stopped under one of the soaring arches of an approach to the Koch Bridge on Twenty-third Street. It rose above them, its three wide levels brightly lit but empty of traffic, stretching out across the Hudson River to New Jersey. Around the maze of entrances and exits a dark crowd had gathered, screaming with a single voice of hatred, their faces blue-lit by the mercury vapor lamps or ruddy from the torches they carried. Behind them a row of old warehouses was burning. Shots snapped over their heads from the beleaguered forces of police and Army and were drowned in the roaring splash of the fire hoses. Knots of uniformed defenders could be picked out by the glare of the battle lamps they had put behind the barriers of trucks and metal drums thrown across the roadway. This was the setting, the shifting backdrop to the emergency dressing station that had been set up here, boldly lit by the piercing light of the battle lamps. In harsh black and white the huddled bodies of the injured lay waiting for treatment; behind them were those to whom treatment would never come, the newly dead.

“Doctor, can you help me— Doctor!”

Sam heard the words clearly through the thunder of back-ground noise and turned to see a young medical corpsman waving to him: he shouldered the emergency bag and threaded his way toward him through the sprawled figures.

“They just brought her over, Doctor, I don’t know what to do—”

The corpsman was young, hardly out of his teens, and he had never seen anything like this before. He had practiced in training and he had probably treated gunshot and puncture wounds — but never a woman who had one leg and her entire side burned, crisped black, with clothing and flesh charred together. His pressure can of burn foam had run out before he had done her leg as high as her knee and he just looked at it with staring eyes, pressing the useless button.

“I’ll attend to this,” Sam said, noticing the woman’s fixed expression and gaping mouth. “Take care of that policeman there, pressure bandage for the bullet wound.” As the corpsman turned away Sam pressed his telltale to the woman’s arm, knowing the results in advance. Massive fourth-degree burns, shock, then death. He pulled a blanket over her and turned to the next case.

Lacerations, gunshot wounds, broken bones, fractured skulls. Most of the injured were soldiers or policemen, the few civilians were those who had been trampled or crushed in the attack. The rioters were using any weapons they could lay their hands on in their hysterical attempts to flee the city.

Sam finished securing a dressing on a policeman’s arm, then sent him to the ambulance, and when he turned back he noticed a new arrival leaning against one of the pillars with both hands over his face. He was in the shadows and when Sam pulled him gently forward into the light he saw that the soldier was wearing a turban on his head and had the chevrons of a havildar; one of the Pakistani brigade that had been flown in early that morning. His hands were clamped to cover his face but blood was oozing out from between his fingers and dripping steadily to the ground.

“Over here,” Sam said, guiding him to an empty stretcher and helping him to lie down. “If you’ll move your hands away, Havildar, I’ll take care of that.”

The soldier opened the one eye that was not covered by his hands. “I dare not, Doctor,” he said in a strained voice. “If I do my face shall fall away.”

“You just let me worry about that, it’s my job.”

Sam pushed at the man’s hands gently and they reluctantly moved back. Fresh blood welled up and he could see the curving, almost circular laceration that cut through the cheek to the bone and had torn one nostril away from his nose: broken bits of glass still stuck in the flesh.

“A broken bottle?” Sam asked, making an injection with a morphine syrette.

“Yes, Doctor, he came on me suddenly and pushed it into my face before I could stop him. Then I–I’m afraid, contrary to orders — I hit him full in the stomach with the butt of my rifle, he fell down and I came here.”

“I would have done the same myself.”

Sam took the last of the visible glass out with tweezers — if there was more they would find it in the hospital — and set the width and depth of the stitch on the battery operated suturator. Holding the edges of the wound together with the fingers of his left hand he pressed the tiny machine over the cut. Each time it touched it secured the cut edges with a rapid suture — sewn together, tied and cut free in a fraction of a second. He moved it on, making a few large stitches that would secure the wound until the surgeons could attend to it. No large blood vessels had been cut and the bleeding had almost stopped.

When the Pakistani had been dispatched by ambulance with the other cases needing immediate attention Sam found two soldiers waiting for him. The sergeant saluted.

“We have some wounded up there on the top deck, Doctor — can you help us?”