Dead Man's Grip

above Scoop and run . It meant that although the victim’s chances were slim, they would do all they could – try their best until he was dead and they could stop. Going through the motions, if nothing else.
    She was aware of the scream of an approaching siren getting louder. Then she heard Phil radioing for the fire brigade to bring lifting gear. She squeezed the young man’s hand. ‘Hang on in,’ she said. ‘Can you hear me? What’s your name?’
    There was no response. The pulse was weakening. The siren was getting louder still. She looked at the stump of his severed leg. Almost no blood. That was the only positive at this moment. Human bodies were good at dealing with trauma. Capillaries shut down. It was like the accident she had attended two years ago, when one of the young lads was dying but was hardly bleeding at all. The body goes into shock. If they could get a tourniquet applied, and if she was careful with his intestines, then maybe there was a chance.
    She kept her fingers pressed hard on his radial artery. It was weakening by the second.
    ‘Hang in there,’ she said. ‘Just hang in there.’ She looked at his face. He was a good-looking kid. But he was turning increasingly paler by the second. ‘Please stay with me. You’re going to be OK.’
    The pulse was continuing to weaken.
    She moved her fingers, desperately searching for a beat. ‘You can make it,’ she whispered. ‘You can! Go for it! Go on, go for it!’
    It was personal now.
    For Phil he might be a Fubar Bundy , but for her he was a challenge. She wanted to visit him in hospital in two weeks’ time and see him sitting up, surrounded by cards and flowers. ‘Come on!’ she urged, glancing up at the dark underbelly of the lorry, at the mud-encrusted wheel arch, at the grimy girders of the chassis. ‘Hang on in there!’
    Phil was crawling back under the lorry with his red bag and his critical haemorrhage kit. Between them, they covered everything that modern medical technology could throw at a trauma victim. But even as Phil tugged the red bag open, displaying pockets filled with vials of life-saving drugs, apparatus and monitoring equipment, Vicky realized, in this particular situation, it was mere cosmetics. Window-dressing.
    The young man’s pulse was barely detectable now.
    She heard the whine of the EZ-10 bone drill, the fastest way to get the emergency cannula in. Every second was critical. She assisted Phil, locating the bone inside the flesh of the good leg, just below the knee, the professional in her kicking in, pushing all emotion aside. They had to keep trying. They would keep trying.
    ‘Stay with us!’ she urged.
    It was clear that the poor young man had been dragged right around the wheel arch after the wheel had gone over his midriff, crushing him and splitting him open. Phil Davidson was calculating the likely damage to his internal organs and bones as he worked. It looked as if one of the wheels had shattered his pelvis, which in itself was usually sufficient to cause massive internal bleeding and almost certain death – on top of everything else that was probably going on in there.
    This lad’s best hope, he thought grimly as he worked on, would be to die quickly.

11
    Roy Grace was shocked to see how pale Cleo looked. She lay in a high bed, in a room with pale blue walls that was cluttered with electrical sockets and apparatus. A tall man in his early thirties, with short, thinning brown hair, dressed in blue medical pyjamas and plimsolls, was standing beside her, writing a measurement on a graph on his pad as Roy entered.
    She was wearing a blue hospital gown, and her blonde hair, cascading round her face, had lost some of its usual lustre. She gave Roy a wan, hesitant smile, as if she was happy he had come, but at the same time embarrassed that he was seeing her like this. A forest of electrode pads were attached to her chest and a monitor, like a thimble, covered her thumb.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ she said meekly, as he took her free hand and squeezed it. She gave him a weak squeeze back.
    He felt a terrible panic rising inside him. Had she lost the baby? The man turned towards him. Grace could see from his badge that he was a registrar.
    ‘You are this lady’s husband?’
    ‘Fiancé.’ He was so choked he could barely get the word out. ‘Roy Grace.’
    ‘Ah, yes, of course.’ The registrar glanced down at her engagement ring. ‘Well, Mr Grace, Cleo is all right, but she’s lost a lot of