Chapter 29
Janice had been sleeping rough for five days now and then, last night, she had lost her blanket. She had been sleeping next to a thin hedge alongside the road when two men had grabbed her, waking her as they pulled her from the blanket and started to tear her shirt off. She had kicked out, twisting and screaming and then she had run, pausing only briefly to snatch up her doctors bag.
Now she had no idea where she was as the map book had been lying next to her when she slept. During the day she had come across a village that had been burned to the ground. She had thought to search it for food but as she got closer she could see that the ground was covered in bodies and she couldn’t force herself to go any closer. She searched every car that she came across and, in the late afternoon, she found a tin of sweetcorn and a box of Tampons under the passenger seat of an old Rover. She put the Tampons into her bag and opened the tin using one of her scalpels. It was one of the finest meals that she could ever remember eating.
She was constantly thirsty, although she filled her water bottle whenever she could, water butts, streams and even puddles, but she knew that she was slowly dehydrating, her heartbeat was up, she hadn’t urinated for over six hours and her mouth and lips were constantly dry.
The sun was going down and she had to find shelter for the night. Preferably some sort of natural protection, as a barn or house would attract people. And Janice no longer trusted people. After walking for a while she saw what looked like a good spot. A clump of thick bushes in amongst a copse of trees, the vegetation thick enough to dull the cutting wind and to conceal from prying eyes.
She only noticed the gray sheet of plastic once she had worked her way into the middle of the thick patch of greenery. It had been artfully concealed with mud and leaves, low to the ground but skillfully erected so as to provide maximum shelter.
She froze, unsure as whether to turn and run or to investigate further. She squatted down and waited for a while. The minutes ticked by and she heard nothing so she edged forward, slowly, and peeked inside the bivouac.
Lying on his back was a young man dressed in a dirty army uniform. Next to him was a plastic shopping bag containing a couple of full water bottles and three cans of food. She couldn’t see exactly what the cans contained because their labels were burned off. The right side of the soldier’s face was covered with a blood soaked bandage that had been roughly applied. Janice couldn’t tell if he was alive or dead.
She crawled over to him and took his pulse, feeling for it in the side of his neck. He was alive but the pulse was weak and ragged. His breathing so shallow as to be almost impossible to detect.
Janice opened one of the water bottles and drank deeply from it. Her eyes started to water and the sheer pleasure of imbibing the pure liquid made her feel giddy. She drank almost half of the bottle before her thirst was slaked.
Then she opened her doctor’s bag and started to lay out her instruments. First, she removed the bloodied bandage from the soldier’s head, shuddering as it revealed his wound.
He had obviously taken a shotgun round from close range. The pellets had torn out his eye and lacerated the flesh on the right side of his face. She could see four or five of the pellets were still embedded in him, and bits of skin and flesh hung in ragged strips from his cheek, like pieces of red ribbon. The fact that he was still alive was proof of an almost inhuman fortitude.
So Janice set to work, knowing that she had to do what she could, but also knowing that there was less than little chance that this brave young man would last the night.
She worked as fast as she could and by the time the light had failed she had removed the pellets, stitched and glued the tattered flesh, given him a shot of broad-spectrum antibiotics and bandaged the wound. Then she tilted his head forward and spent a while dribbling water into his mouth and ensuring that he swallowed it.
Finally, she lay down next to him, spread her jacket over the both of them and moved as close as she could to keep him warm. She was asleep within minutes secure that she was well hidden from passers by.
When she awoke the next morning the young man was sitting up next to her, sipping water from one of the bottles.
‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘So, I’m not dead.’
Janice smiled. ‘It would appear so,’ she replied.
‘I can feel that you’ve done some work on my face. Are you a nurse?’
‘Doctor,’ said Janice. ‘I cleaned your wound, took the shot out, stitched and made good. But I’m afraid that your eye is gone. And I’m no plastic surgeon, you aren’t going to be entering any more beauty pageants.’
The soldier grinned. ‘Damn, there goes my dream of becoming miss universe.’ He held out his hand. ‘Thank you. My name is Axel.’
She took it. ‘Janice. Pleased to meet you.’
‘I wonder if I could bother you for some pain killers, doc?’ Asked Axel. ‘I must say, the old face hurts like buggery.’
Janice scrambled through her bag, pulled out a bottle and offered Axel some codeine capsules.
‘Right,’ he said after swallowing them. ‘Not sure what your plan is but we need to keep moving. First we breakfast on a tin of beans then keep searching, foraging. To stay is to die.’
‘I’m looking for my parents,’ said Janice. ‘They live in Tempsford.’
‘Where’s that?’
Janice waved her hand in a vague Northerly direction. ‘Lost my map. Not that sure. Whenever I drove to see them I had a satnav. So I simply followed instructions, never really took in the actual directions themselves.’
‘Okay,’ said Axel. ‘We head that way,’ he also waved towards the North.
They both laughed. Then he opened the can of beans using the ring-pull on the top. He fished a spoon out of his pocket and offered Janice, who ate first. She allowed herself a third of the can. The soldier finished off the rest. Then he packed his plastic sheet, water bottles and empty tin into his rucksack and they set off across the fields. At times they saw individuals or couples roaming the countryside and they simply ignored them and kept walking.
However, the one time they saw a large group in the distance and Axel made them hide in a depression in the landscape, gray plastic covering them. Invisible. Discretion was the better part of valor, he told her. And bands of any size were best avoided.
Late afternoon they found a tiny trickle of a steam, filled their water bottles up and drank until their stomachs felt distended. Axel also spent some time pulling tender leaves off a Hawthorn tree. Next he attacked a patch of pretty white flowers, pulling them up by the roots and washing them off in the stream. When Janice got closer he showed her what looked like a handful of anemic carrots.
‘Queen Anne’s lace,’ he said. ‘Wild carrots. Also, Hawthorn leaves instead of bread. Now there’s two of us, we need to substantially increase our supply of food.’ He pushed the forage into his rucksack. ‘Come on. Let’s keep moving.’
They continued north until the sky began to darken. Janice noticed that Axel was starting to stumble a little as he walked, grimacing at the pain. Once again, with a soldier’s feel, he found a spot that they could conceal themselves for the night.
He built his small bivouac and opened a tin of beans. He used the other empty tin to halve the supply and then he chopped the wild carrot up small and mixed it in. Then, using his spoon, he showed Janice to put a spoonful of the bean and carrot onto a Hawthorn leaf, roll it like a mini fajita and eat. Janice was impressed, the leaves were slightly peppery and the carrots imparted a fresh crunch.
Before the light faded she changed his bandage and injected him with the last of her antibiotics. She didn’t say anything to him but the wound wasn’t looking good. Despite her best efforts an infection had started to set in and, already, the stitches were pulled tight, the ruined flesh red and puffy. She needed more antibiotics, much more. Also antibiotic powder and fresh sterile bandages.
The next morning when they awoke, Axel was shivering with the onset of fever. She gave him water and paracetemol and they started to walk, but Janice could see that the young soldier was taking immense strain. Every couple of steps he would stop and shiver uncontrollably and the side of his face had swollen alarmingly.
However, there was little she could do and rest would not slow the infection. Their only choice was to continue and hope for a miracle of some sort.
Late that afternoon the two of them walked around a copse of trees to come face-to-face with five men. Two of the men were carrying shotguns. The others carried baseball bats.
And Janice knew that her prayers for a miracle had gone the other way as the one man ran forward and hammered Axel across the head, knocking him to the ground.
e held out his hand. ‘Axel