She had known all along it would end this way.
“Bring a stretcher!” he called.
It’s no use. You can’t save me either, she thought, and wondered dimly why she hadn’t died from the gas, too. That way I wouldn’t be able to do any more damage. I wouldn’t be able to kill anyone else.
“I need to get you over to the ambulance,” he said. “Can you walk, do you think?”
“Yes,” she said, thinking, They must not have had a stretcher. Major Denewell must have borrowed all of them.
“That’s a good girl,” he said, and put his hand under her arm and helped her to her feet. “Here we go.”
But when she tried to walk, she swayed and fell against him.
He grabbed her arm. “Is your leg injured?”
“No, it’s my shoe,” she said. “I’m all right,” but when she tried again, her head spun and she nearly pitched forward. “My head—”
“You’ve breathed in a bit of gas, miss, that’s why you’re dizzy,” he said, easing her down onto the toppled back of a theater seat. “You need to take deep breaths … that’s it.”
He raised his head and called over her to the men gathered around the hole, “Sit here a minute, miss—what’s your name?”
“Mary,” she said, but that wasn’t right. This was the Blitz, not the V-1s. “Viola.”
“Viola, listen, my name’s Hunter. I want you to stay here a moment while I go fetch some oxygen to help you breathe, all right?”
She nodded.
“I’ll be back straightaway,” he said, and went to meet two men coming across the wreckage with a stretcher. He said something and took the stretcher from them, and they clambered back across the rubble. He took it over to the hole, where they were lifting out the section of balcony wall.
So they can remove Sir Godfrey’s body, she thought, watching them. You should wait till the gas is shut off.
“Fetch me a plasma drip,” someone called from the hole, and one of the men bounded off like a deer across the tangle of wreckage.
Why is he hurrying? Polly thought, bewildered. Sir Godfrey’s already dead.
Why is he hurrying? Polly thought, bewildered. Sir Godfrey’s already dead.
She limped over to the hole. They were lifting him out and onto the stretcher. His chest was bandaged, a pad of white gauze taped to the wound, and there was a bandage on his wrist and a line of tubing running up his arm to a glass bottle full of plasma one of them was holding.
“Easy, don’t jar him,” the man holding the bottle said as they lifted the stretcher. “You’ll set him bleeding again.”
He isn’t dead, she thought wonderingly.
But that didn’t mean she’d saved his life. She’d only delayed his death. He’d die on the way to hospital. Or on the way to the ambulance, as they carried him across the wreckage on the stretcher. “I’m so sorry,” she said, and the men looked over at her.
“What the bloody hell’s she still doing here?” the one holding the plasma said. “She needs medical attention.”
Hunter hastened over to her. “Viola, I’m going to take you to the ambulance now,” he said. “Put your arm round my neck.”
“Careful,” one of the stretcher-bearers warned as they started across the wreckage with it. “If you strike a spark, you’ll send us all up.”
“We must go, Viola,” Hunter said urgently. “The theater could go up any moment.”
Of course, the gas. One of the stretcher-bearers’ hobnailed boots will scrape against the iron leg of a seat, and the gas will explode in a fireball and envelop us all.
Including Hunter, who stayed behind to try to help me.
She had to get away from him. Perhaps if he wasn’t near her or the stretcher when the theater went up, he’d only be injured. “I’m all right. I can walk on my own,”
she said, and struck out away from him across the tangle of seats, going as quickly as she could with one shoe and one bare foot.
“Careful, slow down!” Hunter called behind her. “You’ll fall.”
She clambered across a row of seats and over a mahogany railing. The men carrying the stretcher were halfway across the theater, the bottle of plasma held aloft like a lantern.
Polly stepped down onto what had been a wall, painted with masks of Comedy and Tragedy. She glanced back at Hunter. He was only a few steps behind her.
Go away, she thought frantically, hobbling across Tragedy, across Comedy, I’m deadly, and her single heel went through the plaster, all the way up to her ankle.
She fell forward onto her hands and knees.
“What happened?” Hunter said, and before she could warn him to keep away, he jumped down beside her and helped her to stand. “Are you hurt?”
“No, my foot—”
