FUTURES RESEARCH

9009 - THE SURVIVOR - 1998

[You will see, from the date on this, that it was written well in advance of 9/11. However, the prediction is – in some key respects – much like that which actually happened three years later!]

My life has been defined by the LA Incident. I have been running away from it ever since. Now I am running to the stars. It isn't even as if I was really part of it. I was a teenager when it happened, living with my parents on the west side of Beverley Hills, well not actually in the hills, more like the edge of Santa Monica, but - even so - I was never in real danger. Yet it scarred me just as much as if I had been there.

We lived in a nice home, with a nice garden, and my parents were wonderful. Even my sister was a peach. We would have made a perfect family for one of those soaps they were always recording on the sound-stages just up the road. But, of course, like most people there we had no contact with the inhabitants of tinsel-town. This was not because we rejected them, or even because they rejected us. It was simply that they lived in a totally different world - one which was completely contained in the television set which then still sat in the corner of everyone's living room.

So, there I was, I guess as innocent as any young girl could be in those days, just looking forward to my first prom; to being the belle of the ball, being photographed with the handsomest guy in my class. Then it happened, and destroyed everything.

The first I knew of it was the announcement on the television. You know, the one where they broke into normal morning programming; not the proper news programmes which came later. I had been watching the Simpsons, that much I will never forget but I couldn't tell you which episode it was. That worries me. I know they all look alike, but you would think that for something as big as that, something which changed my whole life, I would remember.

I do remember that the first thing they talked about, in that unscheduled newscast, was an incident with the First Lady's motorcade in downtown LA. I didn't even know she was coming. If I had, I might have been cheering with everyone else; and that was the first thing which grabbed my attention. Why couldn't I have seen her? But it slowly started to seep into my brain that there was more to it than that. The helicopter shots, which then took over, showed that her motorcade was stalled in the streets, and all the crowds were lying on the ground. At first I thought they had all been killed, and I screamed for my mother to come in from the kitchen, but they hadn't. If you looked carefully at the images you could see figures slowly crawling towards the cover of buildings, and then running for their lives. So, then, the first lady had been shot perhaps? We had lost a number of presidents that way, but surely not a first lady. No! A close-up, presumably at last from one of the teams on the ground which had been following her, showed her sitting bolt upright, almost regally so, in her car - talking to the members of the secret services who were clustered around her.

" We believe a sniper has stopped the motorcade and may be threatening to shoot the First Lady." The duty announcer sounded like he knew this was the break of a lifetime, barely able to control his excitement - but equally desperate not to seem to rejoice in the peril of those we could see. His ever-so-careful pronunciation was aimed at a bigger audience than he had pulled in over the whole of his life; as the pictures spread to sets around the world. But it didn't make any difference. He knew no more than any of the rest of us. It was obvious that somebody in the gallery was pulling what little information there was off the wire services, and yelling it into his earpiece. I should explain that Jackie, one of my best friends, had a sister who was a sound mixer at Fox; so maybe I did have some contact with Hollywood after all, and I certainly knew some of the lingo.

Even though nothing was happening, I, we, for my mother had now joined me on the couch - were transfixed. My mother was quietly babbling on about the Kennedy assassination, and the death of Princess Diana, but I barely heard her. I couldn't take my eyes off the television, surely history was about to be written in front of my eyes.

But nothing happened. After a while we started to get pictures of reporters huddled behind walls, talking urgently into their microphones, but they, too, might just as well been on the other side of the planet; for they clearly knew no more than us. Maybe they were really miles away, Jackie reckoned that they faked half the news stories after the event. It was nearly two hours before we learned why just one sniper was able to hold so many hundreds hostage. He had colleagues hidden in the other buildings, all with their sights trained on the First lady. Any hostile move, whatsoever, and she was dead! Even the crowds were not to be released; though ambulances were allowed in to take away the half dozen or so who had been injured in the first fusillade, which had presumably been fired to show that the terrorists really meant business.

By this time the crowds were sitting up, and an air of jollity - fuelled by the shared danger - seemed to have sprung up. It was almost as if they were attending a gala function with the President's wife. I guess we all heaved a sigh of relief at that moment. It was all going to turn out alright, as the best television programmes always did. Also by then, we were beginning to get views of the pundits; of the experts on terrorists, on dealing with sieges, on anything the networks thought would explain what was happening. I was on the phone to Jackie when these started to join the debate, and she said that - according once more to her sister - the networks often found these experts in the Yellow Pages. No wonder they so often contradicted each other! Indeed, that day there were so many of them they seemed to be almost about to trip over each other - and one did actually trip over a cable just as his immortal words were about to be transmitted to the whole world. The researchers must have consulted every phone book in town.

But on the ground nothing had changed. We didn't even know who the terrorists were, or what they wanted. But, soon after midday, soon after the ultimatum was finally handed over, we learned some of the facts. The Montana Wolves - as they seemed to be calling themselves - quite simply demanded that the President dissolved government, of the individual states as well as all the apparatus of the Administration in Washington, so that the separate communities could run their own lives. Even I, at my tender age, knew that this was a stupid demand. We only learned later, through the many television programmes which tried to explain the phenomenon, that the Wolves - an unheard of 'citizen's army' - believed that it was literally their sacred duty to stop the world descending into anarchy; an obvious paradox which in no way seemed to lessen their obsession.

Their deadline was sunset, some eight hours hence, and the pundits were already talking about what the special forces, this was way beyond the capability of the local swot teams, would do under the cover of darkness It was clear that preparations were already under way. The helicopter shots showed armoured vehicles being brought into position behind the nearby buildings. Even so, we weren't terribly worried, Sieges such as this ended happily, and the terrorists weren't even foreign fanatics - but were good old American patriots. Like John Wayne, surely they wouldn't hurt anyone. We conveniently forgot that they already had, though the authorities clearly didn't.

We didn't really know what to make of it when, precisely at five o'clock, they announced their next escalation. According to the message put out on the web, and apparently authenticated by the correct code-words, there was also an atomic bomb in one of the cars next to the motorcade. For most of the pundits this merely showed that these so-called terrorists were rank amateurs. They didn't seem so amateurish to me - they had held the First Lady, and several thousand bystanders, hostage for the best part of a day, despite the best efforts of hundreds of police and troops. According to the pundits, though, this claim showed that they were living in cloud cuckoo-land. They hadn't specified which car, but it was clear for all to see that none of those on view were big enough to contain a hidden atomic device. At that time nobody had told us about the rucksack devices the Special Forces kept in their armouries! If they had only said it was conventional explosive, that might have scared the pundits, we had all seen what a car-full of that might do; but, atomic, that was just ridiculous!

It appeared as if the authorities didn't believe it either, for the helicopter shots - there were now so many helicopters that the greatest chance of a real disaster came from a mid-air collision between these - showed more troops moving into position. Not only that, thousands of rubber-neckers were trying to get to the scene, filling the streets around.

It was beginning to get boring. History was not going to be written that day. Even so, we waited, for the time of the ultimatum to pass. Then we would be able to resume our normal lives, to watch our normal television programmes, and only return to see what was happening with the news programmes the following morning. Most of the pundits expected it to be all over by then, with an assault under the cover of darkness. Just a few thought it might drag on for another day. Either way, we prepared to move on. At eight o'clock, I remember, my mother had gone into the kitchen to prepare the meal - my father would be home soon. Indeed, I myself was looking away from the television when it happened. But I saw it though the windows. To the west the sun was almost below the horizon, but to the south a brilliant new sun was rising!

I was lucky, the burns I got were no worse than a slight case of sunburn. As I had immediately flung myself to the floor behind the couch, where I lay screaming for my mother to take cover, I was unhurt when a dozen or so seconds later the unbelievably loud sound-wave hit and, almost immediately after, the shock-wave which blew all our windows to smithereens.

Immediately thereafter there was total, unearthly silence. That silence must have lasted a full thirty seconds, before the night sky seemed to fill with screams. My first thought was to rush to my mother. Fortunately, as the kitchen was at the side of the house away from the blast, she was completely unharmed. She was clutching the edge of the sink, repeating over and over again 'It can't be, it can't be!' But it was.

For our neighbours and us shock was the worst thing. The screams, as we soon found out, had been those of fear not of injury. Indeed, when some semblance rationality had returned a few weeks later, we were faced with pundits saying that we were lucky that as few as twenty thousand had died in the blast, and even fewer had been seriously injured. This was much less than at Hiroshima and Nagasaki - for the substantial buildings in the centre of town had to a degree contained the blast. It was much less that we might have hoped for before the SALT disarmament agreements. There had at least been no nuclear holocaust. They stopped short of calling it just a local incident, but some clearly thought that. Even so, the fact that a handful of extremists, albeit very well funded, could have so easily got their hands on one of the government's nuclear devices scared the hell out of most people. When would it be their turn? On the positive side, it helped a number of stalled peace negotiations forward, and was the stimulus for the final rounds of global disarmament.

For us, though, the real horror was yet to come. Apart from the shattered glass over the carpet little was seemingly changed. Yet our life had been turned upside down. We eventually found a battery-driven radio which worked on the long waves, all the local ones had gone the way of the TV stations. From this we learned what we already knew; central LA was no more. Gradually, as our masters regained some of their wits, instructions started to pour out; not least from the loudspeakers of the police cars now touring the streets. At first we had to keep indoors, they were worried that about the effect of any radio-active cloud - but that was fortunately blown out to sea to the south of us. In any case, that is the standard instruction for any incident - big or small. But, eventually, they recognised that there were literally thousands of injured victims to be looked after; and almost all the emergency vehicles had been lost in the fireball. They had been concentrated in the centre, where it was expected they would be most needed - albeit just to handle gunshot wounds! Thus, there were no ambulances, no fire trucks and few police cars. Worst of all, where so many of the major hospitals had themselves been destroyed, there were far too few doctors and nurses to handle the thousands upon thousands of casualties. Hence we, the ordinary members of the community, would have to provide what medical care we could.

My mother and I were still in daze, indeed still in shock, as we followed the instructions - now also coming over the emergency frequencies on the radio. We tore up sheets to form makeshift bandages, we boiled lots of water - why was that always needed - and collected any suitable antiseptic and medication we could find. Then, with bags full of these pathetic supplies, we went as instructed to the nearby turnpike. The victims would be directed along these.

In the dark we congregated, with our immediate neighbours and the hundreds of others who had answered the calls, at the side of the road. Despite the numbers gathered there, there was almost complete silence - everyone was still in a state of shock, and couldn't bring themselves to talk about the horror. For the first three hours almost nothing happened. Cars screamed past, carrying their terrified occupants as far into the night, as far away from the city, as they could get. The occasional car, which had been commandeered as an ambulance, also screamed past - but more purposefully heading for the surviving clinics out of town, with its cargo of horribly burnt flesh. I wondered why there wasn't more traffic, and then I remembered that the instructions were clear. Nobody had to take their cars into the city; the authorities had enough problems clearing the jams that were already there!

Eventually, though, the first of the ambulatory casualties reached us. They were, initially, simple to deal with, just superficial wounds; indeed, many of them had already been bandaged and pushed aside our offers of help - also wanting to get as far away from the horror as possible, and prepared to walk until they dropped. After a while, the wounds, though still hidden under makeshift bandages, seemed to be getting worse; and a few of the victims collapsed, at the end of their tether, to be led away to local houses - where they could be cared for until the national emergency services reached us. Then the horrors grew. The bandages closer to the city had started to run out, and we started to receive people with whole areas of skin burnt off. The strange thing was that they weren't screaming with pain. But bandaging them made me want to scream. And it got ever worse. These were literally only the walking wounded; god knows what it was like nearer to the city. Here it was bad enough. We started to find casualties who clearly would not survive without being put into intensive care; and there would be no chance of that for days to come.

It was then that we were faced with the dilemmas, which haunt us to this day. They, rather than the horrors I saw, are what still wake me up screaming in the middle of the night. We, too, were starting to run out of bandages. What should we do? Should we save them for the casualties who might recover? Or should we use them up on those who would not last the night? The logical answer was clear, we had to save them for the living. But the agony of refusing to bandage those wounds is still with me. It wasn't the pain that we couldn't relieve, most of them were beyond that point anyway. It was the sentence of death that we were handing out to them. They knew, I could see from their eyes even if they didn't complain, that we had decided that their hours were numbered! Most of them bore it stoically, just a few screamed and cursed, but even they quickly fell silent. Worst of all were those who tried to console me; 'you're a brave girl, but there's nothing you can do for me.' My mother departed, with dozens of walking wounded who would sleep on floors throughout our house. I, though, felt I must stay and minister to the dying. I don't know why; I wasn't a nurse, and the very idea had repelled me; it still did. But I simply couldn't leave them to die alone. For a whole night, and half the following day, until the last of them died, I sat with them, holding their hands, praying with them, and just doing whatever I could do to make them more comfortable. To say it was harrowing would be to wildly underestimate the horror of it. The dying victims, and there were eventually hundreds of them - so many that their bodies later filled a dozen trailers - still live with me, in recurrent nightmares. Almost every night I toss and turn wondering if I could have saved them, but the worst is waking to realise that I couldn’t.

Like everyone else involved in that incident, I am still running away from it - to the stars if necessary.

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