There were still plenty of options. The patient wasn’t in labour yet, and maybe a four-by-four could bring her down the hill to the waiting ambulance. Maybe the storm would clear and the HEMS team could airlift her out. Maybe the support doctor Jack had requested would arrive soon, and maybe not. If all else failed, he and Mimi had delivered babies together before now.
His feet slid on a patch of mud and he gripped the heavy medical bag slung over his shoulder, lurching wildly for a moment before he regained his balance. ‘Careful...’ He muttered the word as an instruction to himself. Slipping and breaking his leg wasn’t one of the options he had been considering.
‘One, two, three...’ In a grim version of the stepping game he played with Ellie, his four-year-old daughter, he traversed the bridge, trying to ignore the grumbling roar of thunder in the hills. He’d wait for Mimi on the far bank of the river. She’d walked back up the road a little to get reception on her phone and check in with the Disaster Control Team, but they shouldn’t lose sight of each other.
He thought he heard someone scream his name but it was probably just the screech of the wind. Then, as the roar got louder, he realised that it wasn’t thunder.
Jack turned. A wall of water, tumbling down from the hills, was travelling along the path of the riverbed straight towards him.
His first instinct was to trust the power and speed of his body and run, but in a moment of sudden clarity he knew he wouldn’t make it up the steep muddy path in front of him in time. A sturdy-looking tree stood just yards away, its four twisting trunks offering some hope of protection, and Jack dropped his bag and ran towards it.
He barely had a chance to lock his hands around one of the trunks and suck in one desperate breath before the water slammed against his back, expelling all of the precious oxygen from his lungs in one gasp as it flattened him against the bark. A great roar deafened him and he kept his eyes tight shut against the water and grit hitting his face. Hang on. The one and only thing he could do was hang on.
Then it stopped. Not daring to let go of the tree trunk, Jack opened his eyes, trying to blink away the sting of the dirty water. Another sickening roar was coming from upstream.
The next wave was bigger, tearing at his body. He tried to hold on but his fingers slipped apart and he was thrown against the other three trunks, one of them catching the side of his head with a dizzying blow. There was no point in trying to hold his breath and a harsh bellow escaped his lips as his arms flailed desperately, finding something to hold on to and clinging tight.
Then, suddenly, it stopped again. Too dazed to move, Jack lay twisted in the shelter of the branches, his limbs trembling with shock and effort. He was so cold...
Mimi... He tried to call for her, hoping against all hope that she hadn’t been on the bridge when the water had hit, but all he could do was cough and retch, dirty water streaming out of his nose and mouth.
He gasped in a lungful of air. ‘Mimi...’
‘Stay down. Just for a moment.’
A woman’s voice, husky and sweet. Someone was wiping his face, clearing his eyes and mouth.
‘Mimi... My partner.’
‘She’s okay. I can see her on the other side of the river.’ That voice again. He reached out towards it and felt a warm hand grip his.
He opened his eyes, blinking against the light, and saw her face. Pale skin, with strands of short red hair escaping from the hood of her jacket. Strong cheekbones, a sweet mouth and the most extraordinary pale blue eyes. It was the kind of face you’d expect to find on some warrior goddess...
He shook his head. He must be in shock. Jack knew better than most the kind of nonsense that people babbled in situations like this. Unless she had a golden sword tucked away under her dark blue waterproof jacket, she was just an ordinary mortal, her face rendered ethereal because it was the first thing he’d seen when he opened his eyes.
‘Are you sure? Mimi’s okay?’
The woman glanced up only briefly, her gaze returning to him. ‘She’s wearing an ambulance service jacket. Blonde hair, I think...’
‘Yes, that’s her.’ Jack tried to move and found that his limbs had some strength in them now.
‘Are you hurt?’
‘No...’ No one part of him hurt any more than the rest and Jack decided that was a good sign. ‘Thanks...um...’
‘I’m Cass... Cassandra Clarke.’
‘Jack Halliday.’
She gave a small nod in acknowledgement. ‘We’d better not hang around here for too long. Can you stand?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Okay, take it slowly.’ She reached over, disentangling his foot from a branch, and then scrambled around next to him, squeezing her body in between him and one of the tree trunks. With almost no effort on his part at all, he found himself sitting up as she levered her weight against his, her arms supporting him. Then she helped him carefully to his feet.
He turned, looking back over the bridge to find Mimi. Only the bridge wasn’t there any more. A couple of chunks of masonry were all that was left of it, rolling downstream under the pressure of the boiling water. He could see Mimi standing on the other side, staring fixedly at him, and beside her stood a man who he thought he recognised. Behind them, the lights still on and the driver’s door open, was a black SUV.
‘All right?’ Now that he was on his feet, he could see that Cass was tall, just a couple of inches shorter than him.
‘Yeah. Thanks.’ Jack felt for his phone and found that he had nothing in his pocket apart from a couple of stones and a handful of sludge. ‘I need to get to a phone...’
‘Okay. The village is only ten minutes away; we’ll get you up there first.’ She spoke with a quiet, irresistible authority.
Jack waved to Mimi, feeling a sharp ache in his shoulder as he raised his arm. She waved back, both hands reaching out towards him as if she was trying to retrieve him. Moving his hand in a circular motion as a sign that he’d call her, he saw the man bend to pick something up. Mimi snatched her phone from him and looked at it for a moment and then turned her attention back on to Jack, sending him a thumbs-up sign.
‘Did you mean to park the ambulance like that?’ There was a note of dry humour in Cass’s husky tones.
Jack looked over the water and saw that the ambulance had been washed off the road and was leaning at a precarious angle against a tree. He muttered a curse under his breath.
‘I’ll take that as a no.’
Jack chuckled, despite the pain in his ribs. ‘What are you?’
She flushed red as if this was the one question she didn’t know how to answer. In someone so capable, the delicate shade of pink on her cheeks stirred his shaking limbs into sudden warmth.
‘What do you mean?’
‘None of this fazes you very much, does it? And you’ve been trained in how to lift...’ Jack recognised the techniques she’d used as very similar to his own. A little more leverage and a little less strength, maybe. And, although Cass didn’t give any orders, the men around her seemed to recognise her as their leader.
‘I’m a firefighter. I work at the fire station in town, but I’m off duty at the moment. On duty as a concerned family member, though—my sister Lynette’s the patient you’re coming to see.’
‘Then we’d better get going.’ Jack looked around for his bag and saw that one of the men was holding it, and that water was dripping out of it. He really was on his own here—no Mimi and no medical bag. He turned, accepting a supportive arm from one of the men, and began to walk slowly up the steep path with the group.
* * *
This