by Amy Ruttan
“Josh?” Zac shouted into the wind.
“Josh?” Ella called. “He’s not going to hear us over this wind.”
“You’re right, but we have to try.”
Zac scanned the ground. The snow was drifting, but the water was washing away parts of it. Other parts had been scoured down to the pavement because of the wind. The streetlights were flickering on and off. And overhead the power lines whipped in the wind.
There was a spark of electricity and a zap. Zac froze and looked up to see a transformer box on top of a power line short-circuit.
The power line snapped and a live wire headed toward them. Zac grabbed Ella and forced her to the ground, pushing her into the snow out of the way and covering her body.
“Oh, my God,” she screamed. “What the heck just happened? I didn’t see.”
“A transformer blew in this wind.” He glanced over his shoulder and could see the live wire thrashing around in the snow on the other side of the street. And as he watched the wire moving, he saw the child, unconscious and lying in a bus shelter, but between Zac and the boy was the live wire.
He could see there was blood under the boy in the white snow. The boy wasn’t in a winter coat, just a sleeper.
And as he looked further up the street he could see the creeping of another storm surge coming their way.
“I found him,” Zac shouted.
“Where?” Ella asked.
“The bus shelter. He’s injured and probably hypothermic.”
If he’s still alive.
But he kept that thought to himself. He couldn’t let that negative thought into his head.
The live wire had stopped moving. It just sat there, only moving slightly in the wind. When the water hit it, it would be a major conductor and kill the boy for sure. Zac had to get to Josh before the water hit the live wire and he had to give the wire enough of a wide berth so that he wouldn’t get hit.
Of course, there was a high voltage and he didn’t know if there was differential voltage in the ground. If he put down one foot in the wrong spot and his other foot on another spot he’d be electrocuted.
“How are we going to get to him?” Ella asked.
“We’re not,” Zac snapped. “I am.”
“You’ll be electrocuted!”
“Not if I keep my feet together and give it enough of a berth. Just keep to the high ground. There’s a surge coming and if you’re near the water with electricity running into the ground...”
The implications of the horror that would happen was too much for him to bear. He needed to stop thinking about Ella being in danger if he planned to get through this and save the boy.
He had to forget that Ella was there.
“Okay,” she said, and even though she was trying to put on a brave face, he could see that she was terrified as she scrambled to higher ground. “Be careful.”
Zac nodded and then took a deep breath. He kept his feet together and hopped around the live wire, giving it an ample distance but not risking himself to differential voltage that might be flowing through the ground.
He also tried to keep his balance in the blowing wind and to keep his eyes focused on the unconscious boy lying injured in the bus shelter through the snow and the brief moments that it became just a wall of white.
You’ve got this.
He hopped again and up off the street onto the sidewalk where the bus shelter was. Here he knew he would be safe from the differential voltage that could be pulsing through the ground. As he walked into the bus shelter he lost his footing, smashing his shoulder into the cold, rock-hard metal.
Blinding pain coursed through him and he knew that his shoulder was dislocated.
“Zac!” Ella shouted.
Dammit.
He fell to his knees next to the boy and could see that he was still breathing, but barely. Only he was useless with his shoulder dislocated and the water was trickling in. Using his one good arm and powering through the pain, he managed to lift the boy as the water washed over them. It was cold, like knives against his flesh, plastering his scrubs to his skin.
“Come on, buddy,” Zac whispered. “Hang in there. We’re here.”
And as he looked down into that innocent face he saw Consuela’s son Rojas, whom he’d been unable to save. Rojas, who’d liked to play soccer with the navy officers. Rojas, who had always had a funny joke and who’d wanted to learn medicine one day so that he could come back to his village and help the people.
Rojas, who’d died way too young because of unnecessary violence.
And as he held onto the boy, the bitterly cold water swirling around them, he began to weep for the loss. For the boy he hadn’t mourned because he had been in shock, seeing a child broken in the middle of a revolution. A boy he’d known and cared for.
The water continued to rise and Zac shuffled to shelter the boy but was limited to what he could do with his shoulder dislocated.
However, the water had caused an electrical surge, burning out the transformer, and the whole block was cast into darkness. Which meant it was safe for Ella to cross.
“Ella!” Zac shouted into the howling wind.
A headlight came on from where he’d last seen her. “I’m here!”
“My shoulder is dislocated. I...” And though it was hard for him to say, he swallowed his pride. “I need your help. The power is out so it’s safe for you to cross.”
“I’m coming!”
He could hear splashing as she crossed the surge, but the snowstorm intensified and he couldn’t see her any more, just the faint light of her surgical headlamp, and he thanked his lucky stars that she’d brought it.
Zac managed to free one arm from his jacket.
Ella appeared in the shelter. “Let’s get you guys back to the hospital.”
“Get my other arm out of the jacket. We need to wrap this guy up.”
“You’ll freeze.”
“He’s been out here longer. I can make it back.” He gritted his teeth and she helped free him out of the jacket. He shifted his weight to keep the boy’s head elevated out of the water. Once the jacket was off, his teeth began to chatter, which meant he wasn’t at that stage of hypothermia that was deadly, but as the boy wasn’t trembling, he was in danger. There was only so long a body could survive in the cold, especially when wet.
Ella lifted the boy up and wrapped him up in Zac’s jacket.
“Can you carry him?” he asked through the pain.
“Yes, because you can’t. I’ve got him, Zac.”
Zac used his good arm to get on his knees and carefully back to his feet. And then he gripped the back of Ella’s jacket so she could guide them back to the ambulance bay doors.
The snow stung his face and he was exhausted. His body felt like it was weighed down and his feet were numb, but it was worth it because the child was alive.
For now.
The power might’ve gone out on the city block, but the hospital lights were still on. The generators were holding their own.
And that meant warmth.
It felt like an eternity before they were sloshing though the water and snow over the sandbags and into the ambulance bay.
Ryan and Jen were waiting.
Ella handed the boy to Ryan. “Unconscious, exposure, head laceration, but still breathing. You know what to do. Page Pediatrics.”
Ryan nodded and carried the boy into an exam room, shouting for warm blankets as he went.
The mother, with a blanket wrapped around her, came running over. Fear was etched into the very pores of her face.
Zac nodded.
She let out a cry.
“He’s in there.” Ella pointed.
“Thank you!” The mother ran into the exam room, falling to her knees and cryi
ng while they worked on her other child.
Zac felt the room begin to tilt.
“Ella...” he whispered.
“Yeah?” She turned and then her eyes widened as he collapsed to the floor, the world fading out as her arms reached for him.
* * *
Ella caught Zac’s head before it slammed onto the hospital floor. Her heart had nearly stopped when she’d seen him go pale and collapse. Not that she blamed him. He was probably in agony from his shoulder, in shock and pre-hypothermic.
“Dr. Lynne!” Ella shouted. She needed help. Right now, with Zac injured, she needed to lean on someone else. She wasn’t the tough Dr. Lockwood, she was vulnerable, just like that girl from long ago who had been so afraid to say anything to anyone. She needed help.
Jen, who had gone to exam room one with Ryan, came rushing over. Her mouth dropped open, but only for a moment, before she shouted over the commotion, “I need a gurney, stat!”
“Your voice is rivalling mine, Jen,” Ella complimented through chattering teeth.
Jen smiled briefly at Ella. “I learned from the best, Dr. Lockwood.”
An intern and a nurse came rushing over and all of them lifted Zac onto the gurney. He moaned as he came to. He was still shivering, which was a good sign, but they needed to get him out of his wet scrubs and get some blankets on him. First, though, they had to put his shoulder back into place.
Ella helped with getting his scrub top off. She threw it to the floor while Jen started an IV with fluid to help stave off hypothermia and pain medication for the dislocated shoulder. The nurse brought in the portable X-ray they used for pediatric emergency patients and Ella prepped him for an X-ray. She couldn’t try and put the joint back into place unless she knew that he hadn’t fractured a rib and that she wouldn’t be breaking something.
“It’s fine,” Zac slurred through his pain meds. “Just pop it back in.”
“You’re delusional,” she said. “Now hold still.”
Everyone left the exam room as she took the X-ray. It flashed up on the computer screen and Zac had been right. It was a simple dislocation.
“Dr. Lockwood, perhaps you want to change out of your wet scrubs,” Jen said.
“It’s okay, I need to put his arm back into place.”
“Now, Dr. Lockwood,” Jen said firmly, crossing her arms, the student becoming the master. “You’re wet, cold and sleep deprived. Go and get changed. I’ve handled dislocations before. I’ve got this.”
Zac, under the influence of his pain medications, raised his eyebrows comically and a smile twitched on Ella’s face. She leaned over Zac, staring down into those now befuddled Davenport blue eyes that she loved so much.
“I’ll be back.”
He nodded. “It’s fine. I’ll be fine. Make sure the kid’s okay. That’s the most important thing. He can’t die.”
Ella looked at him strangely. “He’s fine, he won’t die.”
“He’s broken.” Zac’s eyes rolled into the back of his head and she didn’t know what he’d meant by he’s broken. Was he himself broken? Or the boy? The boy was injured and hypothermic, but not broken. Not completely.
She slipped out of the exam room and into the residents’ locker room, where she found a spare set of scrubs. She quickly changed and as she tied up her damp hair she heard screams of pain coming from Zac’s exam room.
Her heart skipped a beat and she started running.
When he’d disappeared across the road through the swirling snow, she’d heard him cry out as he’d fallen. Had heard the scream of pain, and it had taken every ounce of her being not to run across the road to help him, but there had been a live wire between them.
Watching him hop across the road to avoid being shocked had been bad enough.
And all she’d been able to think of at that moment had been losing him.
He’d hurt her so badly all those years ago, but she still loved him. Try as she may, she just couldn’t get Zac Davenport from under her skin. She needed him.
It had killed her to watch him risk his life like that. She’d felt so helpless. She hated that feeling.
It had felt like she was seventeen again and not having a voice as her mother had dressed her in hideous clothing and paraded her around with her two sisters. And her mother had beamed with pride about Ella’s older sisters and complained about her.
When she’d had no sense of self-worth.
Her only ray of sunshine had been Zac. He’d given her a voice. He’d given her strength.
He’d been her rock, her reason for striving for more, even though he’d hurt her.
Zac might be used to putting his life in danger, but she wasn’t used to seeing his life in danger, and she hadn’t liked it one bit.
He’d looked so broken, so defeated, holding that boy the best he could in the bus shelter. Zac had needed her and she’d wanted to be there for him.
She was so afraid. So afraid of being hurt.
So afraid of losing him again.
This had been one heck of a Christmas Eve and the storm wasn’t over yet. She could still hear it rattling the windows of the locker room as she changed.
She just wanted it to end.
All of it. She was tired, but it wasn’t so much exhaustion from lack of sleep that was doing it to her. It was emotional exhaustion. She was tired of trying to hide her feelings from Zac. She was tired of denying her feelings to herself.
He screamed again and her stomach flip-flopped.
She ran into the exam room where he was. He was unconscious and his arm was in a sling. Jen Lynne was wrapping him in warm blankets.
“It was textbook,” Jen said. “He’ll be fine, but his shift for this storm is over.”
Ella smiled weakly at her protégé while the nurse cleaned up the wet scrubs and bagged Zac’s shoes for him. Ella just stood in the doorway, watching him.
There was a five-o’clock shadow on the strong jaw. It didn’t make him look so young any more. His face had matured since medical school, but the bit of scruff made him look a bit dashing. She ran her hand through his dark brown hair and noticed some grey in it.
Stress from serving, but it suited him.
She’d almost lost him tonight. She’d thought he’d been crazy, heading out into that storm by himself. When the woman had come running in, screaming about her son, she’d seen the change in him. The way he’d gone pale, like he’d been staring at a ghost.
Something more had happened while he’d served in the navy, something to do with a child, and that might explain why he’d said he didn’t want kids.
She couldn’t begin to fathom what he’d gone through, but if it had involved a child... She didn’t even want to think about it.
Her heart ached for him. All the pain he must carry inside him.
It explained why he’d acted completely irrationally, just grabbing a coat and running out like that. It had been all she could do to grab a coat and remember to take a headlamp. She was going to give him serious heck for that but, still, the boy had been found and she had no doubt that the pediatric staff and Ryan Trace could take care of the boy.
Right now her main priority was Zac and this emergency room.
“How are the evacuation plans coming, Jen?” she asked Dr. Lynne.
“They’ve put a stop to them. The whiteout conditions are bad, but they managed to get all the critical patients out of the affected hospitals and into the overflows. Hopefully our generators will hold until this storm ends. It has to end sometime.”
She nodded. “Did you have any big Christmas plans?”
Jen shrugged. “Just dinner at my grandmother’s house, where she’d lament the status of me not settling down with a man and popping out kids. What about you?”
Ella smiled. “The same, only my mot
her and not my grandmother.”
Jen laughed. “I prefer an extra-long shift in the emergency room any day.”
Ella smiled wistfully. “Me too.”
And as much as she didn’t want to get married and make her parents happy, she understood the appeal at this moment. Sure, she’d been working, but she hadn’t been alone this Christmas, like she’d usually been.
Being with Zac again had been wonderful. And for the first time in a long time she hadn’t been lonely, feeling like the sunshine in her life was back. She hadn’t realized how long she’d been living in the dark.
It had been nice.
She’d forgotten what it was like.
Still, he could leave again and that sobered her. She had to be careful. She made a promise to herself, to her heart.
Never would she go through that pain again. Even if it meant a thousand lonely Christmases. The pain wasn’t worth it.
Yes. It is.
CHAPTER TWELVE
ZAC WOKE WITH a start and it took him a moment to realize where he was in the dim light. He was in an exam room. He didn’t know if it was daylight or still the middle of the night.
The boy!
He tried to sit up, but his shoulder ached and he was attached to an IV.
“You dislocated your shoulder,” Ella said sleepily, sitting up from where she’d been dozing in a chair that looked an awful lot like the one she’d been sleeping in earlier. One that didn’t belong in an exam room.
“What about the boy?” he asked.
“He’s fine. He’s up on the pediatric floor. They put his little sister’s incubator in the same room as him and their mother is with them. He was hypothermic and needed stitches, but he’s going to be okay.”
Zac should have relaxed, hearing that, but he couldn’t. He was still on edge. He could still hear Consuela screaming in his head.
He couldn’t control the emotions that were swirling around inside him. The pain, the anger, the fear.
Nothing.
“Zac? What’s wrong? You’re trembling. Are you cold?” Ella got up.
“No,” he said through gritted teeth. “It’s my post-traumatic stress disorder getting the better of me. Just a panic attack. It will pass.”
