‘I don’t have to make the call. If they need me, they’ll call.’
‘It’s work,’ she raised her eyebrows. ‘We both know you’re itching to make that call. Anyway, call it a sign.’
‘I don’t believe in signs,’ he scoffed. ‘You and I getting together is inevitable, Anouk. We both know it. We can’t out run it, and however hard we try it will catch up with us. That need will wrap itself around us and topple us to the ground.’
‘Then I’ll just have to run faster.’
He laughed. An oddly sensuous sound.
‘The faster you run, the further you get, the harder the fall will ultimately be.’
He hadn’t even begun to make the call when it rang.
‘Here goes.’ Raising his eyebrows, Sol took the call.
When he let go of her hand, it felt too much like a loss. All Anouk could do was try to glean all she could from his terse responses. When he started moving, she hurried to keep up.
‘It’s a major incident,’ he bit out, snapping his phone shut a few moments later. ‘Some kind of gas explosion on Beechmoor Street. Multiple casualties; they’re splitting them between us and the Royal.’
Saskia.
‘That’s around the corner from where I live,’ Anouk cried. ‘I have to get back there.’
He stopped momentarily, swinging back to her.
‘It isn’t safe. The area has apparently been evacuated.’
‘I have to get home.’ She stepped onto the kerb with the intention of hailing a taxi.
‘You won’t get a taxi,’ Sol told her. ‘They said it’s gridlock towards the hospital. If we head around the north side on foot, we should make it to the hospital.’
Should she go? For a moment, Anouk wondered whether following Sol was sensible or not. But if people were injured...?
‘Okay.’ She dipped her head, hurrying after him as he raced ahead.
She hadn’t been called, but if things were that serious then extra hands could only be welcome.
And then, her phone began ringing, too.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘BLOOD GAS IS BACK,’ Anouk announced to her team. ‘She’s got a pH of seven point zero four with a lactate of nine.’
‘Bicarb?’ her colleague asked.
She checked the screen.
‘Eight. Basics are minus twenty. Okay, guys, let’s go back to the beginning. Airway?’
She waited for her team to communicate that it was unobstructed before moving on.
‘Breathing?’
The pause felt like a lifetime, and Anouk knew even before her colleague spoke that the breathing that had been weak before was now absent. Instantly she began CPR.
The casualty had arrived in a bad way. How the crew had even got her from the scene of the explosion to the hospital without losing her was a testament to them, but she could tell this wasn’t likely to go the way she would want. And she hated that. She hated losing a patient.
Any patient. Every patient.