Authors: Renae Kaye
I
T
WAS
a rare weekend, and Elliot and I took full advantage of it. Elliot wasn’t on call, and Jimmie and Murray were looking after my place, so together we drove to the city and stayed in their house. Elliot took me out for a romantic dinner at some fancy-schmancy restaurant, we took a walk along the Swan River holding hands, and we fucked ourselves stupid.
It was magical.
But Sunday afternoon we cleaned up and jumped back in the car to make the journey home. Elliot was driving his car, and it gave us an opportunity to talk in depth. Three hours on the road with nothing to do—I learned a lot about the guy. He had an older brother who had followed his father into the family business, and a younger sister who’d died of a congenital heart failure when she was four. Elliot had been seven. It was what prompted him to become a doctor.
I told him about my memories of Mum and the plans I had for the farm.
I had no idea of the disaster about to occur. At least in the movies, they give you some warning music to prepare. But when it just hits you from out of nowhere, it’s hard to comprehend.
Some people say that being in a car accident is like a slow-moving picture, that their lives stopped for that briefest moment, and the events seemed to last forever. It wasn’t like that to me. To me it was—
shit, wham, smash, pain.
Four things in four seconds, and that was it. It was only in the weeks following that I managed to put all the sensations, sights, sounds, and sequences together.
The first portent of what was about to happen was the brake lights coming on in the caravan in front of us. We had been traveling fifteen ks under the limit for a while; the car and caravan in front of us were unable to reach the high speeds of a hundred and ten. We’d joked about the “gray-nomads”—the term given to retirees (the gray-haired bunch) who felt the need to pull up stakes and buy a caravan to tour around the country. They were nomads, settling for only a couple of months over the winter.
But suddenly they were braking hard in front of us. Elliot braked as well, and the tires locked on his vehicle and made black smoke behind us. I automatically braced my arms as he fought for control. Then I saw the caravan begin to skid sideways, jackknifing for a moment until it caught the grass on the edge of the road. The van’s wheels bumped, and then the caravan was rolling, twisting and tumbling, over and over, taking the attached four-wheel-drive vehicle with it.
All of this happened in my
shit
moment—a single second of my life.
Then there was a tire flung up in our direction, slamming into the windscreen—
wham
—shattering the glass inward. In my dreams I can still see the black thing coming at us—so fast that I didn’t even have time to think,
What the fuck is that?
before the impact. Somewhere about this time, I remember seeing red—a red car, a small sedan flashing by. It was later that I put together what that flash was. The police report showed that the small red sedan had been trying to overtake from the opposite direction and was on the wrong side of the road—our side of the road.
Then there was the
smash
—glass tinkling to the ground, metal twisting, bones rearranging, airbags deploying. Elliot couldn’t see ahead—he was in a skid and trying to avoid the rolling caravan when the tire hit us, shattering the windscreen and leaving him with zero vision. Unable to see what was in front of us, he turned away from the traffic and hit a tree, impacting on my side so that I was thrown forward and sideways.
The pain was almost immediate—my lungs, my face, my arm, my chest, my stomach.
Elliot was the first to recover.
“Shit. Hank! Hank! Are you okay?”
I coughed and tried to catalogue what was working on me and what wasn’t. “I’m alive. I’m okay.” I hit out at the airbag in my face. “Are you alright?”
“I’ll live. I’ve got to go and see to the others, buddy. I love you, but I need to check on the others in the accident. Are you sure you’re okay?”
I wasn’t okay because I missed that hugely important statement in the middle of Elliot’s sentence. He had to tell me again days later. I fumbled around for my seatbelt and unclicked. Elliot was already getting out of the car.
“Your side is buggered, Hank. Climb over my side, will you? Have a look in the back and see if you can locate my medical bag—you know? The one with all the cool doctor’s toys in it? Bring it over to me.”
He was jogging to the unrecognizable caravan. It was smashed to pieces—white paneling, bedding, and clothing strewn over the grassy verge. I bit back a couple of expletives and climbed over the console and out the driver’s door.
I was met with chaos.
The dust hadn’t even settled, but I could see that we were in the middle of a nightmare. Up ahead of us was the wreckage of the caravan, but still attached to it was the flattened shape of a four-wheel drive, its roof nearly completely caved in. Elliot was reaching through the tiny hole left by the window. I could see an arm flung out of the small space. The arm was covered with blood.
On the other side of the road behind us, and facing the opposite way, was a stock truck full of cattle and now lying on its side with the underbelly of the vehicle facing me. Animals bawled in fright and pain, locked in the small spaces, kicking themselves free. A couple of cows were wandering the road in a daze. I learned later that the red sedan had been trying to overtake the cattle truck. Upon seeing that a crash was imminent with the caravan and car, the sedan had cut off the truck, forcing it to the verge where it overturned, scraping along the road and gouging holes in the earth. The sedan had clipped the larger truck as it desperately tried to head back to its own side of the road. However, since it was going in excess of one ten, it had flipped repeatedly and hurled down the road like a cannonball. From my shocked position near the wreck of Elliot’s car, I could see the sedan a good one hundred meters down the road, bent in half around a tree.
I couldn’t see how anyone would be alive in there.
“Hank!”
Elliot was calling me, so I quickly found his bag and brought it to him. I glanced inside the four-wheel drive vehicle and my heart sank. An older couple were trapped inside, blood and cuts on each of them. Elliot was speaking calmly to the man, asking him about where it hurt the most.
I unzipped the bag and folded it out like I’d seen him do. There were little pockets stuffed full of lots of interesting medical items.
Elliot turned to me. “Hank, I need you to go over to the other two vehicles and give me a report. I’ll stay here. Come back and tell me as soon as you can about any other injuries.”
I obeyed mindlessly, glad that someone else was taking charge. I jogged to the truck on its side, its windscreen shattered but still intact, and clambered up to look through the driver’s window. The driver was groaning and hanging from his seatbelt. He looked up, and I saw it was Frank Watson.
“Frank! Are you okay?”
He groaned loudly. “Fuck! Shit! Aw, mate. I’ve fucked up me arm.”
I could see it was bent at an odd angle from his shoulder. “Okay. Here, hold on to the window with your good arm and I’ll reach in to undo your belt, okay?”
With a bit of maneuvering, I got him out. He was shaky and pale, but not bleeding anywhere. I sat him on the ground and found we had others.
A young man in his thirties was pulling up in a Commodore, so I sent him down to check on the red sedan. From the way he looked inside and then vomited on the ground beside the car, I knew it was too late for that driver.
From the opposite direction, two more cars had stopped. One driver came over and fussed over Frank, which gave me a chance to report back to Elliot like he’d asked.
“What’s the damage over there, Hank?”
“Whoever was in the red car didn’t make it. I pulled Frank Watson out of the truck. He’s hurt his arm and shoulder, but he’s not bleeding anywhere. He’s talking and moving around otherwise.”
“Good. Find me a mobile phone that works and get an emergency operator on the line.”
Another driver was already talking on the phone, and I could tell she’d rung triple-zero. She was making a hash of it, though. “I don’t know where we are! We’re just on the road, and there are accidents everywhere!” she screamed, so I yanked the phone off her.
“Hello?” I said, “Is that the ambulance?”
“Sir?” replied a steady female voice. “Can you please state your location and the situation?”
I could feel a headache of major proportions forming behind my eyes but I tried to answer coherently. “We’re about six kilometers south of Highbury on the Great Southern Highway. Multiple car accident. We have a truck on its side, a car and caravan pretty wrecked up, and two other cars. There are two people in the four-wheel drive that we can’t get out at the moment. The driver of the truck is injured but okay. The red car—I don’t think anyone is still alive in that one. There’s trapped cattle, some injured ones and others walking around.”
“What about the fourth vehicle, sir?”
“That was us. We’re okay at the moment. The guy with me is a doctor, so he’s helping, but shit, I think we need an ambulance fast.”
“Yes, sir. I am dispatching vehicles to your location.”
Elliot was waving me over, so I handed him the phone. With pride I watched him speak with authority to the lady on the other end. “My name is Doctor Elliot Stockton-Montgomery. I’m going to need a life-flight. I have two severely injured patients who require immediate surgery.” I saw him listen to the woman and then describe injuries—pelvic fractures, internal bleeding, heart rate this, blood pressure that. It hurt to breathe, but I was glad I was at least out of our car.
Behind me a gunshot went off, and we all jumped.
“What the fuck was that, Hank?” yelled Elliot, still on the line.
I looked over my shoulder calmly. “They’re shooting the seriously injured cattle.”
More cars pulled up, and I found a relatively calm woman—a mother in her twenties. She could take the flack. Elliot handed over the phone and relayed reports, which she passed on to the emergency operator. Elliot tended to the two trapped people. He reached through the broken glass and squashed roof to try and touch to them. The mother told us that there was a police car about two minutes away, more medical people at least ten minutes out, and the life-flight had taken off. It would be thirty to forty minutes and a space would need to be cleared on the road for it.
Elliot looked up at me in alarm. “Hank! I need to get this woman out of here. Her blood pressure’s dropping. She’s bleeding somewhere I can’t see or reach. She won’t make it unless we get the bleeding under control. We need to open this car up somehow.”
At last—a job that I could do. Give me a bleeding woman and I am useless. Give me a car doing a good impression of a sardine can and… well, I’m good.
I am also loud.
I opened my mouth and yelled at the top of my voice to the gathering crowd. “The doctor says we need to get these people out of the car NOW! I need tools! Crowbars, hammers, axes, rope—anything you have! Search your cars and bring them over!”
One of those Jaws of Life would’ve been handy, but in the end, we made do. There were four other burly blokes to help, and using ropes and steel bars salvaged off the wrecked truck, we pried open the driver’s door. The old man fell out, and Elliot checked him over, while we tried to pop the roof up to get the lady out of the passenger side. The old man was obviously extremely worried about his wife, and I felt bad for him.
The police arrived and put their extra cutting tools to use. A teenager, not more than sixteen, crawled in and frantically tried to undo the bolts under the driver’s seat to get it out and find some room. In the end we stopped trying to
lift
the roof off the woman, tied a whole bunch of ropes around the broken parts, and using a heck of a lot of human muscle, peeled back the metal.
An ambulance arrived, providing two more medical personnel for Quackle to boss around. They were worried about the woman, and the three of them were perched over her in the car when her husband keeled over on the grass a small distance away. I watched in alarm as he suddenly paled and slumped over.
“Elliot!” I yelled.
I rushed to the old man’s side with Elliot who began to frantically look for a pulse. He tried his wrist and his neck, then laid his head on the man’s chest. He obviously didn’t find the heartbeat he was searching for and started pumping. He placed two hands on the man’s chest and pushed downward at what I thought was a frenzied rate. I was about to keel over myself. There were people everywhere, cars at odd angles, cows still kicking and bawling in fright and pain, flashing lights, and humans talking.
Thankfully the two police cars had started clearing the road and setting up a perimeter for the life-flight to set down. The helicopter would need to land on the road. In the distance a white sheet was covering the red car, and one police officer was standing guard to make sure nobody came near. There were mothers, fathers, farmers, tourists, university students—there seemed to be a lot of people around—and who does Elliot call for? You guessed it.
“Hank! I need your help!”
What was I supposed to do? I didn’t tell him that I was dizzy, and my arm and chest hurt. I went over and received an impromptu CPR lesson, which had me pushing on a man so hard I was afraid I was cracking his ribs. Elliot dashed for the open ambulance and came back with a portable defibrillator, just as a woman pushed through the crowd and declared herself a nurse from the UK. I followed their instructions the best I could.
“Clear! Nothing. Keep going, Hank. Charging. Clear. Have you got a pulse? No? Hang on. Hank, go again. Yes! I have him. Good job, Hank. No—he’s not breathing. Get the—”
The two of them talked medical babble while I sat there feeling as helpful as a gorilla at a spelling bee.
They placed a balloon thing over the man’s mouth and began manually squeezing to breathe for him. The two paramedics with the woman were yelling for assistance and desperately required Elliot’s attention, so I ended up pushing on this balloon, breathing for a man I didn’t know, while the UK nurse looked for other injuries. Elliot needed to clone himself.