Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ World on Fire ❯ Interlude: The Diary of Sally Po ( Chapter 10 )

[ T - Teen: Not suitable for readers under 13 ]

Author's Notes: Yikes, it's been over a year since I updated. Sorry! I decided a few months ago not to bother posting until I had completed the story, which I have finally done. Now that it's complete, I'll be posting a new chapter every week until it's done, giving me some time to edit any of the chapters. The Diary of Major Sally Po Day 1:  I've taken the advice of one of our NCOs and set up a log. If help arrives and I'm too out of it, or worse, too dead to talk, we will have a record of what happened here. We don't know what happened. There was a massive rumbling, a tremor like we were having an earthquake. Pretty uncommon around here, but most of us just ran to the doorways and under desks. Then all the windows in the building blew out, spraying glass everywhere. I was lucky, I was in my office at the time but we had a lot of injuries. Because they were in a hospital we didn't have anyone bleed out, but I know others in the city weren't so lucky. All of our doctors have been too busy with the injured, so I'm in charge of the clinic now. We've set up emergency triage in nearly every room in the hospital, we've even needed to use the morgue for operations. People are coming in from all over the city, the civilian hospitals have been overflowing. I doubt we'll get more though, I can already see the fires surrounding the city. staff sergeant that was on security detail was trained in communications. We've got him at the top of the building trying to set up radio contact. It would only take four days for outside help to reach us, so we need to be able to contact them when they arrive. Day 2:  Didn't sleep much last night. The only surprise was that I managed to get the sleep that I did, fleeting as it was. A hospital is never a restful place, but now the corridors echo with anguished voices even more profoundly. It may have been the vast overcrowding of the city that saved us. The suburbs have gone up like matchsticks, but we seem to be safe in the middle of the city. Concrete and glass everywhere, there's nothing to burn. Those caught outside weren't so lucky. The streets are filled with charred corpses, bodies half sunk into the boiled tar that has now solidified. They look like statues now, caught forever trying to crawl their way out of their black shells. have been a few cases of looting and violence, but not as many as expected. There's a sinister, heavy feeling spreading. No use in possessions if you know you're going to die. I'd call them superstitious, but I'm starting to feel it too. Nothing so passe as an ominous feeling of doom, but a physical force, hot and heavy, pressing down against every available area of skin. staff sergeant has been complaining about the radios. He's resorted to sending out some of the privates to dig around appliance stores, but nothing they bring back works. Just in case he can't get anything working in time, I ordered some of the men to dig around the old port authority building for flares and emergency beacons. Anything to signal rescuers.Day 3: after patient and it's all palliative care. No life saving treatment, no cures, just ease their suffering until death inevitably takes them. We're missing something, but I don't know what. Under normal circumstances there is not a person in this building we could not save. Maybe it's because we rely too much on our now useless equipment, but even without it half the people dying should be saved. Severe burns should not be life threatening in a hospital, but something is eating away at these people from the inside, causing even the fittest to become sickly and unable to fight off the spreading infections. we don't get help soon, the only ones left will be the uninjured.twelve of us. 4: no sign of rescue. A group of the sergeant's men went to the helipad to shoot off some of the flares, but they said it was unlikely to be seen amidst the embers or the smoke. Looking out the window, the columns are so thick and rising so high it looks like a volcano went off under the city. There's no way they missed that signal, so they must be unable to get to us. Another reason we need those radios working. The generators are only powering the basics at the moment, but unless we find more fuel we only have a few days of power left.hate myself for it, but I've been using this journal to avoid going back on the floor. I can't put it off any longer, these people need me. Even if it is only to comfort the dying. 5: feel like Agnes Bojaxhiu when I walk through the floors of the wards. I am doing nothing for them now, not even to ease their suffering. Just keeping them hidden out of sight from the others as one by one their pained moans stop forever. When a few days ago we were keeping people alive at all costs, we have all but stopped now. Even if our medical supplies would hold steady, how much longer can we keep someone suffering until they beg us to let them go? the sign outside, in dirty paint someone has sprayed "House of the Dying" over the quickly forgotten name of the hospital. Even if I had the time to remove it, I cannot bring myself to do so.still comes too rarely and each meal comes back up more easily than it goes down. I can only hope it is due to the conditions. 6:light at the end of the tunnel was a deadly glow.had a great moment of hope and triumph earlier this morning when some of the army engineers had managed to get several machines in the diagnostic and radiology department back to some semblance of working order. The mood lightened in even the darkest hearts of hopeless cases, and we shuffled a representative sample of patients through to get what limited information we can on our high rate of mortality. Maybe it was an unspoken thought, something so awful yet so possible we did not want to entertain thinking it. But once a medical scanner returned a usually unseen error, we all knew the implications.Accumulated radiation too high: patient risk. had no archaic devices made to sweep for radiation around the hospital. Any device that would emit radiation would warn the physician before operation, or would not function if it detected the patient had already absorbed too much. I tested myself in case it was just a unique case. No such luck. Occam's razor had cut through our hopeful assumptions that infection, bad treatment or mysterious ailment had caused the quick deaths. No, simply the blast had carried such radiation that it shut down the immune system of anyone fighting an injury and would soon shut down the bodies of those who had not. 7:bullet, another dull thud as a body hits the floor. There's no hope left to go around. Some of the soldiers agreed to the soul destroying task of executing those who ask for it. I can't stop them, even if I wanted to. A phrase I have been saying a lot lately. Something happens that is horrible, that shocks the conscience. Can I stop it, do I even want to if I could? I can't give any medical care to the suffering, I can't even offer the comforting lie that their deaths will be anything but agonising terror.have longer than most people here and more knowledge of what my death will be like. I can't take up the quick death offered by a bullet, but instead I will do what I can before I shit my kidneys up against a wall. We will take all the bodies to the department store across the road, which is being rigged with explosives already. The last of us will detonate the bombs and bury us all inside. The barest amount of dignity we have left, one last scrap of control we can wrest from a universe that has taken it all away. We can decide how we will be interred, together under a great cairn. you get this message... well. you, why didn't you get here sooner? even that last comforting hatred I cannot manage. It would not matter if you did. were people. We died here. Sally Po, United Earth Sphere AllianceConverting /tmp/phpusKz8k to /dev/stdout