The Doctors' Baby (13 page)

Jonas took a deep breath, while everyone else absorbed this in horror. ‘That'll take skilled miners. And days.'

‘Not days,' Jim said. ‘Not with the amount of help I'll call in. But it may well take until tomorrow. We just have to hope that Sam can keep still for that long.'

‘He can't.'

Anna had sunk down onto a fallen log, and she was shaking in fear. ‘He's hurting now. He only has to twist…'

‘He's a sensible kid.' Jonas was still holding her, but his face was as white as her own.

‘He's only eight. And he's hurt.'

They knew she was right. Everyone there knew she was right. The chances of Sam staying still for the long hours this would take were slim to non-existent.

And then Em took a deep breath. How wide had Jim said the narrow part of the shaft was?

‘Let me see,' she said. She took Jim's torch before he could protest and crawled across the planking to see for herself. She was very careful, holding the torch clear from the shaft so she could see without dislodging anything.

And she saw exactly what Jim had described. A narrowing fifteen feet down, not wide enough to let a man through, but wide enough to let Sam slip though into the wider chamber beyond and then into the next narrowing.

Not big enough to let a man through…

‘Jim, how wide is that blockage at fifteen feet?' she asked in a strained voice. ‘Can we find out exactly?'

‘I guess.' Jim was watching her from the side of the planking. ‘I have instruments in the truck that can do it.'

‘Then find out for me,' Em told him. ‘If it's wider than my shoulders, I'm going down.'

It took a lot of persuading—about half an hour of constant pressure. There wasn't a man there who wasn't horrified at the thought of
anyone,
much less a woman, going down the shaft.

But there was no choice, and all of them knew it.

‘It'll take hours for you to get the machinery in place, much less start digging,' Em told them. ‘Sam's growing quieter by the minute. He's in shock. He needs a drip to keep his blood pressure up, he needs pain relief and, above all else, he needs someone near him. You tell me there's a slight ledge beside his head where the wall's moved…'

‘We don't know how stable it is.'

‘I won't put weight on it. I'll just use it to lever myself into position. If you can harness me, I'll be held from above and all my weight can stay on the harness. I'll wear a hard hat and I'll take another down for Sam.' She looked
around at the group of strained faces. ‘Please,' she said. ‘It's the only hope he has of surviving.'

They didn't like it. They didn't like it one bit. But they measured the width of the narrow part of the shaft. It'd fit Em's shoulders with an inch to spare.

And it wouldn't fit anyone else but a child.

‘There you go, then,' Em told them. ‘It finally pays to be skinny. So rig me up and get me down there.'

‘Em…' It was Jonas, and his face was etched harshly with strain. ‘The shaft—it's moved already with the landslip. God knows how stable it is. Hell, you can't—'

She couldn't get emotional. ‘Do you have any other ideas, Dr Lunn?'

‘You realise the whole thing could collapse?'

‘Yeah, that's just what Anna wants to hear,' she snapped. ‘And me, too. So forget it. It's not going to happen. If you lower me down so slowly I'm hardly moving, I'll keep my hands away from the walls and I'll put no pressure on anything. I'm not adding to that risk very much at all.'

‘You're putting two lives in danger instead of one.'

‘Then dig fast,' she told him calmly, much more calmly than, in fact, she was feeling. ‘And rescue both of us.'

‘Oh, Em.' Anna was clutching Matt for mutual comfort, but she put her little boy down and came forward to give her doctor a hug. ‘If you'd really do this for us…'

Em hugged her back. And then she stepped away, and looked to Jim. She needed to move fast here before she lost her courage.

She really wasn't
that
brave!

‘I need equipment,' she told the men. ‘Can you organise a line so we can hoist things up and down to me? Medical equipment. Food and water if I want it. Whatever I need.'

‘We can do that.' It was Jonas, and she had the overriding impression that he was close to tears. ‘Em, you realise it could be tomorrow before we get Sam out. You'll be down there until then. We daren't risk pulling you up and down again.'

‘Once I'm down, I'm down to stay,' she agreed, ‘so let's get this right first off.'

‘Em…'

‘What?'

Nothing. He stared at her for a long, long minute, while all the impossibilities crowded in on him.

But there was no choice and he knew it. Without Em, they'd surely lose Sam.

But maybe they'd lose both of them.

He couldn't bear it, and his face showed that to her, too. If he could have cut off his shoulders to do this himself, he would have, she realised, and the thought inexplicably warmed her.

But she was the only one who would fit, and he was forced to let her go.

‘Em,' he said again, and there was a whole depth of meaning—of longing, of fear and of love—behind his words. ‘Love…'

And he took the two steps toward her. There was no choice about what he did then either.

He took her into his arms and he kissed her.

And then, after a contact so precious neither of them could realise just what it meant, he put her away from him, like a man preparing himself for a nightmare worse than anyone could imagine.

‘Stay safe,' he whispered, and Em knew right then and there that his words were a plea for himself—not for her.

 

What followed
was
a nightmare.

Em's descent was prepared with as much care as the men could possibly muster. They planked the entire top of the shaft, fitting a net to catch any rubble before it fell. Then they widened the entrance so it was large enough to fit Em, and also so it was dead centre of the narrow gap fifteen feet down.

‘Because you have to drop straight down,' she was told. ‘You mustn't sway. We can rig the harness so you drop vertically and then we can pull the harness up so you're in a sitting position once you're there, but you have to slip through that gap without touching the sides. If you can't do that, you risk dislodging…'

There was no need to tell her more. She knew what she risked.

So finally, hard-hatted and overalled, placed in a harness that spread her weight through her entire body and wearing a carefully packed medical pouch around her midriff, she was gently lowered through the hole.

The last thing she remembered seeing as she looked up at the people surrounding her was Jonas.

And his face was desperate.

 

‘Sam…'

The little boy was barely conscious. Em had been whispering to him as she descended, focusing on not touching the walls but also intent on not frightening the child into jerking when he realised she was there. He hadn't responded. Now, though, she was within inches of him.

There was a ledge—about ten inches wide or so—on either side of his head. Em shone her torch down to see how Sam was held, and her heart sank.

How had he not slipped through? He was so far through now. One more slip…

There was his head, his hair still bright red and curly, but that was about all that was recognisably Sam. He'd scratched himself falling. His face was bloody and tear-stained, and as white as death.

‘Sam.'

His sightless eyes suddenly focused. He couldn't look up but, seated in her harness above him, Em's hand was on his head, gently running her fingers through his curls. Her voice was urgent.

‘Sam, even though I'm here now, you're not to move an inch. In case you fall further. You understand, Sam?'

‘I…' He gulped. ‘Yes.' He was brave to the core. ‘I understand.'

‘But at least I'm here. I won't leave you.'

‘Mum. Uncle Jonas,' he whispered. ‘I want them.'

‘I want them, too.' She forced herself to chuckle, and it echoed strangely in the darkness. ‘But they're both too fat to come down.'

It was a terrifying experience, trying to hold herself still in the harness and talking into the dark. She had a floodlight on her cap, and the beam of light swung wildly as she looked about her. There was another small torch in her hand which she used to carefully examine Sam. ‘You have got yourself into a pickle, haven't you.'

‘I'm…I'm scared.'

‘You and me both,' Em said solidly. There was no use pretending. Sam was too intelligent a kid not to pick up on a lie when he heard it. ‘But we're in this together, so let's make the best of it.'

The best case scenario—the one they'd hoped against hope for when they'd lowered Em—was that somehow she could rig a harness around Sam so that he could be winched up.

It wasn't remotely possible.

One arm was out of sight. The other hand had been forced up and was wedged at an odd angle between his shoulder and the wall. Em could see his wrist and hand but that was all. The extra width of his arm was what was wedging him. If he moved that hand…

He couldn't. She was almost scared to touch him, much less try and gain a hold. She knew disaster would result.

They just had to play a waiting game.

If he started to slip, she told herself, she'd just grab him around the neck and that one hand and pull. She risked breaking his neck by doing so, but if he was going to fall it was the only chance he had.

Please, let him not slip.

‘Is this the arm that hurts?' she asked, and touched his fingers with a feather touch.

‘Yes. It hurts so much. It just jabs and jabs.' She didn't need to examine him to know it was true. She could hear the agony in his voice.

‘I can help that.' She forced her voice to be as matter-of-fact as possible. ‘Sam, I'm going to pop an injection into your neck. A pinprick—that's all. It'll make you feel really sleepy, but that's OK. You can go to sleep if you want. The men are going to dig down to reach us and it'll take ages so it's better if you sleep. And the injection will stop the pain really fast. Do you think you can hold very, very still and not even wiggle when you feel the needle?'

‘I…I'll try.'

‘Good kid.'

Great kid.

Please, let him not fall…

 

Em wished she could sleep herself.

Hour upon hour she waited. Sam slept and stirred and she comforted him. Over and over.

Once she knew she could reach his wrist, she called up to Jonas and he sent down what she needed to set up a saline drip. Somehow, and afterwards she could never figure out how, she inserted a needle into one of the little boy's crushed arms, then hung the saline bag on the pouch at her midriff.

Please, let him not have any internal injuries, she prayed over and over again. His pulse was thready but that might be shock.

She hung on in the dark and there was no answer to her pleas.

If Jonas hadn't been right there above her, she would have gone quietly crazy.

He talked to her. Over and over. He lay on the planking above her head and he talked her through every stage of what was happening. How they'd decided against drills because of the fear of vibrations in the unstable soil. How they were digging by hand—teams of men—every able-bodied man in the district seemed to be here now, taking turns to dig, to heave soil to the surface, to shore the new shaft, to chop timber for shoring…

It seemed everyone in Bay Beach was here. Lori. Shanni. Erin. Wendy. All her friends. They took it in turns to talk to her—Lori had even brought Bernard, for heaven's sake, and she described him as frantic. Bernard? Frantic?

‘Well, he's scratching his butt,' Lori told her. ‘In Bernard-speak, that's frantic.'

She smiled, but she couldn't smile for long.

But always there was Jonas, speaking softly over everyone else.

‘Em, here's Lori to talk to you. With your weird dog. And Nick. Nick's been digging—you ever seen a magistrate with mud on his face? Em, Ray's been here, demanding to dig. How many weeks after a bypass? I reckon he's crazier than you are. I've told him he has to wait until you come up because I need another doctor if he's going into cardiac arrest again…'

And sometimes there was just Jonas.

‘Em, I'm still here. We're all still here. We won't leave you.'

And then an even shorter message as the night grew longer and the darkness deepened. Over and over.

‘I won't leave you.'

And then… ‘Em, I'll never leave you.'

 

The discomfort was unbelievable. Em hung in her harness and kept her increasingly desperate vigil. Her hand ran through the little boy's hair over and over again, the only contact with him that she dared.

It had been almost impossible to put in the saline drip. He'd jerked once and it had scared the life out of her. So now she monitored the drip, gave him pain relief as he needed it and kept in contact with him by touching his curls.

She was starting to need the contact with Sam as much as he needed it from her.

The walls were closing in on her.

As night fell, the light from the top of the shaft dimmed and died. The shaft seemed to close in still further.

‘Jonas,' she whispered, and he was there. Of course he was there. He'd promised.

‘We're down fifteen feet,' he told her. ‘We're moving faster than I thought possible. We'll have you out by dawn, Em.'

She took a deep breath. ‘I need some light.'

‘You have your flashlight. Are the batteries dying?'

‘No… I mean up there. So I can see…you.'

Her voice trailed off but he had it in one. Claustrophobia was impossible to predict, and when it happened it was almost impossible to control.