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‘I’ve got one, I just need a hand with the tape. What happened? I was about to unclick my seatbelt when everything went topsy-turvy.’
‘I’m so sorry, Carys. We had a problem with the landing gear.’ And when she could pull herself together, she’d go check out what that problem had been.
‘So … no take-off, huh?’
‘No take-off,’ she confirmed, ripping off tape with her teeth and securing a pad of gauze to the nurse’s eyebrow. And they bothknew the other of the two Mediflight West planes was en route to a vehicle roll-over five hundred kilometres south. Patient critical, blood loss … that’d take priority over a birth, breech or not. ‘I’ll radio John.’
John Mann would ring everybody he knew in the district who kept a set of wings in their shed. If anyone could find a plane to get Mrs Ullrich to hospital, it would be him.
Another cry made her jerk, and she looked over to the back of the farm ute parked by the old airstrip. ‘Poor woman. Is our new doctor up for this? He looks as though he started shaving about three weeks ago. And how are you feeling, Carys? Dizzy? Loss of vision? Nausea?’
It was easy to name the likely symptoms, because they were the ones she was feeling herself.
‘I’m good,’ said the nurse. ‘Haul me up, will you, lovey? Sounds like I’m needed.’
Kirsty’s hands had a tremor when she reached out to help Carys. That must be the bang to the head making everything around her judder.
Yes. Juddery was the word. She felt off, and sick, andjuddery. ‘You sure you’re not concussed?’ she said. She wanted to ask Carys to check ifshewas concussed, but she wasn’t the patient here. She wasn’t the one wailing in the back of a ute.
Carys—bless her, too, for surviving—was back in action mode. ‘Right. Let’s get ourselves a little organised, shall we? Young master Ullrich seems to be in a hurry to arrive, and he’s setting our timetable here. Looks like we’re having a baby in a paddock today, bum first. You reckon you can get into the cargo hold?’
Kirsty forced herself to check out the B200. The plane’s body and wings were intact, so long as you didn’t dwell upon the sheeredstrips of paint and aluminium where the wingtip had furrowed a new rut in the old airstrip.
The nosecone looked like it had been hit by a freight train, and the starboard propellor—what was left of it—would never see service again.
‘I can get in,’ she said. ‘Tell me what we need.’
‘The humidicrib and the duffle marked INFANT, and the jerry can of sterile water.’
‘I’m on it.’ Busy was good. Busy could fix anything.
But then anything she could do was done, and the medical team were a hundred per cent focussed on the young mum trying to deliver her baby in the back of a ute. She stood in the red dirt, cradling her bruised arm with one hand, and over the agonised noises coming from Janey Ullrich, all she could hear was her mother’s words.
Bad shit happens to Foxes.
Only … stuck out here on a red dirt airstrip, running away wasn’t an option.
