Read Online Irresistible Forces by Danielle Steel - Free Book Online Page A

to make good on the promises he had made earlier, but with a frown, he heard the buzzing of his pager. He opened his eyes to look at her, and without a word, she handed it to him, and he saw the same numbers she had.
    “Tell me I'm having a nightmare,” he said, rolling over, and taking it from her. “Lucas is there this weekend, they don't need me.” He groaned as he said it.
    “Maybe you should call them,” she said softly, sitting on the bed next to him. “Maybe he wants to consult with you about something important.” He and Steve worked together very closely and had enormous respect and admiration for each other.
    Steve sighed deeply as he sat up, and reached for the phone next to the bed, with an unhappy expression. “This better be good,” he said, as he punched in the numbers and waited. As always, in his opinion, they took a little too long to answer, but they were understaffed and always busy. “Dr. Whitman here,” he said tersely when they did. “I just got a 911 on my pager, with red lights. Tell me it was a mistake, Barbie,” he said, recognizing the voice on the other end, and then for a long time he listened, and Meredith couldn't assess what he was hearing. His face looked blank for a long moment, and then he squeezed his eyes shut. “Shit. How many? And how many did we get?” He groaned audibly when she responded. “Where are you putting them? The garage? … are they crazy? What are we supposed to do with a hundred and eighty-seven criticals? It sounds like Gettysburg, for chrissake…. all right, all right…. I'll be there in ten minutes.” He hung up the phone and looked at his wife mournfully. They had not only blown his night all to hell, but his weekend, and possibly his entire week. “You'd better turn on the news. Some fucking crazies tried to blow up the Empire State Building at four o'clock, just in time to get everyone still in their offices, and all the tourists. Nearly a hundred people were killed, over a thousand injured. They're sending us somewhere between two and three hundred critically injured people. They're splitting up the rest of the minor injuries between hospitals all over the city. I have seventy-five trauma beds available, and over a hundred people in the halls now, with paramedics, and another hundred coming in, in the next hour. They're calling in medical personnel from Long Island and New Jersey. There goes our weekend. I'm sorry, baby.”
    He looked like his best friend had died, but in fact a lot of people's best friends had died, and husbands and wives, and children. It sounded like the Titanic. Meredith flipped on the TV while he dressed and there were bulletins about it on every channel. There was a gaping hole in one side of the building, from what they could see, and so much smoke surrounding the building, from fires the bomb had caused and the explosion itself, that it looked like a volcano.
    They both stood staring at it for a moment, and then the cameras panned to the snarl of ambulances and fire engines on the street below, people still being ushered from the building, some of them having crawled down a hundred flights of stairs in smoke and darkness, covered with blood and lacerations, and then there were some grisly shots of tarp-covered bodies. It was an abysmal example of what the human race was at times capable of, and what gave Steve his business. “How can anyone do something like that?” Meredith asked in a choked voice as Steve pulled the drawstring on his scrub pants, and stuck his bare feet into clogs. At least he had slept for two hours, and felt human again. It was going to be a long haul for him now, and they both knew it. “Can I do anything if I come with you?” She hated the thought of sitting at home, useless. And her heart ached at what they had just seen on the news bulletin.
    “I don't think so, sweetheart. Volunteers aren't much help in a mess like this. The city will give us some civil defense people, and Barbie said