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I see are pushing gurneys. A nurse staggers ou t side, three small children in her arms, on her hip, clinging to her back.
    They aren’t setting off any more bombs until people have a chance to get out.
    I let the fire door close. Alarms scream. I run back to Pathology and shove open the heavy door.
    Randy lies on the floor, sweating and shivering. His lips move but if he’s muttering aloud, I can’t hear it over the alarm. I tug on his arm. He doesn’t resist and he doesn’t help, just lies like a heavy dead cow.
    There are no gurneys in Pathology. I slap him across the face, yelling “Randy! Randy! Get up!” Even now, even here, a small part of my mind thrills at hitting him.
    His eyes open. For a second, I think he knows me. It goes away, then returns. He tries to get up. The effort is enough to let me hoist him over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry. I could never have carried Jack, but Randy is much slighter, and I’m very strong.
    But I can’t carry him down three flights of stairs. I get him to the top, prop him up on his ass, and shove. He slides down one flight, bumping and flailing, and glares at me for a minute. “For…God’s sake…Janet!”
    His wife’s name. I don’t think about this tiny glimpse of his marriage. I give him another shove, but he grabs the railing and refuses to fall. He hauls himself—I’ll never know how—back to a sitting position, and I sit next to him. Together, my arm around his waist, tugging and pulling, we both descend the stairs the way two-year-olds do, on our asses. Every second I’m waiting for the stairwell to blow up. Sean’s gray face at dinner: Fucking vigilantes’ll get us all.
    The stairs don’t blow up. The fire door at the bottom gives out on a sidewalk on the side of the hospital away from both street and parking lot. As soon as we’re outside, Randy blacks out.
    This time I do what I should have done upstairs and grab him under the armpits. I drag him over the grass as far as I can. Sweat and hair fall in my eyes, and my vision keeps blurring. Dimly I’m aware of someone running toward us.
    “It’s Dr. Satler ! Oh my God!”
    A man. A large man. He grabs Randy and hoists him over his shoulder, a fireman’s carry a lot smoother than mine, barely glancing at me. I stay behind them and, at the first buildings, run in a wide loop away from the hospital.
    My car is still in the deserted driveway across the street. Fire trucks add their sirens to the noise. When they’ve torn past, I back my car out of the driveway and push my foot to the floor, just as a second bomb blows in the east wing of the hospital, and then another, and the air is full of flying debris as thick and sharp as the noise that goes on and on and on.
     
    Three miles along the East River Road, it suddenly catches up with me. All of it. I pull the car off the road and I can’t stop shaking. Only a few trucks pass me, and n o body stops. It’s twenty minutes before I can start the engine again, and there has never been a twenty minutes like them in my life, not even in Bedford. At the end of them, I pray that there never will be again.
    I turn on the radio as soon as I’ve started the engine.
    “—in another hospital bombing in New York City, St. Clare’s Hospital in the heart of Manhattan. Beleaguered police officials say that a shortage of available officers make impossible the kind of protection called for by Mayor Thomas Flanagan. No group has claimed credit for the bombing, which caused fires that spread to nearby bus i nesses and at least one apartment house.
    “Since the Centers for Disease Control’s announcement last night of a widespread staphylococcus resistant to e n dozine , and its simultaneous release of an emergency counterbacteria in twenty-five metropolitan areas around the country, the violence has worsened in every city transmitting reliable reports to Atlanta. A spokesperson for the national team of pathologists and scientists responsible for the drastic