Page 100 of Savage Warrior

“Stay there a moment. The ambulance is on its way.”

Ambulance? What? Why…? Then it hits me. All of it.

“Where are the others?” I demand. I swing my gaze from left to right, but I can’t make out anything. I’m surrounded by a grey blur, like fog but… not.

“How many of you were there?” the disembodied voice asks me.

How many? I don’t know… I try to count in my head, but the numbers just dance and leap. I can make no sense of it.

“I see six, including him.” A female voice this time. “Four men, two women. Well, one woman and a child.”

I try to think. Yes, yes, that’s right. There were four of us, as well as Magda and Natalija. “Are they… are they all right?” I manage to croak. “The others…”

“Don’t you be worrying about them now, mate. Just you—”

I open my eyes again, force myself to focus. The sound of weeping is still there, somewhere close by. I peer into the fog. If I stare hard enough, it will clear.

It does, and I make out the slim figure of Natalija, sitting on the ground a few feet from me, hunched over, her face in her hands. She’s the one crying. That’s the only sound. The rest is eerie silence.

I reach for her, grasp the hem of her tattered dress. “Natalija?”

She turns, sees me, and crawls over to huddle against me. I wrap my arms around her and rock the pair of us as though I can make this nightmare go away.

The distant sound of a siren reaches us.

“Thank God,” the woman mutters. “I’ll go over and flag them down.”

There’s the sound of an engine flaring to life, loud, like a tractor.

I continue to gather my shattered wits, to battle to make some sense of everything, despite the ringing in my ears and the throbbing pain in my hand and my ankle.

A loud moan comes from somewhere behind me. I crane my neck to see.

A stranger is there, a man in work clothes bending over a shape on the ground. The moan comes again. I recognise the voice this time.

“Tony? Tony, speak to me.”

“Are you alive, bro?” His voice sounds to be coming from a long way away.

“I reckon I might be,” I reply. “You?”

“It’s possible. Jury’s out.”

“What about everyone else? Ethan? Aaron? Magda?” I swing my gaze around, taking in the wrecked helicopter a few yards away, and only then do I spot the other three bodies sprawled around it. “Oh God,” I moan. “Are they…?”

“Let the ambulance crew do their job, mate.” The workman, farm labourer by the look of him, is waving his arms above his head. “They’re here now.”

The siren has ceased, but the blue lights flash bright as a pair of ambulances bounce across the ploughed field we seem to have crashed in. They are followed by a tractor. The convoy arrives, and uniformed crew leap into action. I watch with a sort of disengaged fascination while they rush from one body to the next, leaving me, Natalija, and Tony till last.

“What are they doing?” I ask no one in particular.

The paramedics have set up drips for both Magda and Ethan, but it seems to be Aaron they are most interested in. Three of them cluster round him, and one is performing CPR while another messes about with a defibrillator.

No. Please, no…

I watch, horrified, as they shove a tube down his throat, then lift him onto a stretcher. He’s loaded into the first ambulance, and it sets off across the rough terrain at a snail’s pace.

“Can’t they go any faster?” I demand of the paramedic who is now crouching beside me.