‘I’m going to carry him back along the trail,’ Luke said. ‘It’ll buy us a few minutes’ more time. Janey, go on ahead as fast as you can. We saw that helipad. He’ll need an airlift down south. And I saw a couple of those electric buggy things that the resort staff use. Try and—’
‘I know. I’ll find someone. I’ll bring transport.’ She didn’t mess around, just rose and began to sprint back down the trail.
Rowdy scrambled to his feet, too. ‘Wait, Auntie Janey …’ He followed her, and if he wanted to come with her, she wasn’t going to leave him behind. Oh, lord, he was speaking at last, and they’d had no time to talk about it or think about it or even give him a decent hug!
She grabbed his hand and pulled him along, hearing Luke say to Josh behind her, ‘Come on, mate, we’ll be a bit slower.’
Thank goodness Rowdy was a little wild bush kid! Despite his small size and all he had been through recently, he was fit and strong and could keep up. They were both panting by the time the first of the resort buildings came into view, and her lungs burned.
One of the resort buggies went trundling round the back of the aviary and she chased after it and yelled at the uniformed staff person at the wheel. ‘We have a seriously wounded child back on the trail. We need help!’
The buggy slowed, stopped, reversed, turned, came trundling back. She explained, fighting her breathlessness. ‘He got attacked by a cassowary—’
‘Hell! Elke!’
‘What?’
‘It must have been Elke.’ The man swore again. ‘Get in.’
He reached out to pull on Rowdy’s arm, and helped them both into the storage well behind the vehicle’s one pair of seats. The passenger seat was crowded with gear. Janey sat Rowdy on her lap, because there was nothing to keep him from falling out through the buggy’s low, open sides.
They shot back down the trail while the man explained, ‘There are no cassowaries in the wild on Charm Island. But we had a pair in the animal park, hoping to get them to breed in June or July. Half the aviary went in the cyclone. We lost almost all the birds, escaped or killed. We found Fred, the male cassowary, but we couldn’t find Elke. We were starting to think she hadn’t survived.’
‘Well, she did, and she’s up in the rainforest, and she’s hurt and she’s incredibly dangerous,’ Janey told him. ‘The boy has some serious injuries, femoral artery bleeding, and he’s going into shock.’
The man swore again. ‘Where’s the bird now?’
‘Disappeared back into the forest. Scared off, or in pain.’
‘We have to find her, or she’ll hurt someone else. But they’re so damned hard to find and catch!’
‘I want to think about this casualty first. Do you have a two-way radio? He’ll need the air medical service, and I really hope you have a well-equipped medical centre at the resort! Is your helipad back in action?’
‘Yes. I’ll call it in right now.’ He seemed organised and on the ball. Steering with one hand, he put the walkie-talkie to his ear, pressed a button and spoke. ‘We have a code six on the mountain trail, John. Repeating, that’s a code six.’
Seconds later, Janey heard a crackling response but couldn’t make out the words.
‘There,’ the man said.
‘That’s enough?’
‘Code six. Require emergency medical evacuation by air off the island.’ He looked a little shaky and green suddenly. ‘I’ve never had to call one in for a kid before. And it’s lucky we’ve got the medical centre. We used to send people over to Wallaby Island in our motor launch for anything more than a cut finger, but their centre got demolished by Cyclone Willie. My name’s Andrew, by the way.’
‘I’m glad you have your systems in place, Andrew.’ She gave Rowdy a reassuring squeeze on her lap, desperately wishing she could take some time out to talk to him about what had happened. Not yet. They couldn’t do it yet. And she needed Luke.
‘We should reach them soon, right?’ Andrew asked.
They both saw Luke and the two boys at that moment, ahead on the trail. Luke’s strides were still long and smooth as he tried not to jolt his fragile cargo, but he’d begun to stagger beneath the boy’s weight. Sam must weigh twice what Rowdy did. The muscles in Luke’s calves and upper arms had knotted tight. The pressure bandage must be holding, thank goodness, or he would have stopped.
Andrew pulled the vehicle to a halt and unceremoniously dumped the equipment from the passenger seat onto the trail—tools and a tarpaulin, from what Janey could see. ‘Stay in the back, guys,’ he told her and Rowdy. ‘Mate, you’ll have to squeeze in, too,’ he said to Josh, who was gasping, breathless and tearful. It was crowded, but they managed. Janey put one arm around the shaken younger boy.
Luke climbed in, cradling the injured Sam in his arms. ‘Can’t feel a radial pulse any more,’ he said tersely to Janey. And added then to Andrew, ‘What medical facilities do you have here?’
‘There’s a medical centre with a nurse, pretty new. I’m sorry, I can’t tell you exactly what they have and don’t have on hand.’
‘We’ll manage. It’ll be half an hour before the chopper can get here.’ Maybe longer, Janey knew. Again, Luke didn’t want to talk about worst-case scenarios out loud. If the chopper was already out on another call … ‘Sam, you’re going to be fine, OK? You’ve got two doctors taking care of you, and more on the way. Josh, you said your mum and dad are at your cabin?’
Andrew cut in, ‘What number is it, mate, do you know?’
‘Twenty-two,’ Josh said.
Andrew got back on his radio, his other hand swinging the steering-wheel smoothly. They were almost back at the resort. ‘Code nine to cabin twenty-two, and bring them straight to the medical centre.’
‘Code nine,’ Luke echoed.
‘Notifying relatives of an illness or injury.’
‘Who thought this up?’
‘The boss. Used to be a mess, crackling radios and messages getting mucked up all over the shop. Want to guess what code one is, the one we need most often?’ he drawled.
‘Send a cleaner with a mop,’ Janey came in promptly.
‘You got it.’ The moment of humour came as a short-lived relief to the tension.
‘You’re doing great, Sam,’ Luke said. ‘Just keep breathing for me. Just relax, and don’t move. You’re going to be fine.’
They reached the main building, the buggy scooting to within inches of the entrance, and Janey saw what had to be the medical centre through a door to the left. They left Josh and Rowdy in Andrew’s care. ‘Ice creams?’ he mouthed at Janey, and she nodded, before hurrying inside behind Luke and Sam.
There was a nurse in attendance, comfortably built, in her forties, unflappable, and she didn’t need to be told how serious Sam’s injuries were. She took one look at him and began pulling equipment into place at once.
‘I’m Dr Bresciano from Crocodile Creek Hospital,’ Luke said. ‘And this is Dr Stafford, who’s in general practice in Darwin. Luke and Janey.’
‘Right.’ The nurse nodded. ‘That’s lucky for all of us.’ She added casually, ‘You must know Dr Wetherby.’
‘Charles. He’s great. It’s hard to reconcile what he achieves with the fact that he’s in a wheelchair.’
The nurse nodded, and Janey knew that Luke had passed her subtle check of his credentials by his use of the medical director’s first name and knowledge of his circumstances. They got Sam onto the examining table and set up an oxygen supply, using a non-rebreather mask at fifteen litres a minute.
Janey used a stethoscope to give his breathing a more thorough check than she’d been able to out on the hiking trail, and couldn’t find any evidence of broken ribs, a punctured lung or other respiratory problems. But his heart rate and breathing were still far too fast, and his oxygen saturation had dropped to 94 per cent. They didn’t have much time.
The nurse—‘Barb,’ she’d told them in a quick aside—attempted to take a blood-pressure reading, but shrugged and shook her head. The
pressure had dropped too low, which meant a dangerous level of blood loss and shock.
Sam needed urgent IV access, but it was a catch-22 situation. His circulation had shut down too far for them to find a vein. Luke tightened a tourniquet around the boy’s arm, but there was still nothing. ‘Janey, what do you think?’ he asked in a fast undertone. ‘Cut-down or central vein?’
‘Central vein. He needs this done fast, Luke.’
‘I think so, too.’ Their shoulders bumped together. ‘Unless you’re really smooth on cut-downs?’
‘No, not that smooth.’
‘We’ll go with the right jugular.’ The large vein would take the rapid infusion of fluid that Sam now urgently needed. ‘Sam, we’re going to put in a drip needle to give you some fluid, OK? You’ll feel a bit of a sting, because I’m going to give you some painkiller through the needle first, but then it won’t hurt and it’ll be taped in place and it will make you feel a lot stronger and better. Barb, is there a microwave?’
‘You want to warm the fluids?’
‘Yes, please, if we can.’
Janey adjusted Sam’s position gently, turning his head away so that he wouldn’t see Luke’s approach with the needle and tilting his head down slightly to distend the vein. Luke prepared the drugs and found the carotid pulse on the neck. The internal jugular would run parallel a short distance to the side. Janey couldn’t help watching the long, lean shapes of his fingers as he worked. Surgeons performed miracles with their hands, the way dancers performed miracles with their bodies.
He injected the painkiller then, with the fingers of his left hand still marking the position of the artery, slipped the needle in half a centimetre away at an angle of forty-five degrees and kept up a gentle pressure.
Janey saw the moment when he entered the vein, at about three centimetres’ depth. Blood came into the syringe, and he used his thumb over the hub of the needle to stop any air going in. He inserted the guide wire, removed the needle, loaded the cannula and pushed it into the vein, his movements fast and sure.
Janey grabbed a blood-pressure cuff and when Luke had aspirated some blood from the vein to check its placement and connected the cannula to the infusion equipment, she put the cuff onto the bag of fluid and pumped it up tight to squeeze the fluid through the tubing and into Sam’s body as fast as possible.
‘OK, that’s great,’ Luke said. ‘That’s brilliant. Sam, you’re doing fine, and that’s the hard part over.’
They hoped.
‘Need another cuff?’ said Barb.
‘Yes, let’s see if we’ve got some pressure now.’ They all held their breath. Eighty over forty. It had come up, but was still too low.
‘He’s getting seepage,’ Janey said. The new, spreading stain looked rusty pink against the pale blue, grey and cream pattern of Luke’s torn shirt fabric.
‘I don’t want to disturb the dressing. It’s too pretty,’ Luke said, for Sam’s benefit.
‘Second dressing on top?’ Barb asked.
‘Think so, at this point.’
They heard voices outside, angry and upset and scared. Sam’s parents, and Josh. ‘I’ll go and talk to them,’ Janey said, while Luke and Barb began to put the second dressing in place.
In the foyer outside the medical centre she found Sam’s mother sobbing and his father white-lipped, helpless and angry, with Andrew and Rowdy and Josh there, too. The boys had finished their ice creams and had sticky mouths.
‘They’re saying it was a bird,’ the father yelled. ‘How could a bloody bird have ripped open his whole leg? Why aren’t there any bloody warning signs? How can you have vicious, dangerous wildlife roaming around a family holiday resort, for heck’s sake? Are you people insane?’
‘We’re going to find the bird, Mr Marshall,’ Andrew said, trying to placate him.
‘Is he going to be all right?’ the mother sobbed. ‘Can I see him? Just tell me he’s all right.’
‘And shoot it on the bloody spot. And any others on the island.’
‘He’s doing well, Mrs Marshall,’ Janey said. ‘You’ll be able to see him very soon, once we have him sorted out with fluids and medication.’
Luke appeared and was quickly introduced. ‘We’re getting him stable—he did lose a fair bit of blood,’ he said. He stood tall, his height giving a natural air of confidence and authority. The kind of man any parent would trust. Eight years ago he’d come across as cocky and arrogant and far too sure of himself. Now he was a man you’d lean on to the ends of the earth, and you’d feel safe all the way.
‘We have fluid going in, and he’s on oxygen,’ he continued. ‘There may be an internal injury to the spleen, although signs are that it wouldn’t be major. That’ll be checked out more thoroughly when he gets to hospital. We have a chopper on its way, and one of you will be able to go in it with him, Mrs Marshall. I’ll take you in to see him in a moment.’
‘Yeah, and what about the next kid playing on the nature trail? The bird has to be shot!’
But Janey had felt Rowdy stiffen beside her. ‘Don’t shoot her,’ he said, almost in a whisper. His little hand came creeping into hers and his cheek pressed against her lower arm. ‘She was hurt and scared. The boys wouldn’t back away. She couldn’t help it. Cassowaries are endangered.’
He looked crumpled and weary and defeated, immune to the healing powers of ice cream. She caught Luke’s agonised glance.
‘Let me handle things here for a bit,’ he said, stepping to within inches of her and lowering his head so that they couldn’t be overheard. She felt his body warmth and the effort of his iron control. Just wanted to rest against the rock-like strength of his body but knew she couldn’t. Not now. ‘I’ve got Barb. You have to talk to him, Janey.’ His voice shook. ‘I can’t bear to leave him in the lurch like this! For five years I didn’t know where he was, and now he needs me and I can’t be there. If it wasn’t for you, I don’t know what I’d do.’
‘Luke—’
‘Just go.’
She nodded at him, took Rowdy’s hand and walked him outside, to where they could see a stretch of beach and the boat jetty and various holidaymakers enjoying their afternoon.
‘I don’t want them to shoot her,’ Rowdy said again. ‘I want them to find her and make her hurt leg better.’
‘I know you do.’
Oh, lord, what should she say? Should she make a promise about Elke’s safety that might be impossible to keep? Or prepare Rowdy for the worst? Sometimes rogue wildlife had to be killed.
‘I don’t know if that’s going to be possible, love,’ she said in the end. ‘Maybe she hurt herself too badly in the cyclone. Sometimes when an animal’s been hurt it’s just not ever going to be well enough to take care of itself in the wild.’
‘Elke’s not wild. She can go back in the bird place.’
‘She might be too aggressive to catch safely. We’ll talk to Andrew about it in a minute. He seems good, doesn’t he?’
‘Yes. We could show him where she went into the bush, and follow her tracks, and they could get a vet and give her medicine and bandage her up like you bandaged Sam.’
‘Hey … let’s not think about Elke for the moment. You’re talking again!’
‘I had to, to warn those boys, but they wouldn’t listen. I didn’t want to. I wouldn’t have talked if I didn’t have to.’ Did he think she would be angry?
‘It’s fine, love. It’s fine. And it wasn’t so bad, was it? The talking? It felt OK, didn’t it? Nothing terrible—’
But Rowdy wasn’t listening to this.
‘Where’s Mum, Auntie Janey?’ he cut in, as if he couldn’t wait another second to say it. His little voice trembled, and the trust and silent pleading in his eyes made them as big as saucers. ‘They took her away to a wonderful place, Raina said. To get better. Isn’t she going to be better and coming back soon? Nobody’s told me. I stayed quiet, quiet, quiet for as long as I could to help her heal. Isn’t it working yet?’
CHAPTER EIGHT
LUKE took Jason and Simone Marshall into the medical centre, stopping them just inside the door to say quietly, ‘He’ll need your reassurance.’
Not your anger or your tears, please, for his sake, no matter how emotional you are feeling.
How much should he spell it out? Mr Marshall still looked explosive, while his wife made no effort to hold back her sobs. Luke himself was struggling internally. He felt as if half his soul had gone with Janey and his son, only he couldn’t follow, and couldn’t let his emotion show. In microcosm, it was what he’d endured for five years while Rowdy had been lost to him, and the only thing that made it bearable was Janey.
Not Alice. Janey.
He lowered his voice a little further, and told the Marshalls, ‘He’s had a big shock and your attitude is very important at this point. We can talk later about whether the resort is to blame, and what that means in terms of action. For now, he needs to see you smiling.’
‘Yes, Jase, please?’ Simone laid a hand on her husband’s arm and gathered her own control with a huge effort. She had peeling, sunburned skin, making the lines of strain around her mouth crease tighter.
Jason nodded and said gruffly, ‘As long as he’s OK. That’s all that matters.’
Luke moved forward. ‘Sam, your mum and dad are here.’
‘We’re here now, mate. It’s OK. It’s OK.’
‘Love, oh, love.’ Simone kissed her son and stroked his forehead.
Barb took Luke aside. ‘I’m afraid there’s more seepage coming through the dressing.’
‘Take another BP.’
Seventy over forty, they found. It had dropped again.
‘We’re going to have to tie off the artery,’ Luke decided out loud. ‘He can’t afford to lose any more blood, and we can’t ship him out in this condition. Have you got what we need? Artery forceps? Clamps?’
The Australian's Desire (Mills & Boon By Request) Page 30
