Healing Her Brooding Island Hero Read online

  There were rumours, though. Maybe drugs arrived on darkened boats and were stored for more clandestine boats to take away. Maybe he even manufactured drugs.

  ‘He doesn’t seem to be doing anyone any harm,’ Joan Wilmot, the local cop-cum-mayor, had told islanders who’d worried. Joan’s professional rule of thumb was ‘anything for an easy life’, and she could see no reason to trouble herself. ‘The rumours of drugs are just rumours,’ she’d told them. ‘I’d need a warrant to search and I don’t have grounds. He’s well out of sight in Whalers’ Bay, and he’s doing useful work. Who else is going to get rid of that stuff?’ But as they topped the last rise leading into the town Hugh thought Joan might be paying a very high price for letting sleeping dogs lie.

  Henry’s three sheds were a kilometre or so from the town, just back from the kelp-strewn Whaler’s bay. You could just see their roofs from the high point of the island. He could see them now. Or he could see where they’d been.

  The one on the lee side seemed almost vapourised. The others were a mass of flames. A brisk wind was pushing the smoke towards the coast, so he could see the mess that remained.

  He could see the island’s fire engine, parked well back. Firefighters were hosing flames. A cluster of people stood on the edges of the action, onlookers. A stream of vehicles was on the road, more people than could possibly help.

  ‘Right,’ Hugh said grimly as they reached the turn-off to Whalers’ Bay. ‘Hold onto your hat. I don’t have a siren on this baby but the next best thing.’

  * * *

  One thing Gina had never experienced in her years at sea was coping with traffic. She hadn’t expected it now. Sandpiper Island wasn’t known for traffic jams.

  The road from the town out to Whalers’ Bay, though, was packed, with every islander headed in that direction. With the amount of smoke pouring out to sea there was no disguising something huge had happened. Some of the islanders would be desperate to help, and all of them would want to see. Cars therefore had banked up, inching slowly towards the mess.

  Hugh shoved his hand on the horn, a massive blaring klaxon thing. He pulled into the wrong lane and put his foot on the accelerator. Woe betide anyone daring to come in the opposite direction. When the road narrowed, he simply hit the verge, lurching up the incline onto sand.

  Gina had her seat belt on, but she held her seat like grim death. She didn’t make a sound, though, even when a tree loomed and she was almost sure they’d hit it. They didn’t. Hugh knew what he was doing. Every ounce of his being was focussed on getting where he needed to go as fast as possible.

  And then they were there, swinging in beside the parked fire engine, and Hugh was out of the truck almost before it stopped.

  She was with him. An explosion like this...burns... Every moment was critical.

  A woman was running towards them, and she recognised Joan Wilmot. When she’d last seen Joan she’d been in her forties. She must be close to sixty now, but she didn’t seem to have changed. Her hair was still a mass of steel-grey tight curls, her dumpy figure just as dumpy.

  She was wearing an apron with pictures of poodles all over it. Wow, Gina thought tangentially. It’d take some emergency to get Joan here without taking time to don either her cop uniform or her mayoral robes.

  ‘Doctor!’ she said, and in that one word Gina heard real relief. And more. One word and she realised that responsibility was being handed over to Hugh. This type of situation was far beyond Joan’s skill. Or anyone on this island, Gina suspected.

  ‘How many casualties?’ Hugh snapped, and Joan stopped dead and Gina thought she looked as if she’d been about to throw herself on Hugh’s chest. But the snapped question stopped her. She faltered and then seemed to regroup. Years ago, she’d trained as a cop, and her training was still there.

  ‘We think Jefferson’s gone up with his shed,’ she said, failing to disguise a tremor in her voice. ‘He was here when I got here, trying to pull stuff out, and then it went up. But the fireys, too... The ones close to the shed...’ She faltered.

  ‘How many hurt?’

  ‘F...four.’

  ‘First things first,’ Hugh snapped, looking over at a group of people clustered around the obviously injured. Even from where they were, they could see it looked bad. A couple of men had joined Joan now, listening—waiting for orders? And Hugh obliged.

  ‘Priorities,’ he snapped. ‘Get everyone, and I mean everyone, back from the remaining sheds. They need to get the hell out of harm’s way. Tell the fireys to let what’s left burn. Heaven knows what’s in that smoke, so their priority has to be clearing the area. Have someone contact Gannet, upgrade the need for the chopper, tell them to notify an evacuation team from Sydney. Then get someone with a motorbike sent down the track to get those cars off the road. Everyone clears off the track, parks on the verge, whatever, I don’t care, but I want that track clear. Then I want four trucks, with empty trays, with rugs, anything you can find in the back to make them into makeshift ambulances.’ He paused to make sure they were listening and got unanimous nods.

  ‘Right. You...’ He pointed to a guy holding a mobile phone. ‘Phone anyone you can think of back in town. I want mattresses in the school hall, clean linen, a stack of it, and towels, from wherever you can get them. Tell people to raid their linen cupboards. I want a supply of boiled water by the time I get there, as much as they can boil, get it on now so it can cool. And I want cling wrap, lots of it, we’ll need it to dress burns. Raid the store. So... Clear the crowd from the sheds. Contact Gannet. Clear the track and prepare four trucks for transporting the injured. Then prepare the school hall. Got it?’ He was tugging gear from the back of his SUV as he spoke. ‘Right, Gina, let’s go.’

  * * *

  The island’s fire truck was manned by volunteers, and only four had been able to get to the truck before it left the station. The rest of the team had only just arrived as the shed blew, so blessedly there’d only been four in the face of the explosion.

  Plus Jefferson. He’d been in the shed when it had blown. There was no chance he was still alive now.

  What on earth had been in the shed? Hugh thought as he strode towards the injured. Drugs? He must have been into some sort of crazy manufacturing process, but who would know?

  Now wasn’t the time for asking questions. He had people with major injuries, and no one to help but Gina.

  But help was too mild a word for what she was doing. She’d climbed out of his truck, taken one look at what was before her and sorted priorities. As he’d finished throwing curt orders, she was heading for the group clustered around the people on the ground. His huge boots looked the only sensible thing about her, and even they looked ridiculous, but she strode towards the group with purpose.

  ‘Let me through.’ Her voice, normally soft and low, suddenly had the resonance of a sonic boom, and the clustered locals were startled enough to make way.

  Four people were lying in the dust.

  By the time Hugh reached her she’d already bent over the first casualty. She was doing a fast assessment—airways, heartbeat, bleeding. She was giving curt orders to one of the bystanders.

  She glanced up at him as he reached her and nodded towards the two casualties furthest from her. Division of priorities was sorted in that glance. He left the first two to her and moved to the third and fourth.

  He started his own assessment, checking airways, looking for wounds that could be bleeding out. Looking for spinal damage, head injuries.

  As he checked the fourth—a woman with burns down the side of her arm, bleeding from multiple scratches, moaning with pain—Gina called him back, her voice low and urgent. ‘Hugh, you’re needed here. Compression chest injury. Breathing problems.’

  Another plus for her. Conceding fast that an injury was out of her area of expertise and handing over fast. They did a swap of patients.

  ‘Burns, lacerations, s
hock, suspect spinal injury on four,’ he snapped as they passed. ‘Three’s stable for the moment.’ With no time to learn names, they’d done what emergency workers did the world over. Patients were referred to as the number they’d presented as, or, in this case, distance from the truck. Names would be needed, for reassurance as much as anything, but not now when the absolute imperative was to keep people alive. ‘Backup kit with drugs in the back of the truck,’ he told her. ‘Four needs morphine, ten milligrams. Three as well, but four first.’

  Then he headed for the chest injury, heart sinking as he saw what he was facing. The guy must have been hit full on in the chest. A vicious impact wound. Whistling, laboured breathing.

  Shattered ribs? A punctured lung? Tension pneumothorax?

  The people around them were silent, appalled, and Gina’s voice rose above the stillness. ‘You!’ Her pointed finger skewered the closest adult, a middle-aged guy wearing paint-spattered overalls and huge, tradesman-type boots. ‘I want any container you can find, filled with water. Use the fire truck supply if there’s no tap. I want water poured on this lady’s arm, as much as possible while we work. Do it now. Does anyone know her name?’

  ‘G... Gladys,’ someone faltered.

  ‘Right. Gladys, we have a whole team of people helping and we’ll have you out of pain really soon. You...’ Another guy was skewered by that finger. ‘I want something to stabilise Gladys’s back. There’s a heap of junk over there—find me anything I can use as a rigid stretcher. Gladys, I need you to keep still to help with the pain. The rest of you... Someone who doesn’t faint at the sight of blood, help Doc. Plus I want two people, one on each side of each injury. Decide who, and then don’t leave them for a minute, even if Doc and I are with you. Stream water over anything that looks like a burn. We’re working between four patients and we need to be able to move back and forth. If there’s any problem breathing, yell for us to get back to you fast! If there are any other injuries—bystanders hit and you’re not saying—please, go sit by the trucks and wait until we can see you. The rest of you, check on each other and yell if you need us. Hard. And get the back of those trucks ready for transport. Move.’

  Ten metres away Hugh was working frantically. The guy he was attending seemed to be dying under his hands—by the look of his chest, the lung had completely collapsed. If he wasn’t to lose him he had no time for anything else, but Gina’s voice said authority had been taken out of his hands. For a woman dressed as she was, for a...muppet?...to have a voice that held such power...

  And blessedly, the people she’d yelled at reacted.

  ‘You heard the lady. Move!’ the painter guy was yelling. ‘Rod, Wendy, Stuart, there’s buckets in the cab. Tap’s on this side. Chris, there’s timber back there, come with me and we’ll grab planks. I want fire blankets, dog blankets, anything anyone has to soften makeshift stretchers. I want more fire blankets on the ground here for the rest of the injured. Do what she said!’

  But Hugh had to block them out. He was dealing with a deadly chest wound, rapid, shallow breathing, an obvious shift of the chest wall to the opposite side... It had to be broken ribs, a pierced lung.

  But even as he realised his most urgent need, he heard Gina’s voice again.

  ‘Someone, grab one of the oxygen cylinders in the back of Doc’s truck. He’ll need it. And bring the second one to me. Fast!’

  He had a colleague. More, he had an intelligent, intuitive medic who was not only swiftly assessing and treating, she was also aware of what he was doing.

  This wasn’t just a nurse with basic training.

  Maybe he should stop thinking of her as Muppet?

  Whatever. An older guy he recognised, Ron, the local fisheries officer, was crouching beside him. Another woman came up behind him, Nora from the pub.

  ‘You want help here, Doc?’

  ‘Not if you’ll pass out.’

  ‘Used to be in the army,’ Ron said steadily. ‘Not a chance. And Nora has five sons. Bit of blood doesn’t scare us.’

  Three colleagues.

  ‘Gina...’ He called across. ‘I need to relieve a pneumothorax. Nothing else.’

  She got it. He needed to be totally focussed on what he was doing. She’d also know that with a pneumothorax he could use any help he could get.

  ‘Go for it,’ she called. ‘But I’m needed.’

  He knew that, too. Much as he wanted—needed—a trained colleague to help with a complicated, dicey procedure, leaving burns, shock and suspected spinal injuries to be monitored by untrained personnel was a recipe for disaster. He was on his own—but so was she.

  ‘Stabilise and get ’em shifted,’ he called. ‘Into the trucks and out of here if you can. If the wind shifts and the smoke comes this way...’

  He didn’t need to say more. The remaining sheds were more smoke than flames, but the smoke was black and acrid. ‘School hall’s being made ready.’

  ‘Right you are,’ she called back and left him to it.

  * * *

  The guy with the pneumothorax—his name was Ray Cross, the fishery guy told him—couldn’t be moved until he had his breathing stable.

  For years Hugh had worked in field hospitals, coping with collateral damage from war in less than optimum conditions. He’d seen blast injuries before. He knew he was fighting the odds to give the man he was treating a chance of survival, so he was almost totally focussed on what he was doing, but there was still a sliver of awareness of what Gina was doing.

  She’d already administered morphine. She’d made sure the burns were being washed with cold water and she was organising more water onto the trucks so the washing could continue. She was supervising moving her patients into the backs of the waiting trucks. Watching them every inch of the way.

  She was giving orders to the two persons she’d allocated to each casualty. She was watching everyone like a hawk.

  If she weren’t here, he’d have had to let Ray die. He needed a hundred per cent focus to cope with a collapsed lung, but each of the other three had life-threatening injuries as well.

  Ray’s breathing was fast, panicked, his eyes rolling in terror. His skin was tinged with blue and his pulse was so thready it was frightening.

  All Hugh’s attention had to be on him. He had to trust Gina.

  He did.

  ‘Mate, something’s hit your chest and broken your ribs,’ he told him, his voice matter-of-fact, as if this were the sort of injury a half-decent doctor coped with almost any day of the week. ‘That’s let air into the space between your lungs and the chest wall, which is stopping your lungs filling. It’s nothing we can’t fix, though. I’ve just loaded you with morphine and that should kick in any minute. As soon as it does, I’ll pop a needle in and let the air out. That’ll take the pressure off your lungs, and things’ll settle.’

  ‘A needle...’ The guy visibly quavered and Hugh almost grinned. How many times had he seen this—tough-as-nails soldiers, or, in this case, a trained firefighter, scared to death of a needle.

  ‘It won’t hurt a bit,’ he lied, but actually it was almost the truth because so much more would be hurting that one needle wasn’t about to make a difference. ‘Let’s get you fixed and then back somewhere clean. Our lovely new island nurse is fixing up a makeshift hospital where you can join your mates. You need to meet her. She’s something special.’

  And... ‘A doc and a nurse,’ Ray managed to whisper. ‘Geez, Doc, we almost have our own medical team. Just like Gannet.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE SCHOOL HALL had been made into a makeshift clearing hospital, and afterwards Gina marvelled that it had been done so fast. Apparently, a gym session had been going on when the call had come to say the hall was needed. The gym teacher had promptly turned the session into a hike to the beach. The townspeople had swarmed in, and by the time Gina and her convoy of trucks reached town, the place almost looked
like a hospital ward. Mattresses on the floor had been made up with clean linen. Urns of water had already boiled, and some had been poured off to cool. Someone had thought of using trestle tables with camping mattresses on top to form makeshift examination tables.

  By the time Hugh arrived with Ray, she almost had order.

  Urgency was still there, though. Burns were the most pressing issue. She’d administered as much morphine as she dared and then worked fast to get the burns covered. Some were full thickness. They’d need specialist attention, but for now she washed and washed and washed again.

  Water was always used to cool burns, and, as well as that, she didn’t have a clue what had been stored in that shed. Some of these burns might well have a chemical cause. So she had teams gently pouring water until she had time to assess each. With her roll of cling wrap.

  Cling wrap was a blessing when it came to burns treatment. Not only was it almost sterile, coming from the supplier in a roll that was wound so firmly it had to be almost airtight, it clung like a second skin, it moved with the injury, it covered exposed nerve endings—and medics could still see what was underneath.

  So she covered the burns and left helpers monitoring colour, sensation and movement. Then she moved on to the next imperative. She had two patients with fractures, but Glady’s arm was losing colour, only the faintest thread of pulse in the wrist showing that any blood was getting through.

  Gina was looking at it with a sinking heart. Yeah, she had training in emergency medicine, but realigning a fracture on a burned arm...

  And then there was a stir at the doorway and Hugh entered beside another of the makeshift stretchers. She saw the apparatus being held beside the patient—drips, plus a thin tube leading down into a container carried carefully beneath.

  He’d performed a thoracostomy, then. Under these conditions. The concept took her breath away.