by Dianne Drake
CHAPTER FOUR
“I DIDN’T expect it to be so tough,” Lorna commented to Gideon, after he’d done the latest round of assessments for half the patients in the tent while she did the same for the others.
Blood-pressure, heart rate, respiration count…they’d worked well together. Hadn’t said much, concentrating on their tasks, but in an odd sort of way, working alongside Gideon had been satisfying. They hadn’t argued, hadn’t had cross words, hadn’t even tipped in the direction of antagonism. One hour of working together had been good. “Nobody does at first,” Gideon whispered, so as not to rouse the sleeping patients, as he stopped behind Lorna while she helped an old man take a drink of cool water. “But you learn. First time out, you learn.” She was being an awfully good sport about this, much better than he’d thought she could be. Actually, he’d underestimated her because she’d been good the whole time she’d been there. Not at all like the Lorna he’d expected—the Lorna who spent as much time preening for the camera as he did performing an appendectomy.
He thought about what he’d expected. Glitz. Primping and pampering. Admittedly, she’d never been that bad when they’d been married, but over the years, as he’d watched her on the telly, he’d indulged himself in some exaggerations about her, namely the ones where she’d betrayed herself by turning herself into a media spectacle. Of course, that was pure wounded pride talking. He knew that. As for the glitz he’d expected, well, what he’d seen so far had been grit, not glitz. Pure grit. While he wasn’t ready to admit it out loud, he was gaining a new respect for Lorna, and her abilities. She was damned good. Willing, hard-working and damned good.
Funny how he’d never noticed that about her when they’d been married. If anyone had even hinted that Lorna might do well in the rescue field, he would have laughed.
And he would have been wrong.
“Do you ever get used to it?” she asked. “After all this time, does any of it ever get to you or are you pretty much impervious?
“Get used to it? In a way, I suppose you do. But it still gets to you. Every response is different while the emotions are always the same. And I think if you ever get to the point where it doesn’t get to you, it’s time to quit. This is a job where you have to feel it every moment, have to have the passion to do it. When you don’t feel it, the passion’s gone, and let me tell you, the only thing that gets you through sometimes is the passion for the work. There’s no glamour here, no recognition, no reward other than the outcome, and conditions are hard. We’re sleep deprived half the time, we ache physically, we put our own lives on the line more than any of us care to think about. And without exception we make personal sacrifices in our lives to do this.” He paused for a moment, thinking back to the day Lorna had miscarried. He should have been there, should have stood at her bedside holding her hand. But that simple gesture was counted among the sacrifices, and in terms of his life, it had been a huge one. And one that still caused him to ache. “So, there are a lot of things you do get used to, but so many more that you can’t if you want to survive emotionally.”
“And have you survived emotionally?” she asked.
“Better than most, I think. I don’t have another life to return to. For me, this is it. No conflicts, no divisions, no tugging back and forth for my time. I think that makes it easier.” Or emptier.
Lorna turned to face Gideon, and was immediately confronted by Max. This was the first she’d seen of him in the light, and he was nearly as big as she was. Beautiful dog. Soulful eyes. Huggable. “What is he?” she asked, bending down and taking that hug.
“A brindle mastiff,” he said, smiling with pride “Picked him up from a rescue society. Somebody had abused him.”
She stayed bent down, petting him. “I though you used bloodhounds when you tracked people.”
“Some people do, and they’re the best for pure tracking, especially if you have a scent for them to follow. But tracking isn’t search and rescue, and for that we use any dog with good instincts. A search-and-rescue dog has to have a keen sense of knowing that a victim is somewhere nearby. For Max, he gets excited, has a certain impatient whine. He displays a whole set of subtle signs when he’s on the hunt for a live victim…has different subtle signs when the one he’s hunting isn’t alive. And, yes, he does know the difference.” He gave Max a pat on the head after Lorna stood and immediately Max leaned into Gideon’s thigh, looking up at him in doggy adoration. “Max is as good as they get.”
“And you take him everywhere?”
“As long as it’s not a danger to him, yes. Look, I’m going out on night patrol. Going to walk the perimeters of the south section and see what I can find. We don’t do a full search at night because it’s too dangerous, but sometimes you can pick up on something, especially when it’s quiet, like it is now.” A playful smile crossed his face. “Not taking Max. Want to come in his place?”
She bit back her own smile. “So you protect your dog, but when it comes to your ex-wife…”
“When it comes to my ex-wife I’d say she’s an admirable stand-in,” he teased.
“I’m not sure if I should take that as a compliment.”
“Take it as an invitation to see, firsthand, what we do. I’d like to show you.” He meant it. He did want to show Lorna some of the operation. He was proud of his team and for some strange reason he wanted to share that with her…share it with Lorna the doctor and the ex-wife, not the television reporter.
“If I go with you, who’s going to watch the patients here?”
“Dani’s still up. And Tom’s available. I’m sure they won’t object to some time together.”
“I thought you didn’t want me getting in your way.”
He took Max by the leash, signaled him to stand, and headed to the door of the tent. “You won’t, if you do what I tell you.”
“And walk two paces behind you, like that good subservient ex-wife that I am?”
“And walk ten paces to the side of me to look for something I might have missed.”
“Nobody out here knows you were married, do they?” she asked.
“No reason they should.” Especially since, most of the time, he tried not to think about it. “Are you coming?”
That was an almost amiable interchange, she thought as she slogged through the mud several paces abreast of Gideon. Max was crated for now. Gideon said they didn’t take the dogs out in the dark unless absolutely necessary because it was too risky. Gideon would go out, but he kept his dog safe. Somehow, that didn’t surprise her. He took care of the people here. Not just the patients, but the volunteers. He was like…a protective father. A lump formed in her throat, thinking about it. He was the way with them that he would have been with their child.
It was odd, how he cared so passionately. Odd, the way she’d never seen that in him when they’d been together—the year before their marriage, and the two years during it. She thought back to the last few weeks before they’d separated, while they’d still been hanging on, even though they’d both known there had been no point. Fighting over nothing, fighting over everything…In all honesty, they’d had more interaction then than they’d had during the times when they’d been happy together.
It was so strange, she thought, the way they’d gone up and down. Some of the swings she could account for—the miscarriage, the change of her career direction. Gideon hadn’t been happy about the change. As for the miscarriage…it hadn’t caused the breakup of their marriage, but it had become the convenient excuse. The last in a long line of marital disappointments. And honestly, by that time, it had already been inevitable. A baby might have breathed new life into their relationship, but for how long?
“So when you and Max go out together, who leads? she asked.
“He does. But not on a leash. They leash the tracking dogs, but he’s not tracking. He’s searching. So he’s allowed a wide berth within reason, under my command, of course. He leads, I follow him.”
“But he’ll come back if you call
him?”
“He’s well trained, and obedient.” He chuckled. “And he knows who feeds him.”
“All the qualities of the wife you always wanted and never had,” she quipped, and he smiled. “Anyway, tell me what I’m supposed to do out in the field.”
“Walk, and observe. Since it’s still dark, listen. That’s the most important sense.”
“Sounds easy enough.”
“Never easy, Lorna. Trust me, what we do here is never easy.”
Like what she did on her job was easy? She wanted to ask him if that’s what he thought, but this wasn’t the time. People here needed help, and opening old wounds simply got in the way. They’d had their arguments and it was in the past, buried the way so much of this little area was buried. Only here there was still some hope left for the rescue. With their marriage, the mud was far too deep to dig it out. As if she would do that, if she could.
They walked in silence for better than an hour. Slowly, methodically, they made their way over the soupy terrain, only to go back and retrace their steps two, sometimes three times before they moved on to the next area. Through it all, the only sound nearby was that of their shoes squishing about in the mud. It was a constant rhythm, with Gideon making considerably more noise than she was. Each step was small, calculated. Each step was painfully slow, as if dreading what the next step would bring.
They hadn’t gone off far from the encampment, really. The light of it trailed along at their backs, the sounds of the suffering there blown off in the opposite direction by the wind. Occasionally the wail of someone suffering, or frightened, pricked through the stillness. But mostly there was silence, except for the noises they made trudging in the mud.
Suddenly, Gideon stopped. Reacting to his abrupt movement, Lorna stopped instantly and the gooseflesh rose immediately on her arms, causing the slight brush of her skin against the fabric of her sleeves to heighten in her nervousness. “What?” she whispered.
“Did you hear it?” he asked.
She listened, didn’t hear a thing. Even so, she sucked in her breath and held it for fear that even the tiniest bit of sound would cover up what he was listening to.
“Above us,” Gideon said, taking hold of Lorna’s hand and pulling her toward him. “Somewhere up on the ridge, not too far up there.”
She squeezed his hand hard in the nervous anticipation that they were about to make a rescue. “Was it a person?” It could have been the shifting of a collapsed structure. Or someone savaging the ruins for a souvenir or a treasured memory from their wreckage. Or it could have been Gideon’s imagination, except she didn’t believe that at all. He was too good to make that kind of a mistake.
“Female,” he said.
Lorna sucked in another deep breath, held it, shut her eyes and listened again. That’s when she heard it, just the barest scrap of a whimper—one so imperceptibly faint she might have walked on by and thought it nothing. Except it wasn’t nothing. Gideon knew that, too, judging from the way his spine went stiff. “I can’t tell where it’s coming from,” Lorna started, still not sure what to make of it.
“Shh,” he warned, silencing her. He let go of her hand and turned in a circle, stopping with every step to listen until he faced in a direction from which he didn’t move. “This way,” he said, pointing his torch at Lorna and motioning her over, then pointing it at a spot in the rubble. “It’s coming from there.”
Instinctively, Lorna looked up, trying to remember what she’d seen there earlier when it had been light, since all she saw right now was black. Nothing came to mind other than mud, though. Mud and several collapsed structures. “Gideon, how do we get her out? We can’t just walk up there. We could cause something to break loose, knock something down on where she is…” The actual rescue had never occurred to her. The medical aftermath was all she’d ever considered. But now here she was, faced with a woman who might need medical care but who couldn’t even get out of wherever she was. And who could die if her rescuers made the wrong move.
A cold chill twined up her spine. “What do we do?”
“Well, for starters, use that gift of chatter,” he said. Then he clicked on his two-way radio. “South face, half a kilometer from base. We need digging tools, light, and a stretcher. And bring Max up. We have a survivor somewhere around here!”
“You want me to chatter with her?” Lorna asked after his radio was tucked away.
“Something like that. Do it loud so she can hear you wherever she is. Another voice encourages a response, which will help us locate her. Also, something else we’ve learned is that a person is a lot more calm if someone merely talks to them. It’s knowing that they’re not alone…so let her know she’s not alone any longer. Reassure her that we will get her out.”
“And if she doesn’t understand me?”
He gave her an affectionate squeeze to the shoulder. “Trust me, she might not understand the words, but she’ll understand. Kindness is a universal language, Lorn, and you’re a kind person. She’ll understand that, if nothing else.”
Behind them, Lorna could hear the sloppy pounding of numerous feet in the mud. They were so fast to respond. Gideon called, and they were on their way in less than a minute. She couldn’t help but be impressed, and overwhelmed. They were coming prepared to do their part of the rescue, but she had her very own part in it. Talk. It’s what she did for a living, but suddenly it had never seemed so important. “We’re coming for you! Don’t give up, it won’t be much longer,” she called out as Gideon walked a cautious path up the embankment, trying to discover where the woman was.
“Louder,” he shouted over the growing noise of the crowd gathering there. “She’s not answering.”
Panic gripped her. To have come so close then to have the woman die…No! She wasn’t going to think like that. “It’s only going to take another few minutes, then we’ll have you out of there,” she said, louder this time. “I know you’re frightened. I would be, too. But Gideon is on his way. He’ll find you, then we’ll take you back to camp and take good care of you. Although I hope you don’t like coffee because what they make there is terrible. Worst I’ve ever had.”
Up ahead, Gideon stopped for a moment. “Quiet,” he said, and Lorna assumed he was listening for another sound from the woman.
She was quiet for several seconds before she heard Gideon snarl, “Damn it!” Meaning no sign of the woman yet.
“OK, talk again,” he called to her.
Which she did. “But if you like coffee, I promise I’ll make a fresh pot of it for you…the right way. And the food is delicious. I can vouch for that. As soon as we get you back, we’ll get you looked at, get you into a nice, warm shower, then…”
“Quiet,” Gideon cautioned again, and Lorna immediately went still. She waited, her nerves so brittle they felt like they would snap in two.
“Where?” Jason whispered, stepping up behind Lorna.
“Straight up,” she gasped, so intent on Gideon she hadn’t heard Jason approach. “He says it’s an old woman. I think he’s still listening, trying to figure out exactly where she is. He knows the general vicinity, but hasn’t pinpointed the exact spot.”
Immediately, Jason shined a bright light up the mountainside and scanned back and forth until Gideon’s form appeared in the beam. He wasn’t far away—just a few meters. And he was still making his way upward, one deliberate step at a time. When the light hit him, he spun around and waved, but didn’t say a word.
The one exception to the mandatory bedtime rule was when a rescue was in full swing. Everybody who was free came, including Frayne, whose camera light came on the instant he got to the spot where Lorna was standing, and doubled the light exposure to the rescue area. Then Harry, the other doctor with the group, appeared, as did Brian, the paramedic, and Tom, the nurse, who had left Gwen in his place in the hospital as she never went out on a rescue. There were also several local volunteers, all carrying lights. In the blink of an eye, the rescue site went from nearly pitch blac
k and solitary to as light as day and bustling with activity.
“Was she responding to your voice?” Priscilla asked as she arrived. She had her dog, Philo, in tow. Philo was a black and white Belgian sheepdog—a gorgeous dog who was anxious to get off the leash and get to work. Max, in the grip of Jason, was also ready for the rescue.
Did the dogs feel the adrenaline of it, too? Lorna wondered, because there was a different feel in the air now. It was charged with pure, raw energy, and everybody, including Priscilla, who had looked exhausted only an hour ago, was alert and ready. “Not yet. We heard a whimper earlier, but she’s been quiet since then. I’m getting a little nervous that—”
“Let the dogs come up,” Gideon shouted. “It’s stable enough.”
Immediately Max and Philo were unleashed, and what Lorna saw after that was astonishing. Both dogs started their ascent, slowly at first, each one going in a different direction. Priscilla followed Philo and Gideon came around to walk abreast of Max. “Good boy,” he said, then simply let the dog do what it wanted to do. Search. It took less than a minute for both dogs to find the object of their search, and Max let out a shrill yip as he bounded across a pile of house debris and stopped at what appeared to be a roof lying flat on the ground. Philo zoomed in at the same time and stayed there while Priscilla and Gideon hurried to catch up to the animals.
“Just so you’ll know,” Gideon shouted to Lorna, “that was the bark from Max that tells us somebody’s alive.”
From down below she watched as Gideon and Priscilla picked their way through the debris and finally came to the rooftop. Who would have thought to look underneath it? It was flush with the ground, almost buried in the dirt, and there was a lot of debris on top of it.
