had started CPR but it was no use. The ECG tracing showed idioventricular rhythm. Idioventricular rhythm was almost always irreversible—the last sigh of a dying heart—and this was no exception. Finally Morag stood back, defeated, and she put her arm around the grocer’s shoulders in silent sympathy as he wept for his wife.
But there was no time for Morag to weep. The clinic was almost empty. Every patient and almost all the equipment was gone. They covered Mavis and left her there.
‘This…this place can be the morgue,’ she told one of the men who’d tried to help.
He nodded. ‘We’ll start bringing them in.’
Them? How many? She couldn’t bear to ask. ‘I need to see…to make sure…’
‘If there’s any doubt at all, we’ll bring them to you,’ he told her. ‘But there’s those…well, there’s those where there’s no doubt at all.’
Dear God.
Grim-faced, Morag made her way to the cricket pavilion. Here she found her surgery set up in miniature. Any villager not totally occupied with searching for survivors or helping the injured had been hauled in to help. Marcus and his family were working like a miniature army.
There was no time to wonder. Work was waiting everywhere.
Louise, a middle-aged nurse who usually acted as Morag’s receptionist, had decreed herself triage sister and nothing got near Morag unless she said so. That meant Morag nearly missed seeing tiny Orlando Salmon. Her next tragedy.
Orlando had been held in his mother’s arms when the water had slammed them from one side of the road to the other. Angie Salmon was left with bruising, but her tiny son was dead in her arms. Louise would have deflected her from Morag—Morag had so much on her hands that the clearly dead could no longer be her business—but Morag saw them out of the corner of her eye as she was treating a compound fracture, and the look on Angie’s face had her move instinctively to help.
Once again, there was nothing constructive she could do. But Angie had to hear from a doctor that her little son was really dead. She had to watch as Morag took the time to examine the tiny child with love, and show Angie what had killed him. It had been fast. He’d died instantly in his mother’s arms.
Explaining was all Morag could do, and it was all she had time for. There was no time for comfort. There were urgent cases waiting, but as Morag turned away she found herself choked again with tears. She and Angie had gone to school together. Angie had been the biggest tomboy on the island. She had four more kids, and each one was loved to bits.
Damn.
She needed Robbie, she thought bleakly. She desperately needed to hug her own little Robbie, but there was no time.
And she was depending on Robbie. They all were. He was the village eyes. Someone else had gone up on the ridge now, carrying the strongest field glasses they could find, but she knew that Robbie’s sharp eyes would be behind those glasses.
Searching for another wave.
She couldn’t think of another wave.
Morag worked and worked. Every time she turned around there was more need. Fractures, lacerations, grief…
Then about four hours after the water hit, they brought Sam Crane in, carrying him in on a brightly painted door that looked like it had once been entry point to one of the village’s more substantial houses.
Louise saw Sam as the stretcher bearers reached the top of the stairs, and this time she had no hesitation in bringing him to Morag’s immediate attention. Morag turned from the man she’d been treating and flinched. Dear heaven. So much blood.
‘We found him round the back of the harbour,’ Marcus told her. ‘He was working on his boat when it hit. The boat ended up smashed on the harbour wall and we found him underneath. It’s taken six of us to get the boat off him. As soon as we got the boat off, he started bleeding like a stuck pig. We’ve applied pressure but…’
But what? She was lifting the rough blanket way, searching for the source of the bleeding. And here it was.
‘Boat crushed his leg,’ Marcus told her. ‘What’ll we do?’
His leg was lost. That much was unmistakable. What was left was a mash of pulp and splintered bones. The only positive thing was that his leg had been crushed so thoroughly that the blood vessels themselves must have been crushed. With a wound like this she’d expect spurting blood and almost immediate death, but somehow, hours after the wave, he was still alive.
Not for long, though. Blood was oozing across the door and onto the pavilion floor.
‘We need blood. Plasma. Saline.’
‘We’re just about out.’ Irene, the island’s midwife, turned from applying a pressure bandage to a small boy’s thigh. ‘I could use some here.’
‘We need to set up a blood bank.’ Morag was staring down at Sam’s leg in dismay. She had two trained nurses: Louise and Irene. That meant there were three people with medical skills on the entire island. That was it. How could she cope with this? Sam needed his leg amputated right now if he was to live—but she had no anaesthetist. Her nurses would be needed to take blood. The sort of surgery she was envisaging was horrific, but if she didn’t start now, Sam would die almost straight away.
Triage. Priorities. Someone else was calling out for her from below. The child Irene was working on really needed Morag’s attention. Maybe Sam would have to be…
‘Just cut it off, Doc,’ Sam said weakly, reaching out and taking her hand. ‘I know it’s a mess. I can get by on one leg.’
‘You can do anything, Sam,’ she said in a voice that wasn’t the least bit steady. She gripped Sam’s hand and she wasn’t sure who was gaining strength from who. ‘Sam, I’m going to give you enough painkiller to block things out until we can sort out how best to cope with this.’
‘But the leg has to come of?’
‘Yes, Sam. The leg has to come off.’
‘Let’s get on with it, then.’
‘Sure.’ She loaded a syringe and injected morphine. She set up an IV line and watched as Sam drifted into sleep. Or unconsciousness. The combination of shock, blood loss and morphine meant he could no longer stay with them.
Irene was watching her. As Sam’s hand loosened its grip and she stepped back, she found everyone was watching her.
The huddle of people in the pavilion were shocked past belief. Any islander who was fit and not needed to take care of their own family had been co-opted into helping with medical care. But in this tiny settlement everyone knew everyone, and the entire island was like an extended family.
So far the death count from this afternoon was ten and rising. They’d worked so far in numbed disbelief but suddenly that numbness had disappeared. Every single one of them knew what Morag was facing now.
She needed to turn away from Sam and give her attention to someone she could save.
She needed to give up on the impossible.
She
