Silver Stars (Front Lines #2)(76)

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.”

He goes on for a while, but with the ice chip gone Frangie has time to focus on one very important thing that drives away all other thoughts.

I’m alive!

The voyage takes seven days. Frangie has very little awareness of passing time because now the great danger to her is the fever spreading from a tiny piece of shrapnel that ripped through her intestines. What she knows of the voyage is a drugged dream, a fantasy whirl of white-clad doctors and nurses, light and dark. Sometimes she sees only ghosts. Sometimes she is not on the ship at all, but back home with her mother and father and Obal, and Harder’s there too. Sometimes all she sees is red.

There are the sounds of bells, the constant thrum of engines, rubber-soled shoes squeaking on painted steel, murmured conversation.

And the pain. And the burning.

Eyes open.

Frangie sits up. The pain in her head is still there, but it no longer stabs at her. The pain in her leg is deep and gnawing, but it no longer threatens to overwhelm her.

She looks at herself, at her torso and legs. Two legs! One on each side. That’s good.

Hands? Yes. But one is bandaged and there’s a gap in that bandage where her right-hand ring finger should be.

With stiff and awkward fingers she pulls aside the blanket covering her. She’s dressed in loose pajamas that bulge here and there from the bandages beneath.

“Good morning, pet.” It’s a different nurse, a woman this time, also a brown face, but perhaps from some other part of the far-flung British Empire. The nurse whips out a thermometer, sticks it under Frangie’s tongue, takes her wrist, and counts pulse beats against her watch. The nurse pulls out the thermometer and holds it for Frangie to see. “Ninety-nine point four, and that is a very good thing. The fever has broken, and we may hope it does not return.”

“Can I have water?”

“Orderly? Water, please. We’ll be sending you ashore soon.”

Frangie gulps the water, the sweet, clean, beautiful, luscious water.

If I live a thousand years, no water will ever be sweeter.

“Where ashore? Where are we?”

“We are lying at anchor off Portsmouth. England. As soon as there’s a place at the mole, we’ll go in and offload you all.”

“Thank you.” The nurse nods and starts to move away, but Frangie grabs her hand, wincing at the pain of stiff, unused muscles. “Really. Thank you. Thank everyone.”