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No one was in the water, and for a hot Saturday that was almost unheard-of. Instead, there were scores of people milling around the beach in horrified clusters.

There were three main groups. Two children had been injured, Rob had said, and Dr Pryor. Steve…

Dear heaven.

Abbey pushed her little car as far over the beach as she dared, then grabbed her bag and ran the rest of the way. Her bruised knee was forgotten.

There were people everywhere!

‘Abbey!’ It was Rod, seeing her and calling through the crowd, and his voice was urgent. ‘Abbey, I need you here. Now!’

Not yet. First she should check all casualties and sort out priorities. Triage… Abbey gave a helpless look around. There seemed to be blood and people everywhere. Many of the swimmers were bloodstained. At a guess, many had carried the injured from the water.

There was mass shock, mass distress and tears, and the sobbing of frightened children.

Caroline, the nurse who’d come to the beach with Steve, was bending over a child, and she seemed to be working frantically. But Rod’s voice was just as frantic and Abbey finally abandoned triage as an impossibility. She trusted Rod enough to be led. Two seconds later she was at Rod’s side and she knew there could be no higher priority than the one facing her.

Steve.

Steve Pryor’s leg was slashed to the bone and bright red arterial blood was spurting upwards.

‘I can’t stop it,’ Rod gasped. ‘Abbey, help.’ He was searching desperately for a pressure point and getting nowhere. The wound was massive.

‘Get me towels!’ Abbey snatched the first towel she could see from one of the limp and appalled bystanders. She shoved it into a pad over Steve’s leg and pressed as hard as she could. She used every muscle she had, and a few she didn’t know she possessed, as she pressed downward.

‘OK, Rod, wind another towel around the top of his leg. Fast. You’ll have to burrow under the leg as I can’t take the pressure off here. And, Don… ’ She looked up and directed her gaze at a middle-aged man with a beer gut. The local publican.

‘Don, I need your help. Get everyone’s towels, beachbags-anything you can lay your hands on-and shove them under Steve from his waist to his feet. Work under me. Put them under his hips, use them to shore up sand and build a pile. I want Steve’s legs to be above his heart from waist to ankles.’

The publican looked a sickly shade of green.

‘Abbey, I can’t…’

‘Don’t give me can’t!’ Abbey snapped. ‘Steve’ll die if you can’t. Just do it!’

As the publican moved to do her bidding Abbey glanced up as another car roared across the beach and stopped in a shower of sand, its tyres spinning.

Ryan, too, had beaten the ambulance.

Ryan… She wasn’t alone.

There was no time for Abbey to do more than glance upwards and say a tiny thankful prayer that Eileen had been able to locate him. All her concentration was on getting enough pressure on the pad to stop Steve bleeding.

Where on earth was the ambulance? She had to have plasma. Now!

And what about the injured children?

‘Ryan, I haven’t done triage,’ she gasped as Ryan reached her side. She was pushing down as hard as she could on Steve’s leg and she couldn’t move. ‘There are two others hurt but I can’t leave this.’

‘There’s a girl with a gashed arm. My boys are dealing with her,’ Rod told her briefly. He was hauling another towel tight around Steve’s upper leg. He glanced up at Ryan. ‘But Leith Kinley’s just over there, Doc, and she’s hurt bad. We carried her out of the water on a surfboard because she wasn’t feeling her legs. Caroline-the nurse who was with Doc Pryor-is with her but she looks… I dunno…’

Leith Kinley… Their little asthmatic. Ryan’s swimming pupil.

Ryan took one long, hard look down at the nearunconscious Steve and turned to where Leith was lying ten yards away. Abbey felt her heart give a sickening lurch. Leith… But she had to leave Leith to Ryan. If she didn’t concentrate on what she was doing Steve would bleed to death under her hands.

Where on earth was the ambulance?

And what had happened? It seemed inconceivable that someone just ride a jet ski into the swimming beach.

And then the ambulance screamed across the sand, followed by the local police car, the fire truck and the State Emergency Services van for good measure. Eileen had clearly decided that the more people helping the better.

And Eileen herself arrived in the hospital car.

With plasma. Eileen had plasma.

For Steve, plasma meant the difference between life and death, and he’d lost so much blood now that the line between the two was growing very close indeed.

For the next few minutes Abbey couldn’t think past getting the plasma running into Steve’s body and the flood of blood from his leg completely stopped. Finally, with the combined effort of Abbey, Rod, Don and Eileen, they achieved success.

Abbey sat back in the sand and looked down. She took three deep breaths, as if she hadn’t had time to breathe until now. Steve’s leg was no longer bleeding. The tourniquet would have to be loosened every few minutes to let the blood flow through but she’d tied towelling pads across the wound so tightly that it shouldn’t be a problem.

Plasma and intravenous fluids were flowing into Steve’s veins. And adrenalin to counter shock. His pulse was thready but still there. He was young and strong. He’d need a decent surgeon to repair the damage to his thigh but, barring complications, Steve should live.

‘You’ll make it, Steve,’ Abbey whispered as she saw his eyelids flutter open. She gripped his hand and held tight. She’d only known this young doctor for three weeks but he was already a friend.

‘He’s a bloody hero,’ Don said faintly. Despite his initial protest, Don had worked like a Trojan, building Steve up with towels and sand so his thighs were at a thirty degree angle to his torso. It had made Abbey’s job of stemming the blood loss much easier, and Don hadn’t fainted once. Now, though, with urgent needs over, Don shoved his head between his knees and took a few deep breaths himself. When he finally raised his head he looked better.

‘You know he saved the kids?’ Don said.

‘How?’ Abbey was looping a vast strip of Elastoplast around the pad of towels pressing down on Steve’s leg. She didn’t want the pad coming loose before he reached Cairns. Steve would have to go to Cairns, she knew, and probably on to Brisbane. He needed plastic surgeons skilled in reconstruction for this leg.

‘There was a bloody kid on a jet ski,’ Don told her roughly, glaring around the beach as if trying to locate him. ‘Showing off outside the nets. In bathers and no other protection, mind.

‘Then the obvious happens. He gets stung by a stinger of some sort and assumes it’s a box jellyfish. Panics and starts screaming and then comes haring through the nets to the beach. Forgot the nets would foul him. Got all tangled up and wrenched out of it-straight into a group of kids.

‘Steve here saw him coming,’ Don added, staring down at the injured doctor in awe. ‘Faster than the rest of us put together, I reckon. He lunged across and shoved the kids out of the way. If it wasn’t for Steve, it’s my guess we’d have half a dozen dead kids.’

‘Oh, Steve…’

‘And then Caroline-the only qualified nurse on the beach-tried to stop his leg bleeding and Steve made her go to Leith,’ Rod added. The lifesaver had fixed the tourniquet to his satisfaction and now was wiping some of the blood from his hands with an already bloodied towel.

Towel sales in Sapphire Cove were due to go through the roof in the next few days, Abbey thought grimly.

‘Caroline showed us how to get Leith out of the water without moving her back but, meanwhile, Steve here was bleeding like a stuck pig.’ The lifesaver shoved his hand on Steve’s shoulder and gripped hard. ‘You’re all right, mate. A bloody hero.’