And then he rounded the corner.
It was the smell that hit Myles first. The unmistakeable stench of burning flesh. It lodged itself in his nasal passages, reminding him, taunting him. He swayed, momentarily overcome by the flashbacks he’d been trying so hard to thrust aside, dangerously close to reliving that night. His body flushed hot, then cold, the seat making him feel clammy and helpless.
There was screaming and shouting all around him, but experience allowed him to phase it out. He couldn’t let cries of pain pierce his emotional armour. Not right now. Not when he was so close to the edge as it was.
Something battered his chest and it took him a moment to realise it was his heart, hammering so fiercely he was convinced it was going to ram its way out. His lungs strained with the effort of trying to draw a breath, desperate to suck in deep lungsful yet struggling to allow in even a trickle. He reached his hand out but the canvas tent offered scant support.
He’d dealt with this before. Too many times, adults and soldiers with devastating, often fatal, burns. But this was a non-combat area, and these were civilians. The tiny kernel of logic that was fighting to make itself heard warned him that it was likely to have been a domestic cooking explosion. It wasn’t unusual for a substandard pressure cooker to explode, or for a gas canister, used to make the family meal, to get too close to an open flame.
They might not be used to it in this camp, but he’d seen it too many times over the years.
He glanced around; the chaotic scene in front of him seemed to confirm his suspicions.
And then he saw the child. A young girl with burns on her face and arms and whose leg had clearly been crushed by something landing on her in the explosion. He couldn’t tell if she was alive or dead, but if he just focussed on her, if he shut everything else out—the all too familiar cries of pain and pleas for help—maybe he could just deal with her.
Maybe he could save her.
Racing across the room, he dropped to the ground and began to crawl carefully through the debris, his hand reaching out to try to take a pulse.
It was faint but weak, yet even that felt like a powerful victory.
‘What’s her status?’
A voice dragged him back to reality and he managed to crane his head over his neck enough to see another volunteer, a doctor, had arrived and was trying to get to him. Movement around them suggested other volunteers were trying to reach the other victims. Good, this once he could let others triage, he could just deal with this one child.
This one echo of his past.
‘She’s alive. Just,’ he managed. ‘Time is going to be critical. We’ll need to get her out to intubate and secure central venous access.’
He had dealt with enough to know that burns victims were usually those who required the most surgical interventions, with multiple trips to Theatre. Not to mention even when burns victims were kids, their surgical procedures were often in line with battlefield trauma surgery usually reserved for adults and soldiers.
‘You’re a doctor?’
‘Army trauma surgeon,’ Myles replied automatically, before qualifying it. ‘Well, I was up until I left six months ago. That was my last tour of duty.’
This was what he’d been trained for. This was what he knew best. Yet his six months away from the operating table could only have left him rusty. Then again, how many doctors out here with this group would have his particular field of expertise? How many of them would have operated, night and day sometimes, on such cases in such basic environments like this?
The main question was whether the length and intensity of all his operational tours of duty meant that, even rusty, he would still be the best chance this little girl had.
His head was still swirling as the two of them worked quickly and efficiently, clearing enough rubble to get to the girl, who mercifully began to regain consciousness on her own as they worked. Then whilst Myles performed a routine check and pulled her out, the other doctor prepared to intubate, and to take over pain management.
‘You have a blood bank?’
‘Yes. I’m guessing she’s going to need a transfusion.’
‘Possibly multiple,’ Myles confirmed. ‘You’re not really geared up for skin grafting here, but we can do something.’
And then his mind clicked over, like turning on a light switch, and the past six months faded away and it was as though he’d never stopped operating. Never stopped thinking about medical solutions.
This was who he was. This was what he had been built to do. How had he forgotten that? But could he begin to separate his army career, which was now over, from his medical career, which didn’t have to be?
He’d been an army surgeon for so long, were the two inextricably linked in his mind?
He was so preoccupied with his thoughts that Myles didn’t realise they’d been working for almost an hour, and the girl was finally freed, and they were loading her onto a gurney and rushing her into the single, makeshift operating area, where the only surgeon the forward camp had was hastily going over the triage lists.
He checked the girl as quickly as he could.
‘Leg’s too far gone.’ The doctor pulled a sympathetic face. ‘We’ll have to amputate.’
‘She’ll be ostracised.’ Myles barely recognised his own stiff, raw voice.
A hand appeared on his arm and it took him a moment to realise it was the doctor.
‘I’m sorry but we simply don’t have the equipment out here, certainly not paediatric.’
‘I can do it.’
He heard the words but didn’t remember saying them.
‘Sorry?’
‘I’m a surgeon. Trauma. Ex-army.’ Why did it sound so jolted? So staccato? ‘I can try something.’
‘I thought you were a manual work volunteer?’
‘I haven’t operated in six months. Ever since I came out.’
‘I can’t authorise that. Besides, she’ll need a skin graft and all sorts.’
‘Multiple operations and skin grafts over about a month to six weeks, I would imagine.’ He was beginning to warm to it now.
Beginning to feel a little more human.
A little more...real.
‘Give me some plastic tubes, some wires, maybe some aluminium rods and I can cobble together some kind of external medical scaffolding. A homemade mechanical construction device to realign the bones and hold the leg in the right position.’
‘I don’t know...’
‘Speak to whoever you have to speak to,’ Myles commanded, his voice sounding much more like his own. ‘Get whatever authorisation you need... I need. I can do this. But you amputate without even trying and you’ve condemned a six-year-old kid for life. You know how harsh their society can be.’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Starting with early insertion of a subclavian line. Get me an eight-point-five-gauge trauma line.’
* * *
‘You didn’t say your man was a surgeon, too,’ Clara accused jovially as she came on shift to find Rae moving back and forth between two mercifully non-complicated deliveries.
‘My man?’ She commanded her stomach not to somersault at the idea. There could be little doubt who Clara was talking about.
‘Myles, of course.’ Clara rolled her eyes. ‘Or should I say Major Myles? Army trauma surgeon.’
Rae’s head snapped up from the chart she was filling out to look at the woman.
‘Has something happened?’
‘Apparently there was a gas explosion near the forward camp—’
‘Was he hurt?’ She gripped the edge of the table, her knuckles white with the effort. Relief flooded through her as Clara shook her head.
‘Not him. It was in the refugee camp. A couple of families were cooking over a gas stove when the canister exploded.’
‘Serious injuries?’ She fough
t to stay focussed, in control, as she glanced between the two mothers in labour, never more grateful for a quiet lull in her shift.
‘Multiple.’ Clara pulled a face. ‘But one of them was a kid with a crushed leg. The docs there deemed it unsalvageable, and then your Myles stepped up and apparently had some battlefield skills he’d picked up, which enabled him to save the limb.’
‘He’s not my Myles,’ Rae muttered. ‘Anyway, he operated?’
‘Don’t know, he didn’t come out here as a surgeon so possibly not. But he went into the operating area with one of the surgeons and I’m guessing if he couldn’t operate himself then he at least talked the surgeon through it.’
Myles, operating again? Even by proxy, it was a huge step forward.
‘So, the kid’s okay?’
‘They’re transferring the casualties here as soon as they’re stable, maybe tomorrow. I think someone said the little girl will need more surgeries over the next few weeks, including skin grafts.’
‘How do you know this?’ Rae stepped forward as she thought one of her mothers might need her, then stopped as the girl was tended to by her mother.
‘The other volunteers are back and it’s all they can talk about. The mess hall is buzzing. Figured you might want to know.’
‘Thanks.’ Rae nodded; for the first time since she’d been here she silently cursed the never-abating flow of women ready to give birth.
Maybe when she finished her on-call shift, she could swing by his room.
Maybe.
‘Myles...’ she knocked tentatively ‘...are you there?’
Silence, and then, just as she was about to leave, he pushed the door open then backed into the room wordlessly.
The pre-planned teasing quip died on her lips and, in the absence of a verbal invitation, she took that to be the only encouragement she was going to get, and followed.
‘I thought you might be asleep.’
It felt like an eternity before he answered.
‘I can’t sleep. That is... I can’t bring myself to.’
‘Are you okay?’
She braced herself for him to brush it off. To dismiss her. So it was a surprise when he sat down, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped between, and his body leaning forward.
‘I don’t know.’
Carefully, Rae turned the other chair around, sat down, and waited. The quiet swirled around them, almost peaceful.
But opposite her Myles was too silent, too still. As though there were a storm raging in his head that only he could hear. As though it were buffeting him whilst leaving her untouched, only a few feet away.
He looked...broken.
‘Myles?’ She spoke softly. ‘What happened?’
For a moment he didn’t answer and the silence pressed in on her, far more brutal than the oppressive heat outside.
‘You already know what happened,’ he ground out when she’d almost given up hope of him speaking to her. ‘Or else you wouldn’t be here.’
‘I came to congratulate you,’ she admitted after a moment’s hesitation. ‘They’re calling you a hero out there.’
He made a sound that might have been a bark of laughter but for the fact it was possibly one of the most chilling sounds she’d ever heard.
‘A hero is the last thing I am.’
‘You saved a little girl. You fought to save her leg when no one else was going to. Out here that’s the difference between her having a family to go back to, a home—wherever that may actually be—and being cast out for ever.’
He didn’t answer. It was all she could do to resist the urge to pull her chair closer, to run her hands over his bent back, to try to soothe him. To take his pain away.
But she couldn’t be that person. She could barely even sort out her own mess of a life, how could she possibly imagine that she could be enough to help someone else?
Besides, Myles would never want her help. Sex was one thing, a simple physical act. But intimacy, actually laying oneself emotionally bare to another person, was a completely different thing. He’d made it clear time and again that he would never want her in that way. She would be a fool to keep repeating the mistake, hoping for a different outcome.
And still, she didn’t move.
Which meant she was that fool.
So she could scarcely believe it when he started to speak again.
‘The smell was almost unbearable.’
He had fastened his hands together, lacing his fingers tightly, around the back of his head, and if she hadn’t strained to hear his agonised voice she would have missed what he said.
‘What smell?’ she asked, tentatively.
‘The smell of burning flesh. Once you’ve smelt it you can never forget it. It scorches itself into your nostrils. Brands itself into your brain. There’s no escaping it.’
She wanted to answer, to ease his obvious torment. But what could she possibly say? So instead she waited, her hands balled in her lap to stop her from reaching out to touch him, to comfort him, the way she wanted to. To stop herself from lifting his head to look at her, as though that could somehow break this terrible spell he was under.
But she couldn’t risk it. He was only talking now because he was caught up in his own head. If she reminded him of where he was, of the fact that she was there in front of him, he might realise who he was talking to and shut down altogether.
Now, more than ever, she knew how close to the mark her half-brother had been when he’d told her that he thought Myles was suffering.
And so she sat still, quiet, waiting. It felt like an eternity before he spoke again.
‘That’s what I smell...in those nightmares.’
He lifted his head abruptly, to look at her, to connect with her. And suddenly she wished he hadn’t. It was as though something were wrapping itself around her lungs, preventing them from expanding, from drawing in any breath.
The torment that laced his voice was magnified tenfold in that bleak expression, dark torture roiling in his eyes. She wanted him to talk and yet the idea of making him relive it was almost unbearable. She yearned to be the one to take away his pain. To be the one who could make it all right for him.
‘From a mission?’ she pressed gently, smothering the guilt she felt at knowing more than she was prepared to reveal.
But she wanted it to come from him. She wanted him to be the one to tell her. He dipped his head in what she took to be a nod.
‘One of the last missions I went on.’ He stopped again, and she held her breath. ‘I was on a medical mission, going from village to village treating a number of medical issues. I was looking at a cleft lip, with and without the cleft palate in paediatric cases. There were a few of us, from medics to surgeons, and we had a rifles team with us when we went into the less stable regions.’
She offered an encouraging sound, not wanting to risk speaking and interrupting his thoughts.
‘We’d been to a village in the foothills. Whilst I dealt with a couple of surgeries, others tried to resolve some of the more common issues such as diarrhoea and vomiting. There’s a general lack of education, poor nutrition, no access to medical care out there. They were mostly farmers so there wasn’t a lot to go around, so, other than that, we played some football with the kids and provided some materials and labour to help with general repairs around town.’
‘Football.’ She risked a soft laugh. ‘The universal language.’
Relief coursed through her when it worked.
‘Yeah, I guess. Though I’m usually more of a rugby guy, myself.’
She laughed again but didn’t push it by saying anything more.
‘Anyway, we left the town and went on to the next. A few days later we were heading back to our main army camp when we saw these plumes of black smoke. I don’t remember anyone saying anything, but we all knew where it was. Ou
r convoy changed direction and we went to investigate.’
She didn’t dare to speak. Not even move.
‘When...’ He clenched his jaw so tightly, she expected to hear it crack. Shatter. ‘When we got there, we saw it. Men, women, children. The enemy forces had been in to kill everyone. And they’d left the bodies where they’d fallen before setting the town alight.’
Hence the smell, Rae realised, forcing herself not to speak.
‘We tried to save those few people who were still alive. But it was too late. Plus, we had to go slowly. There was still the fear that some enemy had stayed behind in case we returned, and we didn’t know if we were going to come under fire at any time.’
‘Which is when Michael McCoy died.’
The words were out before she could stop herself.
He froze as if she’d slapped him. So unmistakeable that she actually had to check herself to make sure that she hadn’t.
‘Say again?’
Abruptly, Rae wished she hadn’t started the conversation. It was as though Myles had the power to control the very air around them. A few minutes ago, she’d been walking out in the hot, dry, dusty camp. Now, it felt as though there were a storm rumbling ominously around the darkened room, a chill tiptoeing over her skin leaving her whole body shuddering.
And yet, she wanted to know. She needed to hear it from Myles himself.
‘I heard about Lance Corporal Michael McCoy.’
His jaw tightened. Dark. Lethal.
‘Mikey.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Michael McCoy. Mac, or Mikey, to his friends.’ His voice sharpened. ‘To me.’
‘Right.’ She swallowed hard.
‘What did you hear? How did you hear?’
‘Rafe mentioned it. Once,’ she added hastily. ‘In passing, the night you and I first met at his offices. He said you’d lost a good buddy on that last mission, that you’d taken it hard and that he didn’t know the details but he thought you were suffering... PTSD.’
‘Is that so?’
Christmas with Her Bodyguard Page 13