Devonshire Squires Chapter Twenty Eight
"Do either of you speak Chinese?" George Hayter asked the question more in hope than in expectation, but after the half hour they'd just endured, they were due for a bit of luck.
The blonde uniformed woman who was nearly as tall as he was said "no", and her petite companion paramedic just shook her head. He figured they'd both heard the "Little and Large*" comparisons too often, so didn't bother. In any case, his normally strong sense of humour that kept him going during medical traumas was wearing thin by this stage.
The women were the third ambulance crew, and they'd drawn the short straw.
When Mary Morstan had texted him, George was penned in with the fighters being processed by the police. She'd been forced to stand on the other side of the police tape, until she managed to get the silver-haired detective inspector to let him out.
"How are you at handling PTSD cases?" she'd asked as they hurried to the swing doors.
"Watson?"
She'd stopped momentarily at the doors and looked at him carefully, before asking "how did you know about that?"
Hayter had shrugged, "What can I say? RAMC is full of gossip, and he is rather a celebrity these days. What's happened? Do you know what triggered it?"
She'd shaken her head. "No, not John. Sherlock…"
By the time they approached the treatment room, he'd been given the low-down: injured, high fever, delirious, drugged up on what Watson thought was cocaine- and in the middle of a flashback, talking in Chinese. Oh, and highly dangerous, because the second casualty might not live due to the thrashing he'd been given by Holmes. According to Mary, moving the second casualty would prove challenging, precisely because of that and how close the unconscious man was to Holmes.
Their conversation was interrupted by a crash of metal and a curse from the room, making Mary break into a run. George saw an armed officer watching from the corridor, trying to decide what to do about the commotion.
When they got to the door, a man in a business suit bolted out cursing and holding his forearm. Mary was onto him in a flash, and pushing up the slashed right sleeve to examine the deep knife wound. But she still called out, "John, you okay in there?"
"Still busy." It was said quietly, but with some feeling. "Just keep people out and I might have a chance."
She ripped the white cotton shirt, now splashed with blood. "Well, Mister Nobody, do have you a name? I prefer to know who I'm sewing up."
"Ashley Lewis."
"What did you do?" she asked, pushing him down so he was seated with his back against the wall of the corridor. George dropped to his knees beside her and opened his medical kit, pulling out a suture kit and bandages. Mary ripped open the pressure bandage and applied it rather firmly.
The dark-skinned man grimaced. "Tried to stop him from getting a hold of the knife, the one that Watson had put on the counter after he used it in the op; said it was evidence- possible murder weapon used on Kirwan. I was trying to bag it when Holmes grabbed me." He winced as she applied a pressure bandage. "Trouble is, I don't want to hurt him, but he doesn't have the same idea about me."
She sighed. "Do you blame him? To him, you are a stranger with a knife." She worked Ashley's suit jacket off and then over the bandage, as the swing doors from the gym opened to admit a pair of ambulance paramedics. She lifted the pressure bandage to gauge the speed of blood loss, muttering "You'll live; I'll leave this on for a little while; the suturing can wait until the situation is under control again."
As the two man crew came up and started to bend down to help, Mary shook her head. "Not him; he's walking wounded, and I can do the sutures needed. There are three others in there needing more urgent help. So call for reinforcements."
Perhaps because of the tone in her voice, George smirked as the paramedic in front just pulled out his radio and got on with ordering another two ambulances. The other one started toward the door, only to be hauled up short by another snapped order from Mary.
"And you're not going in there- one of the patients is armed and very mentally unstable. So, let this man and the doctor who's already in there do their work." She looked up at Hayter. "John needs your help- tape and gauze to stabilise an airway so this lot can take the first casualty away. Just be quiet, lend a hand and try to keep an eye on what's going on with Sherlock. Your assessment of his state of mind will help."
He smiled at her. "Thank you, Nurse, for your excellent triage."
She started cutting lengths of tape, adding, "Just what we needed- more strangers when Sherlock is not only dangerous, but armed, as well."
Hayter went in very carefully, making sure that he kept Watson between him and the dark brooding presence in the far corner of the room, now back down behind the upturned treatment bed. Against a soundtrack of growled Chinese which sounded like half a conversation, George helped the doctor stabilise the make-shift breathing tube and get the unconscious African onto a body board. Together they lifted him out of the treatment room and onto a trolley manned by the ambulance crew who took him away. They were less than two and half miles from The Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, so he felt confident that the man would survive and recover. His respect for Watson's skills under pressure grew, as he wondered whether he would have had the nerve to do the emergency cricothyrodomy operation with a flick knife in the dark.
By then, the second crew were in the corridor; as they came to the door, Watson spoke in a quiet but firm whisper that still managed to carry to the men.
"Not in here. We need a long spine board to immobilise this patient- but we'll do it. Too many people in here will cause problems."
"You could do with more light," said one of the paramedics as he started to reach for the light switch.
"No! Lights off! No need to trigger another violent episode."
The paramedic's hand stopped in mid-air, half way to the switch. George gave a wry smile. You can take the man out of the army, but not the army out of the man. Watson's order had just as much impact as if he'd shouted it, even though it had been said in a barely more than a whisper.
Using a seond torch provided by the ambulance crew, he took one look at the extent of the head injuries on the injured man, and then George understood Watson's last comment. The fighter's head had been repeatedly smashed, all along the left temple. This was violence for violence's sake; Cunningham would have been unconscious and no threat after the first blow. As Watson's torch beam focused on the injury, George used his to spot blond hairs and blood on the side of the treatment bed on its side, just behind the injured man. The paramedic was also taking a look in the torch beam and gave a grunt. "Looks nasty. I'll get the collar and side supports."
Perhaps because it was a voice he didn't recognise, but, the volume of Chinese emerging from the other side of the treatment bed suddenly went up, and a definite edge of panic crept into the tone. Not good. While George's hands were busy with straightening out the legs and arms on his side of the comatose patient, his mind was starting to wonder just how they were going to be able to convince the third patient to accept help quite so quietly.
oOo
John was trying to focus on his new patient, without thinking too much about the fact that Alec Cunningham was a self-confessed murderer who had inflicted serious damage on Sherlock, not to mention threatening to add him to the body count, as well. He'd faced a situation like it before in Afghanistan, when giving emergency first aid to a Taliban fighter who had tried to ambush a foot patrol, but ended up getting shot himself. Then he'd rationalised it by thinking that the man who was bleeding under his hands should be less terrified of him than he would be if their roles had been reversed.
A good surgeon focuses on the injury, not the person. He needed that mantra right now, as he listened to the panic in Sherlock's words. He didn't need to translate whatever language it was to know that the man was in the grip of a flash-back. It made him wonder yet again what the hell had happened while he was away. John was still reeling from the sight of Sherlock smashing Alec's head repeatedly against the metal leg of the treatment bed. He'd ignored John's please to stop as if he hadn't even heard them. Sherlock was intent on killing the man, even after the fighter was unconscious and no longer a threat to either of them. Who hurt you so much that it makes you want to kill?
Hayter quietly slid the long spine board alongside Cunningham and started undoing the straps down at his end while John did the same at his. There was also a cervical collar and side head blocks to immobilise the patient's head during transport. Hayter was closest to the door, with John nearer to Sherlock. He found himself wishing that he had a head torch. Holding the small maglight in his teeth or under an arm was getting awkward, but given the total chaos that happened the last time the overhead lights went on, he knew he just had to make do. Sherlock had simply gone berserk, howling in pain and smashing his way up from the floor, sending the metal treatment bed straight into the side of Cunningham again.
It was as if he couldn't see, couldn't recognise John at all. Actually, on second thought, John realised that it was more that Sherlock was seeing something else, something that wasn't actually there. Hallucinating? Was that the fever, or something else at work? He thought about his own experiences of flashbacks. The remnants of his PTSD bothered him now mostly in his dreams, when his subconscious mind was free to conjure up the ghosts of his past horrors. But, he could still remember what it was like to be instantly transported by some sound or visual stimulus to a different place, where everything he saw and smelled was what he went through in the moments before, during and after he was shot.
From what he had seen, he thought that light was somehow the trigger, maybe due to his sensory processing issues. Was this a meltdown, complicated by drugs, driving him into a flashback? Too many imponderables. While these questions were rattling around in his head, John kept working, bandaging what he could to try to stop the blood. The two former Army doctors locked eyes in the dark, silently counted off the one-two-three needed to lift the unconscious fighter onto the board, and then started to strap him in.
It was his fault that Mycroft's man had gotten the knife wound, but John had been sure that it needed to be bagged as evidence as quickly as possible. Leaving it on the counter-top, in plain sight of a mentally-unstable patient just wasn't on. But, he'd miscalculated, thinking that Sherlock was no longer a threat now that Alec was out of the equation. From out of nowhere, he'd appeared alongside the agent, and managed to get the knife off of him in a blinding flash. Perhaps his eyes were more used to it, but he seemed to see what he needed to see, while the others in the room were fumbling around in the dark.
The agent had spun around to try to get it back, just as John tried to stand up, to stop the inevitable reaction.
"Sherlock, don't! He's on our side."
The response was unexpected. With his left hand, Sherlock shoved John's shoulder down hard, dropping the doctor to his knees again, as he slashed out at the agent with the knife, cutting deep into the suited forearm.
John realised that he had to intervene somehow, if this man wasn't to end as badly hurt as Alec. Through gritted teeth, he snapped, "Get out! Don't try anything- just LEAVE!" Then more quietly, John said, "Sherlock just might kill you if you stay here, and if you hurt him, then his brother just might do the same to you."
From his position on the floor, John then kicked the treatment table hard, and it spun back to crash into Sherlock's legs, momentarily distracting him.
Wrestling with his training that would have kept him in the room, the agent thought about it for a split second and then left before Sherlock could resume his attack.
Within seconds, Sherlock was back down in the darkest corner of the room- only now he had a knife. Fifteen minutes later, that was still worrying the hell out of John, as he finished buckling the final head strap on the second patient to be removed.
"Okay, ready to go. Slide him out low to the ground, until we're out the door."
Even this quiet statement provoked a rise in volume from the muttering in the corner, which John tried to ignore as he and Hayter slowly started to move the patient out the door.
Two down. One more to go. Triage rules said save the least injured patient for last, but John knew that dealing with Sherlock was going to be very, very hard, and he had absolutely no idea how to do it.
Author's Note: * "Little and Large" is a British ref to two comedians, Syd Little and Eric Large, a double act popular in the 1970s and 80s.