He flattened himself beside me.
“We have to move the patients. They could be hit,” I said as I got to my knees and crawled toward the ward. I should have been terrified, but a calm had settled over me. I knew I had to stay focused to help the patients and find Stepan.
Dmitri followed me. The other nurses were already there. We moved the two patients and their babies to a different room, one at the back of the house on the second floor.
When everyone was settled, I spent a few minutes talking to Galina and explained what had happened. “It’s all right,” she said. “You go. We can manage. Be careful.”
I went back to Dmitri. “Stepan doesn’t go off by himself. Did you ask Hap and Miles if they had any ideas?”
“Yes, they didn’t have a clue. In fact, they were both astounded he’d go out by himself.”
I remembered about the train and the plans for the boys to leave town. With everything that had happened, I’d completely forgotten the whole reason I’d come to the hospital. “Are Miles and Hap still home?”
“Yes, the trains have been shut down today.”
At least they were safe for the moment. “We can go out the back,” I said.
While I was watching Dmitri put on his gloves, I realized he didn’t have his cane with him. He hadn’t had it at all, and he’d been moving around much better, though he was still limping. The nurse in me worried he should still have it in case he needed it.
“We need a plan before we leave the building,” he said. “What about your friends who own the theater? Would he go to the Tamms?”
“I don’t think so. He hasn’t been there as much as the older boys.” He’d always been jealous that Hap and Miles wanted to go there without him.
“Well, what about his friends? Would he go to one of their houses?”
I tried to think of where he might be and what friends he would visit until an awful realization hit me: Stepan didn’t have any friends. Even though he would have been old enough to start school the year before, we’d kept him home because he’d been so shaken by my mother’s death. He was so quiet, so overshadowed by the other boys, I hadn’t even considered that none of us had made an effort to arrange for him to meet other boys his age.
“I can’t think of anyone’s house he’d go to,” I said. “He may just be out in the crowds.”
“All right. We’ll find him.” I heard the determination in Dmitri’s words, but I knew it was going to be a nearly impossible task. It would be dark soon. The winter days were short, and we’d have a much harder time when night fell.
I heard Tanya scream, and then came the sound of a man shouting at her. I recognized the voice.
Blok.
He’d come back.
Chapter Fourteen
DMITRI AND I ran to the kitchen. Dmitri was first, and when he reached it, he stopped so suddenly I ran into him. It wasn’t just Blok. The room was filled with policemen. Tanya huddled in one corner, weeping.
“Get out of here!” I screamed. Pure rage welled up in me. I tried to shove one toward the door but he pushed me away without even looking at me. The rest ignored me, and I realized they were all drenched with sweat and breathing heavily.
“Up to the roof!” one of them shouted to the others. Two of them carried a machine gun.
I ran to block the entrance to the back stairs. “This is a hospital! We have patients here.”
Another one shoved me out of the way. Dmitri took hold of me.
“Stop!” Dmitri said to the men. “You don’t have authorization to take over this building.”
“We don’t have time for authorization. There’s a mob out there.” He motioned to Dmitri’s uniform. “You should be out with your regiment helping us, but if you’d rather hide here with your girlfriend, just stay out of our way.”
He spat on the floor, and then some of the men moved up the stairs. Two ran toward the front of the building and another took up a position at the back door with his gun raised. I wanted to throw pots and pans at them or do something, anything, but Dmitri wouldn’t let go of me.
“No! No!” I couldn’t stop yelling.
“Charlotte, it won’t do any good. There are too many of them,” Tanya said.
I heard more glass shattering at the front of the house.
Galina ran in. “There are people in front of the house throwing rocks and trying to open the door,” she yelled. She saw the policeman at the back door and her eyes went wide.
“They know the police are in here,” Dmitri said. “They’re trying to get at them.”
The policeman at the back door swore. “They’re not getting me!” he cried.
“Charlotte, one of them has a torch,” Galina whispered.
Horror rose in me, and my throat tightened so much I had a hard time getting the words out. “They’re going to try to burn the building down to get to the police. We have to get the patients out of here.” I tried to block out the image of the hospital in flames.
Galina hesitated for only a few seconds. “Yes,” she said. “Yes.” Her voice was back to its normal tone, one that sounded like a nurse. “We’ll split the nurses up so that someone is with each mother and baby while we take them to their homes. The woman caught in the gunfire can go with one of us until it’s safe to get her to her own home.”
I’d already forgotten about the woman we’d brought in. “How is she?”
“She’s all right. She can walk, at least. One bullet went right through her arm. Another grazed her face, which was why there was so much blood, but it’s just a minor injury.”
I looked over at Dmitri. I could see the strain on his face. He nodded.
As soon as we told the other nurses, they began to help the patients get dressed. Galina directed everything, reassuring the women everything would be all right.
I didn’t tell the policeman’s wife that her husband was in the building or about the attacks on the police.
“Take me to my sister’s, please,” one of the other women said. “It’s closer and she’ll be there with my children.” A sob escaped her. She was a frail woman named Lena and I feared she’d break down, but she clamped her mouth shut and pulled on a coat a nurse gave her.
I could only imagine how much fear the patients felt, still weak and with fragile newborns to protect.
I heard more sounds of glass shattering, but we acted as if we hadn’t heard. All the nurses were calm, and I knew that the others had blocked out the chaos swirling around us because we had a job to do. It was one of the first things I had learned in nursing training: to focus on the task at hand, ignoring everything else.
I didn’t notice that Dmitri had left the room until I glanced over to see him coming back in when we were almost ready to go. He made a motion with his head like he wanted Galina and me to go out in the hall.
“The back door is still clear,” he said. “The policeman scared off people trying to come in that way. I think they are concentrating on getting in the front because there are more windows. Once we’re outside, no one will hurt a group of women with nurses as long as they realize who you are. I’ve told the policeman what we are doing so he won’t stand in our way.”