She shoulder-checked him, knocking his grip off of Zar and back a few steps.
The guy glared at her and reached for something inside his suit jacket.
“Arret,” Zar yelled.
Anna thrust one of her blood-covered hands in front of the man’s face. “This child is bleeding to death right now. Move.”
His eyes widened in surprise, and he backed up another step.
She turned her attention to Zar and the medics. “Go, go, go.”
They rushed off the platform, and she realized that people were pointing at the way to go, giving them a clear path to the helicopter.
When they reached the medical helicopter, the flight medics hopped out and took over for the two carrying Luke.
The helicopter’s rotors whipped the air and flattened Anna’s hair against her skull. She couldn’t understand what anyone was saying, but she pointed at the chest tube, still dribbling a steady trickle of blood, and no one got in her way.
Zar got in first with the IV bags, then the flight medics carefully lifted Luke into the aircraft and strapped his backboard into place. Anna followed, moved farther inside until she was next to Zar, and sat on a narrow jump-seat.
The flight medics closed the helicopter’s door, and the aircraft took off.
One of them handed her and Zar headsets, and she put hers on. “He needs a unit of blood right now.”
One medic shook his head.
Zar took his hat off so they could see him and said something in French that had both medics freezing in place for a moment.
The next second, they were opening a storage container, which turned out to be a small refrigerator, and pulling out a unit of packed red blood cells.
Anna looked at the bag to ensure it was labeled as O negative, then hung it next to the bag of saline. She connected the blood to Luke’s IV needle rather than the saline and opened the line wide. It dripped fast enough to almost look like a constant stream, and given how much blood he had to have lost since the accident... She gently squeezed the bag to push the blood in faster.
“How long to the hospital?” she asked.
“Four minutes,” one of the medics replied.
“Get the other bag going in the other IV,” she ordered.
The medic glanced at Zar, then moved to comply.
She looked Zar over her shoulder and mouthed, thank you.
He smiled grimly and nodded.
Using her stethoscope—damn it, what had she done with her backpack—Anna kept a close watch on the boy’s blood pressure and heart rate. Despite the chest tube, his abdomen still felt taut. They didn’t have long to get him to surgery.
The medic tapped her shoulder and pointed downward. She took that to mean that they were approaching their landing site.
Seconds later, the helicopter touched down, and the doors were thrown open. Luke was removed by two medical porters in OR scrubs. Anna, Zar, and one of the flight medics followed.
The aircraft had landed on the roof of a large building with mountains in the background and a small city below them.
Luke was placed, backboard and all, on a gurney and rolled through a large set of doors. More staff greeted them, yelling questions in French. The medic responded, then pointed at Anna. Several members of the staff glanced at her, but a couple of them outright stared at her like she had three heads or something.
“I’m Dr. Anna Brown, a trauma surgeon from Boston. Does anyone speak English?”
Everyone put up their hands.
Though careful to suggest, Anna asked for blood tests and several units of packed cells to be given to the boy in preparation for surgery.