Bride by Accident. Marion Lennox

was Corey?

      Someone was crying. A child. It was a thin, fragile sobbing and it helped her haul herself together. It helped ground her.

      The fog receded, just a little.

      She’d definitely been in a car smash. This was real.

      Somewhere a child was terrified. Did that mean she had to pull herself together and do something about it?

      She put her hand to her head and felt, gingerly, all over. Ouch. OK, she’d been hit on the head and maybe she’d been out of it for a minute or so. But she was OK. She was fine.

      She moved her head a little and paused.

      All right, not fine. But she was OK, and OK was all she had to be going on with.

      But this wasn’t just her. She put a hand on her bulge and thought in sudden fierce anxiety, My baby has to be OK, too.

      As if in response she felt a kick, for all the world like an indignant reminder that she should take more care of her precious cargo.

      ‘Hey, this wasn’t my fault,’ she told her bulge as she pushed herself up onto knees that were decidedly jelly-like.

      She used the car—her mangled car—to haul herself higher. To her feet.

      Her car was a mangled wreck. She’d been lucky to get out alive.

      She was alive. What next?

      The face had said to lie still.

      How could she?

      The child’s sobbing was a trickling stream of fear. What had the professor said at the kids’ hospital where she’d done her medical internship? If a kid comes through the front door screaming, he can usually be put at the end of the queue. It’s the quiet ones you look at first. Don’t ignore the quiet ones.

      Did that mean she could ignore the sobbing?

      No. This sobbing wasn’t a hysterical scream. It was a sound of pure terror.

      Where was the face? Where was the man she’d thought was Corey?

      What had happened?

      She stared around her, growing more appalled by the minute.

      There were logs everywhere, vast, bare trunks, each maybe two feet thick and twenty feet long. They were sprawled over the road like bowled ninepins.

      A guy—maybe the truck driver?—was retching over on the verge.

      Another guy—a little man with a white face and a ripped shirt—was frantically punching numbers into a mobile phone.

      A third adult was crouched by the lorry, clutching his head. There was a crimson stain blooming under his hands.

      And then there were the children.

      One of the children was lying on the road and someone else—another man, the face?—was working frantically over him. Over her?

      Her. A girl.

      The little girl was wearing pink tights, stained crimson. There was a medical bag spread open and she could see the face was trying to attach clamps.

      He looked so like Corey, she thought, the fog drifting. If he was Corey then he must be a doctor, which would explain…

      He wasn’t Corey. He was an unknown doctor, working desperately to save a life. She was concussed. She was seeing things.

      She wasn’t imagining the blood. There was far too much blood.

      She could help. She took a step towards him and then she paused, her medical training slamming in.

      No. This wasn’t about one child. She had to figure out priorities.

      Triage.

      Somehow she forced her attention from the doctor and his small patient. Her eyes started moving methodically from child to child, assessing as she went.

      These kids had all obviously clambered or been lifted from the wreck of the bus. Scratches, lacerations, shock. She did a visual check of each child as well as she could. Looking for desperate need.

      Damn, why didn’t her legs want to hold her up?

      They had to. They had no choice.

      The guy with the bloody head—an older guy in a suit—was looking as if he was in real trouble. He was sitting by the bus as if he’d collapsed there.

      Maybe she should go to him first.

      His situation didn’t look immediately life-threatening.

      Assess the whole situation.

      The kids were all moving. No one seemed to be unconscious. There was lots of blood, but nothing that looked like uncontrolled bleeding. A couple of children were cradling their arms. There’d be fractures, she thought. Lacerations.

      Her eyes moved swiftly across the group. Nothing too urgent, she thought, moving on.

      OK, go to the guy with the suit and the bloody head, or help the doctor.

      Maybe that was where she was needed most. She could help the doctor with the clamps. There was so much blood. He was fighting against the odds.

      But still she held back. This whole assessment had taken only seconds. She’d checked the people. Now assess the scene for further danger.

      Her training—taking in the whole situation before deciding on action—made her eyes move on. To the bus. It lay precariously on the cliff edge, with logs pushing against it. The doctor must have been moving to the bus to check it, she thought, and then been deflected by a need that had been even more urgent. A child bleeding to death.

      The bus could slide down.

      Was it empty? It had to be empty.

      How to check?

      She forced her feet to walk across to the guy with the phone. Somehow. Her legs really didn’t want to hold her up.

      The guy looked as if he was trying to make a phone call. He was punching numbers.

      ‘Is everyone out of the bus?’ she asked.

      He turned and stared at her as if he didn’t understand what she was saying. As if she was a voice without a body attached. Then, without answering, he turned back to the phone and started punching numbers again.

      Too many numbers. The job was too much for him. His fingers were all over the place. Achieving nothing.

      He must be in deep shock.

      Who was he trying to ring? Emergency services? Surely someone had rung them.

      Here was a priority.

      There was no time for gentleness. Emma took a deep breath, told her legs to stay working—she felt as if her body belonged to someone else—and she lifted the phone from the man’s nerveless fingers. She didn’t have time to treat him with kid gloves. The bus could slide at any minute.

      ‘Is everyone out of the bus?’ she demanded, in a voice that could have been heard interstate. It wasn’t a voice that could be ignored.

      Especially when she was two inches from his face.

      He gaped.

      But he didn’t respond.

      She lowered her voice to threatening.

      ‘You want me to slap you? Answer me! Is the bus empty?’

      It worked. Sort of. She’d shocked him out of his stupor, but he was still no use. ‘N-no,’ he whispered. ‘I can’t…I don’t know.’

      He reached for the phone again, as if that was all he could think of to do.

      Maybe he didn’t know whether the bus was empty. Maybe he couldn’t even manage a phone call. Emma took a step back, held onto the phone, punched the emergency code and waited until a female voice responded.