her fingers … and slowed.
Slowed more.
But in time?
She had to be in time.
‘Hey, she’s stopped the bleeding,’ Luke told his uncle. Until now it had been impossible to disguise the panic. ‘Lily’s hit the spot. Don’t you move, not a whisker.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ Tom whispered. ‘Oh, girl, I’m making you all mucky.’
‘I love horses and I love nursing,’ Lily told him, trying to match Luke’s reassurance, trying to keep the strain from her voice, as if holding back blood like this was routine. Knowing how close to disaster they still were. ‘I like a bit of muck.’
Tom tried to laugh but it didn’t come off. He looked …
Like he could go into shock at any minute.
It was a real possibility.
Lily couldn’t move. Her fist was a ball curled tight against damaged tissue, pressed hard against the pulsing artery. Somehow she’d hit the spot, somehow she’d blocked the blood supply. If she moved a fraction …
Luke was tightening the tourniquet with one hand, holding his phone in the other. Snapping details to an emergency service.
‘Air ambulance, helicopter, code blue. GPS co-ordinates …’ He lifted his uncle’s phone from his pocket—a new model, Lily saw, and read the positional co-ordinates off. Thank goodness for technology. ‘There’s a clearing a hundred yards to the north. I’ll secure it before you get here. If you can break the sound barrier I’d appreciate it. Move.’
He flicked the phone off.
There were sheets of paper-bark hanging from the massive gums along the river. While Tom—and Lily—stayed motionless Luke hauled a dozen of the soft bark sheets, folded them into a wedge and manoeuvered them with extraordinary care underneath Tom’s hips and legs. He had to be careful; there was no way he was interfering with Lily’s position. But it had to be done. Any available blood needed to flow to Tom’s head and not to his lower limbs. His hips had to be higher than his heart.
Done. He twisted the shirt tighter around Tom’s thigh and Tom grunted in pain.
‘I have emergency gear in the car,’ he told Lily. ‘Catheters. Saline. Morphine.’
‘Then why are you here?’ She was impressed by how calm she sounded. Luke needed to get an IV catheter in now, if not sooner. If Tom’s veins collapsed, resuscitation would no longer be possible.
They both knew that point was close.
‘I’m going.’ Luke sounded agonised. He’d hate to leave but he couldn’t stay. He touched his uncle’s face, then he touched Lily on the shoulder—a feather-light brush.
Then he was gone.
They were the longest minutes of Lily’s life, keeping pressure on the wound, praying Tom’s condition wouldn’t worsen. Trying not to let Tom see she was terrified.
The dogs, Border collies, lay and watched and she sensed their fear as well.
‘I hope Luke can run,’ she ventured, and Tom tried a smile.
‘Like the wind,’ he whispered. ‘He spent half his childhood running on this farm. Most weekends. All his school holidays. Ran all over this farm.’
‘Did he never go back to Singapore?’
‘Parents sent him to boarding school to get rid of him,’ Tom muttered. ‘He had a ruddy big birthmark on his face. His parents hated looking at it. My brother was too mean to get it fixed, though. Told the kid it was character building but in truth he was fixated on money. Like that bloody wife of his …’
He broke off and gasped and Lily wished she could hug him, wished she could move. Selfishly she also wished she could alleviate the pins and needles in her hips.
She could do nothing.
They were totally dependent on Luke. He needed to fetch equipment. He needed to check for a safe place for the helicopter to land. It was maybe a ten-minute run back to the house. Ten minutes there, ten minutes back, time to get land cleared …
All she could do was sit.
It was killing her. It was killing Tom. With every moment his chances grew slimmer.
Then, before she imagined it was possible, she heard the roar of a motor revving through the trees, crashing … and Luke’s Aston Martin broke into the clearing, bush-bashing like he was driving an ancient SUV rather than a sports car. No matter, he was here. He was out of the car almost before it stopped, hauling his bag with him.
‘Tom …’ She heard the catch in his breath, knew how terrified he’d been of what he’d find.
‘We’re fine,’ Lily said quickly. ‘And we always knew Aston Martins were offroaders.’
He managed a fleeting grin as he hauled a catheter from his bag.
‘You drove that thing through the bush?’ Tom gasped, and Luke’s smile became genuine. Luke would have run thinking the worst, Lily thought. He’d have known that if Tom had gone into cardiac arrest while he was gone there’d have been nothing she could do—not when taking her hands from the pressure point meant blood loss would resume.
But now …
Luke was inserting a catheter. He had IV fluids! Not blood product, she thought, that’d be too much to hope from most emergency kits, but he had saline, and any fluid was a lifesaver.
Could be a lifesaver.
Please.
The catheter was inserted in seconds. An IV line was set up.
‘There’s morphine going in, Tom,’ Luke said. ‘Any minute now you can stop gritting your teeth.’
‘I’m not gritting my teeth,’ Tom said, indignant. ‘Or not very much.’
Lily let out her breath, not knowing until then that she’d been holding it. There was a chance …
‘I’m releasing the tourniquet for a moment,’ Luke said. ‘I’m not saving you only to lose that leg. You might want to grit those teeth.’
‘Pansies grit teeth,’ Tom said, though the expression on his face said the pain was bad. ‘Me and Lily aren’t pansies.’
‘You and Lily can face the world with your heads held high,’ Luke said. ‘Pansies? I don’t think so. Heroes, both of you.’
‘It’s our Lily. I’m just lying here thinking of England.’
‘Well, think of England a while longer,’ Tom said. ‘I need to get the paddock cleared for the chopper. Harbour Hospital, here we come.’
‘Hey, we might even be in time for Teo’s party,’ Lily managed, desperately striving for lightness.
