CHAPTER TWO

      LIFE AS BORRAWONG’S only doctor was sometimes boring, but just as often it was chaotic. If one person went down with the flu, the whole town usually followed. Kids never seemed to fall out of trees on their own. Ellie had a great team at the hospital, though. Usually she could cope.

      But not with this.

      Two carloads of kids had been drag racing on a minor road with a rail crossing without boom gates. Maybe the drifting fog had hidden the crossing’s flashing lights and the sight of the oncoming train until it was too late. Or maybe alcohol had made them decide to race the train. Whatever the reason, the results had been disastrous.

      The train had just left the station so it had been travelling slowly, but not slowly enough. It had ploughed into one car, pushing it into the car beside it.

      If the train had been up to speed, every occupant of the cars would have been killed. Instead, Ellie had seven kids in various stages of injury, distress and hysteria. Parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins—practically the whole town—were crammed into the waiting room or spilling into the car park outside.

      Air ambulances were on their way from Sydney but the fog was widespread and there were delays. The doctor from the neighbouring town was caught up with an unexpected traumatic birth.

      She was the only doctor.

      Right now, she was focusing on intubating seventeen-year-old May-Belle Harris. May-Belle was the town’s champion netballer, blonde, beautiful, confident. At least she had been. Her facial injuries would take months of reconstruction—if Ellie could get her to live past the next few minutes.

      Ellie’s team was fighting behind her, nurses and paramedics coping with trauma far beyond their training. But while she fought for May-Belle’s life, she had to block them out.

      ‘You can make it,’ she told May-Belle as she finally got the tube secure. At least she now had a safe air supply. The girl was deeply anaesthetised. She should have an anaesthetist to watch over her before she could be transferred to Sydney for specialist reconstructive surgery. Instead of which, she had Joe.

      ‘Can you take over?’ Ellie asked the seventy-year-old hospital orderly. ‘Watch that tube like a hawk and watch those monitors. Any change at all, yell. Loud.’

      ‘Louder than these?’ Joe said with a wry grimace. There were six others kids waiting for attention, plus the injuries and bruises of the train crew who’d been thrown about on impact. Some of these kids—the least injured—were...well, loud would be an understatement. One of the girls was having noisy hysterics and the very junior nurse allocated to her couldn’t quieten her.

      With years of experience, Ellie knew she could quieten her in a minute but she didn’t have a minute.

      ‘Grab me by the hair and pull me over here if you need me,’ Ellie told Joe. Block everything out and focus on that breathing.

      Moving on...

      A boy with bubbling breathing also needed urgent attention. There had to be a punctured lung.

      A girl with a shattered elbow needed her too. She risked losing her hand if Ellie didn’t re-establish a secure blood supply soon. The lung had to be a priority but that elbow was at an appalling angle. If the blood supply cut...

      And what if there were internal injuries?

      Focus, she told herself. Do what comes next.

      * * *

      He was heading for Borrawong’s Bush Nursing Hospital.

      Marc hadn’t been surprised when Josef’s discreet investigators had told him Ellie was back working here. This was where her mother had lived, the town Ellie was raised in.

      The last time he’d seen her she’d been heading home to care for her mum.

      Borrawong was a tiny town miles from anywhere. A wheat train ran through at need, hauling the grain from the giant silos that seemed to make up the bulk of the town. The train felt like the town’s only link with civilisation.

      He’d never been there. ‘As long as Mum stays well, I’m never going back,’ Ellie had told him. She was jubilant at having escaped her small-town upbringing, her childhood spent as her mother’s carer. Until those last days when their combined worlds had seemed to implode, she’d put Borrawong far behind her.

      But now Josef’s investigator had given Marc the low-down on Borrawong as well. ‘Population six hundred. Bush nursing hospital, currently staffed with one doctor and four nurses, servicing an extended farming district.’

      To be the only doctor in such a remote community, to have returned to Borrawong... What was Ellie doing?

      Had her mother died? Why had he never asked?

      Because he had no right to know?

      He landed in Sydney, then drove for five hours, heading across vast fog-shrouded fields obviously used for cropping. It was mid-afternoon when he arrived, and midwinter. The time difference made him feel weird. The main street of Borrawong—such as it was—seemed deserted. The general store had a sign: ‘Closed’ pinned to the door. The town seemed deserted.

      Then he turned off the main street towards the hospital—and this was where everybody was.

      The tiny brick hospital was surrounded by a sea of cars. There were people milling by the entrance. People were hugging each other, sobbing. Two groups were involved in a yelling match, screaming abuse.

      What the...?

      He pulled up in the far reaches of the car park and made his way through the mass of people. By the time he reached the hospital entrance, he had the gist. A train had crashed into two carloads of kids.

      How many casualties?

      The reception area was packed. Here, though, people were quieter. This would be mum and dad territory, the place where the closest relatives waited for news.

      He made his way towards the desk and a burly farming type guy blocked his path.

      ‘Can’t go any further, mate,’ the man told him. ‘Doc Ellie says no one goes past this point.’

      Ellie. So she was here. Coping with this alone?

      ‘I’m a doctor,’ he told him.

      The man’s shoulders sagged. ‘You’re kidding me, right? Mate, you’re welcome.’ He turned back to his huddled wife. ‘See, Claire, I told you help’d come.’

      He was the help?

      There was no one at the reception desk, but double doors led to the room beyond.

      A child was sitting across the doors. He was small, maybe nine or ten years old.

      He was in a wheelchair but he didn’t look like a patient. He was seated as if he was a guard. He had his back to the doors and he held a pair of crutches across his chest. Anyone wanting to get past clearly had to negotiate the crutches, and the kid was holding them as if he knew how to use them.

      Right now he seemed the only person with any official role.

      ‘I’m here to see Dr Carson,’ Marc told him. The kid’s expression was mulish, belligerent. The crutches were raised to chest height, held widthways across the doors. ‘I understand there’s been an accident,’ Marc said hurriedly. ‘I might be able to help.’

      ‘No one goes in,’ the kid told him. ‘Unless you’re Doc Brandon from Cowrang, or from the air ambulance. But you’re not.’

      ‘I’m a doctor.’

      ‘You’re not a relative? They all want to go in.’

      ‘I’m not family. I’m a doctor,’