Story Market Day

I’m actually amazed by the low recoil, the concussive forces from that thing within the confines of a building or vehicle? ::shudders::
3M has already caused me enough tinnitus.

If you hate everyone around you throw a Gamma 6 on your AR-10… my brother said being next to it when I shot was like being on line with a short barrel SAW in a shoot house again.
 
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Late at Night, High on a Ridgeline


The vehicle was a shadow, slipping through the dark. Not fast enough to attract attention, and not loud enough to be heard until it was far too close, it creeped along high on the hillside. The slow and steady movements and quiet nature of the vehicle was an illusion.

Inside, there was enough activity to make a TV broadcast room feel calm. Four sets of eyes were darting everywhere, each pair looking for it’s own needs. Up front, the driver and co-pilot were trying to see everywhere at once. Near, far, stationary, movement, IR and NVG feeds front and back, terrain, obstacles, slope, camber, air temperature, roadway temperature, humidity, weather, GPS, it all came into play, along with map location compared to reality, where they were headed, where to avoid, where to run if something happened, where to run if they were cut off, and on and on and on. The front seats had their hands full.

The backseaters were just as busy. Two screens, dozens of radios, sensors, transmitters, detectors, jammers, camera feeds, GPS, all the bands, all the frequencies, they were sweeping and testing them all from the laptops on their mounts.

The cabin was warm, but they couldn’t roll down the windows with their mesh screens up. The two in back were going back and forth, testing this thing, trying that thing. Behind the backseat was a metal rack with an array of electronic boxes and dodads, cooling fans piping air to them to keep them cool and working. An exhaust system was pulling the hot air down and out floor exhaust ports right above the mufflers to help reduce the additional heat signature and to also place them lower in the vehicle’s silhouette.

Up front the discussion was mainly things like ‘why don’t we swing down one street and take the alley over to the basketball court on thirteenth’ and ‘this thing is a little wide for the chokepoint over on Magnolia. Might be hard to take at any decent speed.’ The conversation in the back was different. It was full of tech jargon, kilohertz, burst rate, heat sink capacity, broadcast strength, antennae configuration, bleed over and on and on. The two in the front didn’t even pretend to follow what they were talking about, even though the two in the back were the whole reason they were out driving around.

With half the night gone, the two in back finally had enough data for the changes they needed to do.

“OK Penny. Take us back.” Bekka said as she and Ivar were shutting down most of the transmitters, receivers and laptops, leaving only the main communications set up running.

Heidi looked over at Penny.

“Finally.”

The vehicle turned and made it’s way back to it’s lair.
 
At the Training Building


It was a big gathering in the main bay. There were vehicles and tables of gear all around but most of the stuff wasn’t loaded into vehicles yet since the pairings and positions hadn’t been finalized. That was part of the current discussions.

Stephen and Doug were cross-referencing the rope kits and splitting everything up into two separate packages so they could duplicate in two elevator shafts, or if one kit didn’t make it to scene, they could still proceed. Brice was with them, going over the braces and frames to set up the pulleys in the shafts themselves.
Silas, Ivar, Jesse, Zed, Garen, Violet, Ian, Nadia and Oskar would be the main people inside the hospital moving and loading stuff. For this they had a veritable pisspot of the thirty dollar four-wheeled furniture dollies, bags full of A-Bags and ratchet straps. All of this was to let them move stuff quickly and efficiently.

These two crews would move in early, as soon as they got the go-ahead from the recce crew. They would work at staging and preparing everything so when the trucks rolled in, they could load them as fast and efficiently as possible to minimize the time they are doing a lot of visible activity.

There were several other jobs and crews being built and developed as well. Erich, was at the Training Building with Chance, Amber and Evelyn to deal with an immediate casualty. Their primary inbound source would be Mia and Ren if they had to evacuate a casualty.

This left three more crews.

One crew already staged at The Center. This readjusted group was Allyson, Heidi and Jonas. This was the Quick Response Force, ready to swoop in and put the hammer on any problem that needed flattening. They would move in and help during the tail end of the packing and the actual drive away phase.

Riding overwatch in the distance would be Veronica, Bekka, Dylan and Emilia. They would sit in location high above on one of the hillsides watching and listening. Their whole job was to keep an eye on everything that was going on both near and far while everyone had their heads down and were working on the gear movement.

The last dedicated crew was one nobody wanted to be put to work. It already moved out and were in their holding location, having had to travel farther in it’s route to circle around and come back towards town from the norther edge. This crew’s job was to sit, wait, and be ready.

They wouldn’t come into play unless there was a major attack, and maybe not even then. What they were there for was if someone got cut off, split away or otherwise separated from the main operations. They were operating like a ‘downed pilot’ rescue crew. They would either swoop in and pluck the person up with the vehicle directly, the best choice, or if need be, go in on the ground by foot, find stabilize and exfil the trapped/injured/separated people.

For this, they had one of the other Interceptors. They would have used the ‘Spyder’ but they wanted to be able to bail out of and into the vehicle quickly and the four doors would work better for that, along with the increased cargo space. It was wearing the new paint job of the Southern Camp Interceptors, but only had the basic radio package, not the new and improved one Bekka was developing.

It was an interesting blend of people in this group. Training and experience were high, in one way or another.

Penny was the dedicated driver. She was studying the maps hard for the northern area. Barbara was with her, doing the same. The other two were scoping out their hold short location, making sure they had the lay of the land around their layover point.

Angelique and Kingfisher didn’t need to speak as they moved. They had done this together too recently and operated well together. They were scouting through the urban/rural interface area near the park the four of them were stashed in. They were using a far corner of the one Ian, Mia and the others had landed at from their kayak journey from Alaska. They knew it was unoccupied and was far enough removed that they wouldn’t get random traffic, but close enough to get right into the town with little delay.
 
In the Hospital Building


As soon as they moved out of the hidden wing, the other areas were more chaotic, and had definitely been visited since the Wave. One of the first things they were after was a map and directory. This would be near the elevators.

Before they left their hidden wing, they checked the hinged door to make sure they could reopen it once they closed it. It had obviously stayed secret all this time and they wanted to keep it this way, so they had a place to rest during their activities. They had no illusions this would be a quick trip.

They moved carefully along, listening for any extra sounds or movement. In this part, there was a lot more trash and clutter where some wholesale ransacking took place. It looked like this was an inner hallway and the hospital was organized around a box pattern. On this floor, this side was marked for a bunch of upkeep and management functions. Moving down the hall, they reached the other side of the elevator. This elevator was marked ‘Staff Use Only’.

Across the hall from the elevator was a floor listing. Kara snapped a quick picture of it. The hospital had all kinds of functions, many more than what most would think of, but with the size of the town, each one couldn’t be very big.

There were at least three full floors of small specialty clinics, along with a ton of other things. Podiatry, Ophthalmology, EENT, Urology, Dermatology, Nephrology, Pediatrics, Behavioral Health, Family Practice, Gynecology, Endocrinology, Gastroenterology, Audiology, Physical Therapy, Oncology, CT, X-Ray, Endoscopy, Pre-Op, Same-Day Surgery, OR, Offices, Family Services, Gift Shop, Cafeteria…And on and on.

There were other spots on the list that were higher on their list to check out first. NICU was number one, along with Obstetrics, Labor and Delivery on the short list. They should also have the right drugs in the co-located Pyxis Med lockers. They held little hope in finding anything still in the main pharmacy, and probably nothing salvageable in the ground floor ER, but those would be checked eventually.

Two other locations Garen had on Kara’s short list might have more hope escaping being targeted by looters though. One of them was the Bio-Medical Repair shop. There might be a stockpile of equipment they could use, or at least cannibalize to keep their own gear running.

The other was the flight medic’s ready room. Garen said he thought he remembered there being some gear stashed up there for swapping out and restocking the helos when they came in with patients.

The list of clinics and what floors they were on helped them develop a gameplan. Now all they had to do is get there,. Oh, and make sure there was no one else here, or if there was, figure out if they were hostile or neutral, and determine the next steps.
 
Later


None of them were sure why which floor selection for what thing was chosen, but of course what they were after first was at the top of the building. The top floor was where the NICU and Labor and Delivery was. This was the most important location. The next floor down was where the ICU was, along with administrative offices. That floor wasn’t as important other than potentially for some drugs and monitoring equipment. The thought was with the juicy targets for looters being on the lower floors, the lack of good things for the average person, coupled with the long hike up a shitload of stairs, all helped fill their cynical minds with a sliver of hope.

To give themselves a better chance of steering clear of people if there were any in the building, they went to the stairwell closest to the water. With all the windows shattered and weather streaming in, the stairwells on the exterior corners of the seaward side should have been flooded and then uninhabitable.

They were staying away from the fire egress stairwells on the interior corners. Due to fire code, those were solid windowless and much more likely to be used for shelter and or movement by anyone left inside.

When they breached the door, they could tell it had been open to the sea and weather. There was plenty of signs of birds roosting on the handrails and the window frames. Even though the windows were gone, the air was more confined, so it had a stale quality to it.

Up they went, they still tried to keep quiet as they moved. There was no telling who was on the other side of the access doors into the rest of the building. One of the big things Kara kept looking for as she led the way up the stairs was any sign of recent traffic on the stairs or signs the stairwell doors had been opened recently.

Up and up they went. The only sounds in the stairwell was the soft tread of their shoes, the nylon-on-nylon sound of shifting gear and the breathing of the three as they moved steadily upward.

They paused on the landing outside the door to the NICU/L&D floor. They needed to rest a moment to get their heartrates back into the green after the climb and the sudden scare one floor down when they startled a couple seagulls. Kara was surprised she didn’t shoot them when they leaped up and took off screaming as they launched themselves out one of the open windows.

The three of them positioned themselves at the door. Rahel would open the door, Kara would enter first, then Rahel, with Hanna coming in last.

Rahel tried the knob carefully. It turned. She pulled carefully. It moved stiffly, but without sound, thankfully. Kara slipped past her and went inside.
 
Griz3752 said:
There's a place for silent dexterious methods and the piledriver, stomp till it stops moving method. They both have an application. Oddly they both function on the "Look whos here" approach but with differing volume levels of noise.

All rumour to me of course; I've never experienced either from the guest pf honour perspective.

THX CGG
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K-12 Rescue Saw straight through the wall, bypassing the doorways.
 
On the NICU Floor


The place showed signs of a hasty evacuation. That was understandable. After the quake and wave, there was no power and almost everything the NICU did required it. Monitors, pumps, sensors, warming stations, computers, all needed electricity.

The NICU wasn’t large, only four stations, but Kara couldn’t help but wonder the fate of the babies here when it happened. She purposely ignored the papers on the old-fashioned clipboards in their rack at the nurse’s station. She knew others would grab the clipboards later. She wouldn’t touch them. The temptation to read the charts would be too great. She was busy anyway.

Hanna went through this side of the floor quickly. She tagged a bunch of stuff with sticky notes. She had two colors of them from the nurse’s station: pink and blue. Following the earlier plan, Hanna was designating what had to go from here, and the colors would help with the other part. Not all of the same thing would go in the same load or vehicle. All the pink stuff would go out in one vehicle and all the blue in a separate vehicle. This way, if something happened to vehicle ‘X’, they wouldn’t lose all of one particular item.

Kara was going to move the pink and blues into two separate alcoves. This way when the loadout crew got here, they could take all of one set then the other without someone having to explain it as they went. She used a big marker and wrote the labels on the wall in case Hanna and Rahel got done breaking into the Pyxis before she got back.

This sort of marking wasn’t foreign to Kara, or Hanna for that matter. They were using triage. This would be going on as they went through the whole place later. They had several rolls of flagging ribbon with each of them. After this initial survey of the high priority targets was done, they would start working through the rest of the potential stuff, tagging items, or piles or bags of stuff with colored flagging tape, prioritizing things so each location, floor, clinic and cubby hole could be swept for things without getting bogged down in lesser items early, and missing more important things if they had to pull out sooner than they intended.

Kara headed back to the nurse’s station to check in with those two. They had gotten lucky. The machine in this section looked to be an older one and intact. It had clear doors for better inventory control. This was something they could exploit. They were prepared for it. Window punch if they were glass, and if they were plastic, they had pencil torches. The goal was breach the window, then they could retrieve the meds.

Kara walked back to the Pyxis, where she found Hanna and Rahel pulling and sorting the drugs inside into five piles. The cubes of glass all over the floor answered the question. Tempered glass. That was a good thing. It was a lot faster and easier to defeat and gave them better access quicker.

As she walked in, Hanna looked up.

“Good. You’re just in time. Here’s your stack.” Hanna said as she pointed to one of the three smaller piles of vials.

The three of them had a messenger back apiece that they would be loading a small selection of super high priority and highly portable items into incase they had to run away. These drugs were some of them. The rest were divided into two piles. These piles would be bundled into pillowcases and dropped into the pink and blue collection points.

“Cool. The pile points are marked.’ Kara said as she scooped up her drugs and dropped them into the empty messenger bag hanging at her side.

She looked at Hanna and Rahel.

“All three of us go to the L&D side, or Rahel start moving stuff while you and I go start the sweep?”

“All three of us go, then we start moving stuff I think.” Hanna said.

This made Kara happy. She didn’t want to do the horror movie mistake of splitting up too soon.
 
In L&D

To get to L&D, they had to go through the central wing. In this area was the OB Clinic, exam rooms and offices. They didn’t linger in this part since they had higher priority than old magazines, Surgilube, exam gloves and speculums. There should be plenty of those in the actual L&D wing.

Once they were in there, it was a quick sweep looking for others or signs of recent activity. There was none. It looked like no one had been here in months. All of this was good news in Kara’s book. As soon as they found no one, Kara had Rahel slide the fire axe through the door handles onto the L&D wing to lock it from the inside.

Time to get to work. It was kind of a ‘rinse and repeat’ of the NICU. There were several delivery rooms, along with a large waiting area with beds and curtain dividers like in a Same-Day Surgery pre-op and post-op recovery area. Hanna went around the rooms putting stickies on things while Rahel went to start raiding the Pyxis.

While this was going on, Kara was moving back to the stairwell to check their next target.
 
For this Kara had to use a different stairwell than the one they used so far. This one was in the center wing next to the main bank of elevators. She carefully opened the stairwell door, trying to be as quiet as she could. Her normal luck wasn’t with her. It was silent, allowing her access to the stairs. After she pulled the door open, she listened. There was nothing but the sounds of the wind and the sea. She checked the latch to make sure she could get back in once it closed. It worked. She was taking no chances though. She pulled the small Allen wrench on it’s lanyard out of her pocket. She used it to secure the panic bar in it’s ‘open’ position.

She stepped through and eased the door closed, then opened it a couple times, just to make sure. When she was satisfied, she moved up the final flights of stairs to the top.
 
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Top of the World


Kara gently pressed open the door at the top of the stairs. She was trying to picture what she would find from Garen’s half-assed description from a visit here two years ago. She came into a small hallway with several doors on the right side and one at the end. All the doors except the one at the end of the hallway were open. She carefully moved along, looking for any signs of people.

This section felt different than the NICU and L&D. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but she just knew people had been through here more recently than the other spaces they had checked.

The first room she came to was some sort of Ops room. There was a large map on one wall, several planning tables, a couple of desks and the other administrative clutter one would expect to find. She moved on.

The next room, practically a broom closet, was somebody’s office, probably the boss. Empty.

The next room was a break room , with a couple couches, a table, some chairs and a small kitchenette setup on one wall with a microwave, coffee pot and a fridge.
Empty.

Two simple bunkrooms separated by a bathroom/locker room were next. Empty.

This left only the door at the end.

Kara went to it. The knob turned easily. She opened it slowly and scanned.

It was the small rooftop hanger. Bingo!

There was no aircraft inside, but there was a series of cages and lockers along the far wall. These were her target. The aeromedical evacuation company kept equipment for the helicopters here, along with resupply materials. This was where she hoped to find some good stuff. Stuff more towards her experience. She was hoping to find the right sort of stuff to seriously outfit the medical snatch wagons they were building. Things like cardiac monitors, end-tidal monitors, small portable ultrasound, and ventilators were all on the ‘yes, please’ list, right after all the baby stuff and the drugs.
 
In L&D at the Pyxis


Rahel was going through sorting and bagging the drugs, splitting them out into their planned bundles. She knew Hanna wanted everything, but at least she was practical enough to follow Kara’s suggestion of having at least a small ‘run away’ set for each of them so they could make sure to have something.

She was scanning the drug names, splitting things out and building the piles. The names made no sense to her. Misoprostol, Oxytocin, Relaxin, Mifepristone, Hyaluronidase, Isosorbide mononitrate, Bupivacaine, Ropivacaine, Clonidine, Neostigmine, Crinone, hydroxyprogesterone, terbutaline, nifedipine, methylergonovine, Pitocin, Methergine, Cervidil, and on and on and on.

Rahel didn’t understand any of it, but she had the quick reference cheat sheet Hanna had made her listing the drugs, and their priorities. ‘If there is any of this one, they go in the grab bags first, then these, and don’t bother with any of these, because they require constant temperature storage, so they are worse than useless…” Hanna had told her as she went down the lists when she gave them to her.
 
In the Main Room


Hanna was moving along. She wanted to get as much as she could set and ready to send out as soon as the first transports got there. She was piling stuff up on the beds to be packaged, but there were some important things she was already dropping into her scavenging bags. For those, she grabbed three of everything and would split them with Kara and Rahel when she went to grab the next pile of drugs Rahel was liberating from the Pyxis.

Handheld Ultrasound and doppler were two big plusses. She would make sure they took a bunch of the diagnostic monitors when the others got here, but these little items she could run away with in her bag.

She knew once Rahel was finished with the drugs, she would work on the small supply room door. Hanna didn’t expect a ton of stuff in it since most of the time they could just call down to central supply in the basement for anything they needed a lot of. The stuff in the supply room on the floor would be short-term immediate stuff to support the gear on this floor. That was fine with her. She could at least make sure they had small amounts of stuff for their three pregnant patients.
 
Dumb Blonde said:
I was worried here for a moment, but then nothing untoward happened.
Do you mean that Kara's luck is usually bad? Or is it a typo?

View attachment 618155
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DB don't hold your breathe on that; this crew is a long way from exiting the building.

There's always a chance of a chapter or so being posted @ 0Dark30 or thereabouts.

Just saying . . . .
 
Up Above


Kara looked around the small hanger space. It was sized for on helo, and in a serious emergency, if they brought out the shoehorn and the lube, they might get two inside, but not easily nor comfortably. This wasn’t the main base for the helos. It was more of an alert pad, rearm, resupply point. Their main location was down at the airport, and long gone.

What they did have here was some older backup gear and some restock supplies. The lockers all had labels. Most of them were things for maintenance. These weren’t her first target. That was the small walled off area. The one with the push button door lock.

Kara knew this would be the gear. She also knew the steel door and frame wouldn’t be the easiest to open. She also knew it was to prevent someone from being able to pilfer without detection. It was deterrence, not real protection. The door might be difficult, but the wall wouldn’t be.

As she approached the door, she noticed several stokes litters, backboards and another hoist basket, all setting on top of the roof of the room. Great place to store bulky things out of the way. This got her thinking. There are probably cabinets or shelves along the walls. If they had stuff stored on the roof, there had to be a ladder to get it. There wouldn’t be cabinets on the roof in the room. She wondered how dumb these guys might really be.

It didn’t take long for her to find the wheeled maintenance ladder. It looked just like the one at the big box store. She pushed it into position, then set the brake, cause, safety first.

She climbed the rolling staircase until she could see the roof of the room. There were large sheets of plywood across the roof beams over at least half the space, all along the perimeter. In other spots, she could see the back of fluorescent light fixtures and ventilation ducting, like looking at the inside of an office’s drop ceiling.

Kara carefully stepped out onto one of the plywood panels, testing to make sure it would hold her. Once she was sure, she slid the old-school ice hammer into her hand. It was time to get to work.
 
Inside


It didn’t take long for her to gain access. She was able to sweep the room with the headlamp and find a spot on a counter to lower herself down into the room. The first thing she did after she got inside was open the door, ensuring an easier exit than her entrance. She dropped one of the large U-bolts she had in her pocket over the middle hinge of the door, preventing it from closing completely as she turned to her task.

The headlamp swept around the room as she looked. The counter she had stepped on had shelves against the wall. In these shelves, and the ones to the left and right, were the main targets of her search.

They had set up for two full swap outs from here. At least for the bigger things that needed charged batteries. On the shelves were all the big electronics, still plugged into their chargers.

Kara’s eyes scanned the equipment. Some were models she was familiar with. Others, not so much. That’s ok. She could learn them, along with all the other medics.

Portable cardiac monitor/defibrillators, transport ventilators, IV infusion pumps, blood warmers, video laryngoscope... It was like Christmas. There was even some hand-held ultrasounds. Granted, a lot of this stuff looked like it had seen better days, but sometimes the older gear had some advantages, like the older Zoll monitors on the shelf. They were old enough they qualified for AARP cards practically, but were built to be thrown down a mountain and still work when they reached the bottom. Most importantly, they still had paddles.

One of the big issues was diminishing supplies, especially very type specific expendables. With the paddles, all they needed is gel, and that could be made in a pinch.

The same concept played out with the other stuff. Sure new was great, but Kara would trade new for robust each and every time.

In the drawers of the cabinet were supplies for all the electronic gear charging above. Now that the big thing she was after had been found, she looked at the rest of the room.

Bins held a small ready stock of expendables. IV start kits, bags of fluid, a bin with trauma supplies, all labeled and ready to grab. She looked further.

Against the wall with the door in it were some gym-style lockers. These held another bonus. Two helo helmets, complete with comms and NVG mounts. She checked the lockers under them. The NVGs were there. Bonus! These were bulkier and not any big improvement over Kara’s own rig, but it was set up with the helmet and would work well for someone else in the vehicles. She checked the sizes. One medium and one large, as she expected.

On the other side of the door was a pair of shelves with a jump kit and an airway bag, each still sealed with inventory tags. These would be fully packed and ready to grab to replace one in a helicopter if it would take too long to reload, or if it went for an unintended swim without it’s medic, a real danger here by the ocean.

All of this would be great to take, but she didn’t know the best way to do it. The elevator shaft that came up to here wasn’t the one they were intending to use. She didn’t like the idea of a dozen trips back and forth carrying gear.

She wondered if Doug could set up a way they could go right over the side from the helo pad. Maybe there’s a window-washer’s rig on the side of the building they could use.

Step one of all those answers involved checking out the edge of the building. Time to go outside.
 
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