Eve jerked the steering wheel to pull over and slammed on the brakes. “Audrey! Audrey, get out! Get out now!” she screamed.
Audrey looked around, dazed. “What? . . . Why?”
“It’s a V-1, Audrey! Get out!” Eve scrambled from the ambulance to take cover, not bothering to shut the door. When she looked back, Audrey was still inside.
The V-1’s sputtering motor halted.
Oh, no!
Eve sprinted to the ambulance and yanked open the passenger door. She pulled Audrey out. They were staggering away from the vehicle when the force of the blast knocked them both to the ground. It happened so fast that Eve had the sensation of slamming into a brick wall. Pinpricks of light danced in her vision like stars. The shock wave traveled through every inch of her body. She barely had time to cover her head before a cloud of debris and dust rained down.
She lay in the weeds, stunned. Deafened. She tried to sit up and her head whirled as if she’d spun in circles. The sensation made her vomit. “Audrey . . . ,” she rasped. She could barely hear her own voice. “Audrey, where are you?” She sat up slowly and looked around. Audrey lay in an ungainly heap, her limbs sprawled, her leg twisted at an unnatural angle. She wasn’t moving.
Eve heard ringing. An ambulance was coming. Thank God. She crawled painfully toward Audrey to see if she was alive, if she was breathing, and found a pulse in her throat. “Audrey! Audrey, wake up!” she begged. Blood matted her forehead and hair. Something was sticking out of her leg. Her own shinbone. Blood pulsed from the wound. Eve pulled out a handkerchief for a makeshift tourniquet, using a stick to twist it tight. It would do until the ambulance arrived. Where was the crew? Come on, come on! They must be nearby. The bells were so loud!
Yet all of the other sounds around her were muffled. Eve couldn’t hear birds or the wind in the trees or any other noises. She could barely hear her own voice when she cried out for help. They weren’t ambulance bells. The ringing was in her ears. And Audrey might be dying. She needed to drive her to hospital.
Eve looked around for their ambulance, praying that the bomb hadn’t destroyed it. It sat alongside the road where she’d left it, only a few yards away, the windows blasted out by the explosion. Eve half crawled, half staggered to it, ignoring her nausea and throbbing head. Every movement brought a surge of agony from her left arm, but she managed to open the rear doors. Pull out a stretcher. Drag it to where Audrey lay. Shift her limp body onto it. Drag it back to the ambulance. Audrey didn’t moan or move, even as Eve clumsily hauled the stretcher into the rear of the ambulance. She checked Audrey’s pulse again. Weak. She replaced the handkerchief with a real tourniquet. The exertion made Eve dizzy. She closed her eyes for a second to keep from passing out. She couldn’t faint. She couldn’t.
Eve grabbed a blanket from the back before closing the doors and used it to cover the broken glass on the driver’s seat. A jolt of pain shot through her leg as she depressed the clutch. Another pierced her arm as she grabbed the gear lever. Oh, God, help me! She couldn’t drive. She had to.
Tears of pain and panic blurred Eve’s vision. Only fear and training propelled her forward. Two ambulances raced past, coming from the opposite direction. They sounded miles away even as they zoomed by. She should have waited, searched for other victims. There wasn’t time.
At last, at last, Eve pulled up at the hospital’s emergency entrance as she had so many times. The engine bucked and died but she was in too much pain to step on the clutch one last time. She’d been trained to keep calm, but she flung open her door and half fell from the ambulance, screaming at the attendants to hurry. Audrey didn’t move when they transferred her to a gurney. “Is she alive?” Eve asked as they rushed Audrey inside. She couldn’t understand the muffled reply.
A nurse eased Eve onto another gurney. “Let’s take care of you,” she mumbled. Eve felt a shock of pain before everything went black.
A doctor stood over her when she opened her eyes, listening to her chest with his stethoscope. He said something to her and she shook her head. “I can’t hear anything!”
“You’re going to be all right,” he said, bending close. “Your eardrums weren’t ruptured. We’ll stitch up the worst of your lacerations, like the deep one in your leg. You suffered bruising and a dislocated elbow, but you’ll recover.”
Eve tried to sit up. “I need to move the ambulance—”
A nurse held her down. “We already moved it. We have more casualties coming in.”
“What about my friend? She has a head injury—”
“We know. We’re taking care of her. She needs surgery for a compound fracture in her leg. You lie here quietly, now, so we can get you stitched up.”
Eve did as she was told and lay still on the gurney. The pain as they yanked her elbow joint into place was like nothing she’d ever felt before. Then, miraculously, the pain was gone. The cuts requiring stitches contained bits of broken glass, likely from the shattered windscreen. More casualties poured into the emergency room, and the nurses moved Eve to a chair near their station so they could use the gurney for someone else. Eve wished she could help, but she couldn’t stop trembling, even with a blanket wrapped around her. Audrey was badly injured, and Eve was terrified for her.
Hours passed before the flow of ambulances and victims halted. Eve’s hearing improved, but her head continued to throb. She stopped one of the busy nurses and asked about Audrey. “I’ll send a doctor out to speak with you,” she promised. At last, the same doctor who’d spoken with Eve earlier crouched in front of her, leaning close to her ear.
“Your friend had surgery for her fractured leg. She’s still unconscious. We won’t know more about her head injury for a while. In the meantime, you should notify her family.”
A wave of nausea rolled through Eve. Audrey would want Robert by her side. Eve needed to call the American air base and Wellingford Hall to locate him. Yet she would never be able to use a telephone until her hearing improved. She pulled herself to her feet, slowly, painfully, and limped over to two ATS ambulance drivers who stood talking near the door. “Will you help me, please?” Eve explained what had happened and begged them to notify Audrey Clarkson’s fiancé, Robert Barrett, at the American air base or at his barracks in Wellingford Hall. The drivers wrote down the information and promised not to give up until they got through to him. They helped Eve to her chair at the nurses’ station before hurrying away to use the phone.
Eve leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. God, are You going to take Audrey away along with everyone else I’ve ever loved? If so, please take me, too. She drifted to sleep from exhaustion and shock.
When she opened her eyes again, someone was gently shaking her and calling her name. “Eve . . . Eve . . . ?” Louis crouched beside her. Night had fallen outside the emergency room doors. “Eve, are you okay?”
“I think so. . . . I fell asleep.” If Louis was here, then Robert must be here, too. “Audrey! Is she all right? Did they tell you anything?”
“She’s still unconscious.”
“I need to see her.” She tried to stand, but Louis made her stay seated.
“She needs to be hospitalized for a few more days. In the meantime, you need to get out of here and get some rest.”