Page 15 of Winter's End
The German stepped backward to the seat just in front of her, held up what looked like a heavy baton, and thrust it downward with force. Bones cracked, the sound unmistakable, and a man howled in pain.
The German reached for his pistol, held it over his head. “Who is next?” he shouted, yanking a small child out of her seat. “Perhaps this pretty littlefraulein?”
The child’s mother shrieked, people stirred and mumbled, the man with the broken bones groaned louder.
“No!” Zoe found herself shouting. “Put her down. She is an innocent child. Choose someone your size, please,mein Herr, bitte!”
Releasing the child, the big man moved forward, stopped directly in front of Zoe, and shoved the pistol in front of her face.
Terrified, Zoe sat wide-eyed.
A long moment passed.
“Stop!” someone behind her shouted. “Stop! I am Johan Gruber.”
The Nazi slowly holstered his pistol and strode toward the back of the bus. “Johan Gruber, you have been named an enemy of the Reich. This is yourfrau, Gerda Gruber?”
There was a shuffling of papers, the sound of handcuffs clicking into place, and muffled sounds as the Germans half-kicked, half-dragged the man and his kerchiefed wife down the aisle, down the steps, out into the pearly gray darkness. The flashing lights of a German Kubelwagen lit frightened faces red and blue as the doors of the bus wheezed closed.
Outraged cries, tears, shouts. Zoe heard it all, her heart still racing, loudest to her ears the moans and groans of the injured passenger just in front of her. The driver was pleading for people to return to their seats, but before the bus pulled back onto the roadway, Zoe was out of hers.
She stopped briefly to assess the passenger across the aisle, a middle-aged man in a suit and tie with bright red bloodstains on his clean white shirt. Palpating his bloodied nose as gently as she could, she noted with surprise that it did not appear to be broken.
“Apply pressure,” she reached into her coat pocket and handed him a lace-trimmed handkerchief. “I will be back in a moment,” she told him, moving to the seat in front of her.
A glance at the keening man’s bloodied trousers told her the sound of bones breaking she had so clearly heard had been the fracture of his right knee cap when the German’s baton smashed into it. There was a jagged tear in the woolen pant leg and the knee appeared to be swelling.
“My name is Zoe Visser,” she told him in low tones. “I am a veterinarian, not a medical doctor, but I think perhaps I can help ease your suffering a bit until you can be seen by a doctor.”
All around her, there was chatter, shouting, the sounds of people sobbing.
“Help, please.”
“My daughter needs help!”
“I can’t find my medication!”
Zoe bent to her patient in the low light, gingerly palpated the knee.
“Aah!,” the man groaned.
“What is your name, sir?”
“Hans…ah, it hurts!”
“I know, Hans. Take a deep breath. I will try to fashion some kind of tourniquet.”
Glancing around her, she spied a towheaded child clutching something that looked like a wooden cribbage board.
“Behagen,” she bent to the boy’s level. “How would you like to be a hero today, and let me use your cribbage board to help that man whose knee was broken?”
The boy looked at her, blue eyes wide, and silently held out the board.
It was small for her purpose, but placing it beneath the man’s shattered knee cap, she pulled the wool scarf from around her neck and wound it tightly around the makeshift splint.
A small crowd had gathered behind her.
“Back in your seats, please,” the bus driver shouted. “For your safety, please, back in your seats!”
