Alex Kava - Damaged

Ive spent most of my life in tornado country, so I have a healthy respect for the forces of nature. In 2004 I bought what I believed would be a writing retreat just outside of Pensacola, Florida. Six months later, Hurricane Ivan roared ashore.

Its difficult to describe the damage, and even more difficult to explain how deep the damage cuts beyond that done to physical property. Theres a transformation that takes place within the community. You spend long, hot days without running water and electricity. Gasoline and groceries are limited to what youve stocked before the storm. The clean-up is physically and emotionally draining, but you find yourself grateful to be working alongside neighborsin my case, people I had only recently met. They taught me what true strength and perseverance looks like.

Nine months after Ivan, Hurricane Dennis made a direct hit. And the Pensacola community simply rolled up their collective sleeves and started cleaning up all over again.

To the community of Pensacola: please know that it was out of respect and admiration that I decided to use your piece of paradise as the backdrop of Damaged.

As in all my novels, I have blended fact with fiction. For the record, here are some of the facts and some of the fiction.

The premise of infecting an entire tissue bank is based solely on my speculation. There have been, however, fatalities caused by infected donor tissue. One such case occurred in 2001 when it was determined that a twenty-three-year-old man who died after routine knee surgery was killed by a rare bacteriumClostridium sordelliiand that he had contracted the infection from cadaver cartilage that was used to repair his knee.

Unlike those of organ donor banks, the standards for tissue, bone, and other donated body parts are more loosely regulated. Even though the FDA established the HTTF (Human Tissue Task Force) in 2006, they continue, by their own admission, to lack the resources to inspect and regulate this vast and growing industry.

The Uniform Anatomical Gift Act does prohibit the buying and selling of dead bodies, but the law allows for companies to recover their costs for expenses such as labor, transportation, processing, and storage. Demand is high, supply low, which sometimes opens the way to fraudulent brokers, as in the case of a New York funeral home where PVC pipe was swapped out for bones.

Yet, because of this industry, amazing technological advances have resulted. BIOMedics is fictitious, but similar companies have been creating and manufacturing innovative products like bone screws and bone paste, which have helped save the limbs of many soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq.

Its true that the Naval Tissue Bank at the Naval Medical Center in Maryland was the first to use frozen bone transplants and to set up the first body donation program. However, to my knowledge you will not find a similar tissue bank in Jacksonville, Florida. Nor will you find Captain Ganzs surgical program at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola.

Likewise, I must offer my apologies to the Coast Guards Air Station Mobile and Naval Air Station Pensacola. Ive taken a few liberties with takeoffs and landings, many of which would not include Pensacola Beach.

While it is true that before Hurricane Dennis there were homemade signs asking The Weather Channels Jim Cantore to stay away or go home, Im sure Mr. Cantore has witnessed many similar signs in other communities. Hopefully he views these with the same good-natured spirit in which theyre intended, and as a tribute to his expertise.

And last, Charlie Wurth would have found the Coffee Cup closed on Sundays, but if youre in Pensacola any other day of the week, be sure to stop and try their award-winning Nassau grits.

PENSACOLA BAY
PENSACOLA, FLORIDA

Elizabeth Bailey didnt like what she saw. Even now, after their H-65 helicopter came down into a hover less than two hundred feet above the rolling Gulf, the object in the water still looked like a container and certainly not a capsized boat. There were no thrashing arms or legs. No bobbing heads. No one needing to be rescued, as far as she could see. Yet Lieutenant Commander Wilson, their aircrew pilot, insisted they check it out. What he really meant was that Liz would check it out.

A Coast Guard veteran at only twenty-seven years old, AST3 Liz Bailey knew she had chalked up more rescues in two days over New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina than Wilson had in his entire two-year career. Liz had dropped onto rickety apartment balconies, scraped her knees on wind-battered roofs, and waded through debris-filled water that smelled of raw sewage.

She dared not mention any of this. It didnt matter how many search and rescues shed performed, because at the moment she was the newbie at Air Station Mobile, and shed need to prove herself all over again. To add insult to injury, within her first week someone had decorated the womens locker room by plastering downloaded photos of her from a 2005 issue of