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And suddenly, as if waking from a dream to find your body has been set afire, Frangie feels a wave of pain—a sickening, mind-spinning wave of pain—and she knows it’s only the beginning.
The doctor sees her face twisting with pain. “Okay, that’s enough for now, Marr. Nurse?”
Frangie does not feel the jab of the needle. She does feel the way the wave of pain slows and crashes and dribbles down to become nothing but bubbles and bubbles and . . .
She’s in a bed, not a cot. There are sheets beneath her fingertips. Something strange about her hand. Something strange.
It’s dark, but the dark of lights turned down low, not the dark of night. Above her a bulb burns dimly behind a glass shade protected by a wire cage.
She turns her head. Exquisite pain stabs her temples, rockets around her head, and spreads in echoes through her body. A deeper, more compelling pain rises from her leg to dwarf the headache.
She sees beds in a row with hers, how many she can’t tell. A hospital? A horn reverberates, a far-off, melancholy sound. A nautical sound. Is the slight rolling motion just her imagination? Is it a symptom?
No, she’s on a ship. She’s being evacuated. That simple logical deduction is immensely reassuring: her brain still works. It’s confused, it’s drugged, but it still works.
“Where?” Her first complete word. She can hear that it’s an actual word, not a moan.
A man’s face swims into view. Not a black face, but dark, maybe an Indian, like from India, she isn’t quite . . . She refocuses. It’s not a quick or automatic process, she has to think about it, to focus.
Yes, a dark but not African face.
“Well, hello, young miss.”
“Hello.” A second word.
“How are you feeling?”
“Hurts.”
“Yes, I suppose it does.” There is a fruitiness to his English, a musicality. “Now, listen to me. Can you hear me, love?” He covers one ear and then the next as he speaks. “Do you hear equally well through both ears?”
She shakes her head, a mistake that brings back the stabbing pain. “Right not as good.”
An entire sentence!
“But you do hear through the right ear?”
“Yes but ringing.”
“That should go away in time.”
Frangie notices a bag of whole blood hanging. The nurse follows her gaze. “You have just come from surgery. You lost some blood; we are replacing it.”
“Hot. I’m hot.”
“You have a fever, love. There was some sepsis, which would have been arrested earlier, perhaps, had your people not wasted twenty-four hours before evacuating you.”
“What?”
“There was only the field station for blacks. It took some time to find a ship willing to admit you to their sick bay. But you are now aboard a Royal Navy ship, bound for Blighty, so all’s well, eh?”
“Can I have some water?”
“Not just yet, I’m afraid, your fluids will be through IV for now. But here, you can take this chip of ice.”
The ice chip is a tiny bit of heaven. She savors it as it melts on her tongue.
“The surgeons were able to get most of the shrapnel out of you. Not all, but most. Your leg has been set.”
