“Do you know what we’re dealing with?”
“A new club opened out of town tonight. Full to capacity. Explosion. One of the upper floors collapsed."
Chapter 33
Jax
We weren’t the first crew on scene, but the place was still in chaos. People screamed, names echoed out into the night as friends searched for each other, radios crackled with crew already inside the building.
“Okay, what are we dealing with?” Eddie asked the Watch Manager from one of the other units.
“We’re not sure. Explosion of some sort. Brought down the second floor and blew out the side of the building round the back.” My eyes darted over the carnage that was a lot worse than we’d first thought.
“We have a team in there now shoring up where we can and the utilities have been switched off, but we can’t rule out more damage to the structure and further collapse. We’ve tried to clear the walking wounded and they are being triaged over there.” He pointed to an area away from the building where two ambulances lit up a line of people with an array of obvious injuries.
“We know we have multiple crush victims, two women, and a man so far, and then there’s a void space we can’t get to becausewe need to clear the debris once we’ve got some support securing the floor above.”
“Where do you want my crew?” I asked, looking between him and Eddie.
“I want you in full PPA gear and once it’s safe, get in there, clearing a way to the void spaces to start with. We need to check whether we have more casualties taking shelter there.”
“Sir?” A paramedic appeared next to us. “The bouncer gave us this… it’s a list of the people who had tickets for tonight. Well, surnames for the people with regular tickets and then the names of the VIPs as well as if they’d arrived or not.”
“How many?” I asked.
“Eight hundred.” I thought if we get a name of someone, we can try to find them on here so we know they’re accounted for. It’s not perfect, but—”
“No, great idea. See if you can get one of the police officers to help you while you focus on patching people up.”
He nodded before dashing back to his ambulance.
Our radios crackled with the information that the structure was as safe as our colleagues could make it, but we had to proceed with caution.
“Be careful in there, Cartwright,” Eddie instructed before I turned to brief my crew.
We worked for hours, passing debris between us so we could move through the space. Head injuries, broken bones, crush injuries; the further we got into the place, the worse the casualties we found.
Dust spiralled through the air, illuminated by our head torches. As we moved through the floor, the cries of people stillinside were punctuated by the foreboding groans of the building as if it was struggling to stay upright.
“We need to speed this up,” I announced over my radio.
“Understood,” Jimmy’s voice replied through my comms from the other side of the giant room.
As we neared the back of the room, the dust thickened, making me glad I was wearing my breathing gear. It had settled on the DJ booth and the tables that remained standing, making the place look like it had been deserted for years. Metal rods and cables dangled from what was left of the ceiling, and the large, circular lighting rig hung precariously.
“Let’s go around. No one wants this falling on them,” I instructed, pointing upward before moving through the smaller pieces of rubble, calling out to anyone trapped.
A muffled cry sounded out, and I signalled to where I’d heard the noise. Four firefighters moved in closer and we began pulling the rubble until a woman’s foot was exposed.
“We’re coming. Just hold on.”
We moved quickly, exposing the lower half of her body. Her black trousers were ripped, her feet bare and her body twisted, exposing the lower half of her back. Her red top had ridden up, showing a worryingly large black bruise that covered her hip and stretched up to her spine.
Henri pressed her fingers to her neck. “Pulse is weak and thready.”
Just then Jimmy lifted a large piece of metal from her back and she groaned, as I smoothed her light hair back from her face so I could see if there was any damage to her head, my mouth falling open as I saw a familiar face.
“Jax,” she murmured as the lighting rig groaned, finally giving up its battle to stay attached to the ceiling, crashing onto the ground, bringing a shower of debris raining down on us.
