Where the Wattles Bloom

One

It didn’t bode well for Rowena Murray’s sparkly new beginning, late on this Sunday afternoon, when the car she’d been following at a safe distance suddenly swerved erratically several times before veering off the road.

In that weird slowing-of-time way, she watched in horror as its front end found the only tree in a fifty-kilometre radius.

Until the tree there’d been nothing of any note. Just low scrub, brown dirt, some occasional scraggly-looking sheep and a scattering of pink galahs grazing on the edges of the outback highway.

‘Holy shit.’

The car had crumpled, as modern cars were designed to do.

There was a hissing noise coming from the engine, and a plume of what she hoped was steam rather than smoke rose from under the buckled bonnet.

The driver, who’d been travelling under the speed limit anyway, had braked as the vehicle had left the road, so at least the speed with which the car hit the tree hadn’t been calamitous.

Still. Big old gum tree—one. Shiny new SUV—zero.

She reached the driver’s door, which was thankfully undamaged. The only occupant was a man who looked to be in his fifties. His head was slumped back, his eyes shut, the inflated airbag squashed against his significant girth. There was no blood or apparent damage to his face.

‘Mister?’ she called as she yanked on the door handle.

Locked. Shit!

‘Mister,’ she called again, banging against the window. His lips had gone dusky. The kind of colour lips went before they turned blue.

Still no answer. Double shit.

Rowena whipped quickly around the car, trying all the doors. All locked.

Triple shit!

Crouching beside her first aid kit, she thanked god for her anal-retentive tendencies as she grabbed the emergency window breaker. She’d seen a paramedic use it once at a crash site and had immediately purchased one for herself.

If the man had been conscious she’d have told him to shield himself, but he wasn’t, and those lips were giving her the heebie-jeebies.

‘Sorry about the window, dude,’ she muttered.

Of course, a broken window was nothing compared to the bigger problem of the massive gum tree embedded in the vehicle’s engine, so …

Rowena struck the glass, as she’d seen the paramedic do years before, turning her face away.

It shattered and she almost whooped, except it was too early to celebrate.

Although the tempered glass had broken into fragments, there were large sections still in situ and she knew she’d cut herself reaching in to unlock the car for sure.

The gloves from the first aid kit were meant to keep germs and bodily fluid out, not be a defence against sharp objects, so they wouldn’t be any help.

‘Hold on, mister.’

Without a second thought, she yanked her skivvy off over her head. By now, Rowena was so jacked on adrenaline, neither the brush of cold June air on her exposed torso nor the fact she was flashing her bra registered.

The guy in the car was hardly in any state to notice.

Wrapping her shirt around her fist, Rowena gently knocked out enough of the fragmented glass to give her free passage. When she was satisfied, she reached her arm in and blindly groped for the unlock button. Finding it, she pushed it, the locks releasing with a resounding thunk.

Yanking the door open, she ignored the chunks of glass lying like ice cubes around the intact interior of the car. With one hand she reached for the man’s carotid pulse, while with the other she gave his arm a hard shake.

‘Mister.’

Still no answer. And no pulse. Unlike hers, which was fibrillating like crazy.

Shit. Shit. Shit.

Rowena’s thoughts raced. There were no respiratory noises that might indicate he had some kind of airway blockage, so what was it? A stroke? Or a heart attack? That would certainly explain his abrupt swerving. And by the size of his gut and jowls, he wasn’t the healthiest specimen of manhood.

How long had it been since the car had crashed? It felt like an age but it hadn’t been. More than a minute. But not quite two. Maybe even less since he’d lost cardiac output?

Ignoring the horrifying stats on out-of-hospital cardiac arrest and the fact she was in the middle of nowhere, Rowena mentally prepared herself for what she’d been trained to do—saving lives.

Staring in dismay at the weak signal on her phone, she dialled triple zero. Anchoring the phone to her ear with her shoulder, she sliced through the seatbelt with the knife attachment that came with the window breaker.

‘Do you require police, fire or ambulance?’ The connection was awful, the male voice breaking up, but it was help. Her heart rate decelerated a fraction.

‘Ambulance.’

Finding it hard to get in behind the man with the airbag in the way, she popped it with the knife.

Look at her go—a regular Crocodile freaking Dundee.

‘Hello. What is the exact location of your emergency?’

Good question. Where the hell was she? Think, Rowena. What was the last marker she’d seen?

Think!

‘I’m about fifty kay out from Acacia Junction in the middle of New South Wales, on the B85. On the eastern approach,’ she added with a grunt as she grabbed the man around the shoulders and yanked, his torso falling heavily against her chest.

If she’d had a cervical collar she’d have put it around his neck, but she didn’t, and she couldn’t perform effective CPR with him sitting up, so she hoped like hell the cause of his arrest wasn’t related to a spinal cord compression because she’d probably just killed him for good.

The next response was garbled but Rowena thought it was a request for what had happened.

‘Car accident. It veered off the road in front of me and—’ Rowena grunted again as she dragged the prostrate man from his seat bit by bit, bracing against his full weight as the accident victim slumped against her. She was far from petite but she still struggled under the man’s boneless mass.

Thank god for those gym sessions these past months.

There were more garbled half words Rowena couldn’t catch, and for a moment she wanted to scream as she finally got him out, his feet dropping to the dirt like lead weights. How she managed to not dislodge the phone from between her shoulder and ear, Rowena had no idea.

‘I’m sorry, you’re breaking up and I can barely make you out so just listen.’

She dragged him clear of the vehicle so they could be seen by any passing cars before kneeling beside him, thanking the universe for her jeans as dirt and sharp little rocks abraded her knees even through the denim.

‘There’s just one man. I think he’s had a heart attack. He’s not breathing and does not have a pulse. He doesn’t appear to have any other injuries.’

Rowena briefly left the man’s side to retrieve the first aid kit. She plonked it beside her as she resumed her position, plucking out a pair of gloves and snapping them on. Absently she noticed blood on her arm and realised she’d managed to nick herself, despite using her shirt as protection.

Wherever the hell it was right now.

‘I am an ICU nurse.’ She retrieved the pocket mask from the kit. ‘I have dragged him out of the car and am about to start CPR.’

Probably best not to mention it had been about a decade since she’d performed CPR on anyone bigger than a newborn.

‘I’m going to put the phone on speaker but reception is bad and I am alone out here so I’m going to be busy until help arrives.’

Rowena hit the speaker button, placed the phone on the ground and positioned her knees snug with the patient’s ribs.

The guy on the phone was saying something else but her entire focus was on a pair of blue lips as she placed the cushioned plastic mask with the moulded protruding mouthpiece over his nose and mouth.

Forming a seal with her lips, she ignored the faint bitter tang of treated plastic as she performed some rescue breaths.

Then, finding the centre of his chest with the heels of her interlocked palms, Rowena delivered her first compressions.

Given how big the man was, she really had to put her back into it.

The emergency call taker said what she thought was, ‘The ambulance is on its way,’ and she said, ‘Tell them to hurry.’

Which was stupid. They were hardly likely to dawdle.

Still, if she was fifty kilometres from the nearest ambulance, it would be about twenty minutes going full lights and sirens before help arrived. Thankfully the flat, straight, deserted road was perfect for speeding, because the man’s chances dimmed the longer he was down.

He needed oxygen. And adrenaline. If only she could give him some of hers, which was currently washing around her system in ridiculous surplus.

A monitor would be super handy. A defibrillator even more so. But all he had was her.

‘Don’t you die on me,’ Rowena said, breathing heavily.

It wasn’t right for someone to die flat on their back in the dirt with only a stranger for company.

‘Don’t you dare die on me.’

Her best hope was that someone would happen along before the ambulance. Two sets of hands were better than one.

She switched to the mask and gave two more breaths before working his chest again, pushing back against the hovering edge of panic, reaching for the eye of calm. It’d taken her several months and many thousands of dollars with her therapist to find it—it had better not desert her now.

‘Come to the country, they said,’ Rowena muttered out loud between compressions. ‘It’ll be quiet, they said.’ She grunted at the exertion of each downward movement. ‘It’s just flu jabs and earaches, they said.’

Rowena thanked god for her meds as she puffed in a couple more breaths. If she’d come across this three months ago she might have gone into cardiac arrest herself. Or ended up rocking in a corner for days after.

Two minutes later, with the emergency call taker trying his best to keep her company despite the appalling reception, Rowena heard a car in the distance.

‘Someone’s coming!’