Chapter 36: Aftermath

KA-BOOM!!!

I went flying forward between two parked cars because of the pressure wave from the blast. The earth shook as though the planet would crack apart. An immense cloud of debris apparently rose from the explosion in all directions, but mainly out of the open end of the culvert. Shrapnel of all kinds started to rain down upon us. I scrambled under the car I’d fallen beside. I could see Daniel squirming beneath a pickup truck one vehicle over when I looked past the undercarriage of the car I was under. A second later, a rock the size of my head smashed down where I’d fallen leaving a six-inch deep pock mark in the asphalt of the parking lot.

As the shower of rocks and debris slowed and then stopped, I heard the cacophony of hundreds of car alarms triggered by the explosion – maybe thousands. When all seemed clear of falling debris, I slithered out from under the car. My ears ached from the sound of the blast. I found I had a bloody nose, and a gash on my forehead, most likely from my fall. My arms and legs ached. My ears were ringing from the sound wave of the blast. One hand was bloody and badly ached from a severe bruise.

About sixty cars that had been nearest the blast area had been turned over or tossed about into the next two aisles. I could see the edge of a crater between the first and second row of vehicles. Every vehicle within sight had serious damage. Many other autos had shattered windshields and side windows. The cars in the second row nearest the bomb lay at odd angles; several were upside down or flipped over, and at least a dozen had been flung onto their sides by the force of the blast. As far as the eye could see cars were covered in dirt and rocks of varying sizes – some as large as a living room chair.

I walked to the edge of the smoking crater. Where the culvert containing the bomb had been, a crater in the earth about thirty or forty feet deep and over a hundred feet across sat smoldering from the heat of the blast. There had been at least six feet of dirt and paved parking lot atop the culvert; across the crater, it had all been blown into the sky and rained down on the cars. Any trace of the ditch, iron gate, or concrete pipe had been obliterated. The crater continued to smoke like an angry volcano on all sides as I turned to find Daniel.

As I headed to where Daniel had been, he popped up between two cars. He looked stunned and also in shock; he had a strange look on his face. His left arm had been ripped open by some piece of debris; blood gushed from just below his bicep.

I whipped off the bandana I’d been wearing as a ‘western prop’ for the music show, and he allowed me to tie the scarf tightly around his upper arm as a tourniquet. I said to him, “Let’s get you to a doctor. Come on. Can you walk?”

He looked at me and haltingly said, “You don’t look too good yourself. Better than me, though.”

Daniel walked gingerly next to me trying to immobilize his arm as we threaded our way between cars and headed towards the stadium. The stadium looked undamaged, but I could see that some smaller rocks and debris had been hurled at least that far. Amazingly, one car had been hurled so it lay crumpled beside the door from the stadium we had exited.

In the distance, I heard the emergency sirens – the klaxons – of dozens of emergency vehicles racing to the scene.

Daniel stumbled, and I brought my arm under him to support him. At that instant, a camera flash went off; there stood the same paparazzi photographer who had been taking pictures of me working on the bomb. He also had some scrapes and bruises, and blood running down his face from a scalp laceration; he must have been in the parking lot when the bomb detonated.

The newsman let his camera swing down to his side; he came to us at a run, “How can I help?” He moved to support Daniel’s other side.

Thirty minutes later, I sat with Daniel and Brendan Spencer, the photographer, on the back bumper of an ambulance. We had all been treated for our wounds. Daniel’s was the most severe – a broken bone from some falling piece of debris, and he’d need some hospital treatment and many stitches to sew him back together. A field nurse had done what she could to stop the bleeding.

The bomb squad had shown up, but their role had changed from prevention to diagnosis. I knew that they would spend countless hours at the bomb site sifting through every piece of evidence they could find. I also knew I’d spend several more hours with the police recounting details about the knapsack and bomb, and so would Brendan since he’d taken pictures of the device.

The concert had stopped – taken an unplanned intermission as emergency vehicles poured into the parking lot. Public address announcements informed the crowd what had happened and urged them to stay put. Repeatedly, announcements were made that even if people could get to their cars, they would not be able to leave the parking area because of the large gathering of emergency vehicles. The whole stadium had become a crime scene.

Terry and Crystal somehow found us sitting on the ambulance. They were both frantic about whether I’d lived or died. I tried to introduce them to Daniel and Brendan, but all they wanted was me – both with hugs and deep concern. After an initial bout of hysteria and alarm Crystal quieted down and held me unbelievably close to her. She sobbed wildly, so glad that I was unhurt. Later, I’d have to pay special attention to her, not an unpleasant thing to do. Her concern was genuine, and full of love. I had a huge rush of adrenalin still surging around in my veins. I asked, “Did anybody in the stadium get hurt?”

Crystal and Terry both shook their heads and shrugged. He said, “I don’t think so. Some policewoman escorted Crystal and the band off stage and back into the far side of the stadium about a minute before the bomb went off; people were puzzled about what was happening until the big bang. We could see the fiery explosion because the fiery plum went so high, some small debris – mostly dirt – rained in here and there, but other than that nothing really bad.”

I looked at Crystal who still snuffled into a tissue. “Care to do the second half of the concert? Can we round up the band?” She was still on the edge of tears about what could have happened – all the carnage, but she nodded in agreement and squeezed my hand. We hugged again, and then I held her hand as we headed off to reenter the stadium and finish our show for the now captive crowd. Daniel wished us well.

Fifteen minutes later, Crystal and I walked up onto the stage to a second thunderous round of applause from the fans still in the stands. We had found everyone in the band, and they were more than eager to continue. It appeared that maybe ten or twenty percent of the crowd had left despite the announcements to stay put. I had visions of many people walking home in the middle of the night.

My bandaged hand, forearm, and cheek were obvious additions to the onstage show, plus my costume was covered in dirt, and my backside muddy from where I’d slid down the embankment into the drainage ditch – when there was still a ditch and not a crater. I’d brought Brendan with us as he turned out to be a good fellow, and he’d helped me get Daniel to medical aide. He wandered around in the VIP seats close to the stage and took a couple of hundred pictures of us before he waved, and sauntered away halfway through our second set.

We sang for ninety minutes straight until Crystal and I were both hoarse. At our invitation, Cindy Wonder, the singer from The Hobo Palace band joined us on stage for most of our set. The concert that was to have ended at ten o’clock didn’t end until half past midnight. The parking lot remained in chaos, particularly in the areas with damaged vehicles. Police had cordoned off a large area and didn’t want the vehicles moved until the bomb squad had studied the scene. Several trucks with large spotlights dotted the parking area by then turning night into day; the focus had become everything in the blast zone – probably a radius of 500 feet or more.

The police had arranged for about a hundred buses for the hundreds of people whose cars were damaged beyond use or in the cordoned off zone. More buses seemed to be arriving by the second. Some crude process had been set up to route people to buses going to particular urban or suburban locations. Our limousines had been damaged beyond use in the explosion. Crystal, the band, and the rest of our entourage filled one bus and eventually got back to the Four Seasons. We fell into bed about three-thirty in the morning, late even by our standards.

Nancy flopped down on the bed beside Crystal and me. We’d both been sound asleep. Through squinted eyes, I peered across Crystal’s nude body at the clock – eleven in the morning. Nancy bounced a little on the bed, “Come on, you two. Get up. Time to face the day and a grateful public.”

“Huh?”

Nancy, who wore only one of my t-shirts, dropped a stack of newspapers onto the foot of the bed as I sat up. The headlines were all focused on the explosion ... but more than that, they focused on the fact that I’d again become a genuine hero. I’d discovered the bomb, tried to defuse it, and then at great personal risk had gotten the device far enough away from the stadium to minimize damage and save lives. One paper’s headlines said I’d put my own life at risk to save thousands: hyperbole at its best.

Reading the front-page story in one paper, I learned that only eight people had been hurt by flying debris – all had been in the parking lot, but two people had been killed in the blast: a stadium guard and a policeman who had come after us to help as Daniel and I ran away from the arena with the bomb. We hadn’t seen them as we ran from the culvert, and apparently, they hadn’t heard Daniel’s shout to ‘Run like hell.’ All had been too near ‘ground zero’ at the wrong time.

Several newspapers quoted a police statement saying that if the bomb had detonated where I had found it, over two-thousand people would have been killed instantly and many hundreds more severely injured, and that presumed that the upper tiers of the stadium didn’t cascade down on the lower ones.

No one had yet taken credit for planting the device; speculation ran from the IRA to Isis or Al Qaeda terrorists, and even included the humorous possibility that someone didn’t like country music being sung in an Irish stadium.

Also on the front page of several papers were pictures of me kneeling or lying down in front of the knapsack inspecting the bomb. One was a close-up of me picking the wires apart on the bomb. A second showed Daniel firing his gun into the bomb to cut the wires. Another picture showed Daniel and me running down the interior corridor of the stadium as I clutched the knapsack to my chest. Others showed the crater, and the chaos in parking lot with all the destroyed and shattered vehicles. If the event hadn’t been so tragic, it would have been right out of a B-grade movie.