The Girls from the Beach by Andie Newton

Author:Andie Newton [Newton, Andie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789546699
Publisher: Head of Zeus

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We set up our hospital in a damaged building, pockmarked with blasts from German 88s. The windows were shattered and the walls looked like they’d cave in with one gust of wind. Surgery was set up in the back, away from the opening, where the medics brought in patients. Soldiers lay on the ground, moaning, festering, and holding their body parts together. We covered the windows with empty potato sacks we’d found in crates.

Doctor Burk pushed his sleeves up, calling for Red, who’d been washing her hands in a dribble of water leaking out of a lone spigot in the wall. Me and Roxy ripped the soldier’s uniform from his body. Our only light was a single bulb strung up over our makeshift operating table. Sniper fire popped throughout the village in menacing, spaced-out attacks.

Red ordered me to help administer the ether. “But I haven’t been trained for anesthesia.”

“Trained or not, this is war,” the doctor butted in, and that was the first rule of many I would later break.

Roxy poured the ether, while I held the soldier’s jaw and gauze over his mouth, making sure he didn’t swallow it, gag, or drown.

“Kit,” she said. “Don’t let go.”

And I held that boy’s jaw till my elbows ached. Then my arms. And my fingers felt stiff as nails, unbendable. My legs started to collapse from the pain in my arms, only when we were done, there wasn’t a moment to rest. Another boy to fix, followed by another—tally after tally after tally I made on the wall. Intestines spilled into Red’s hands, and she stuffed them back in. Ears had been blasted off, and soft tissue opened up to yellowy fat that bubbled like chicken skin in Crisco from a tank battle.

“Sweet boy,” Roxy said to the ones who could still hear. “I’ve got you…”

The potato sack covering the window slipped from the nail. I couldn’t move my arms. The doctor froze, Red and Roxy too, and in horror we stared at a sliver of glass left unprotected.

“Hurry,” I said in a shouted whisper to anyone who could help. “The window!”

And another nurse climbed up on a chair and fastened the sack back to the nail. She fell to the floor in disbelief that she was still alive, knowing she could have been shot by the nearest sniper.

Some twelve hours later, with my back slumped over, I was given a break.

I walked away in the gray morning hours of the shut-up building, stepping over reaching hands, and bodies with bayonet slashes exposing their insides in the most ungodly, unsurvivable way. “Nurse,” I heard someone say from the floor, larynx gargling with blood, “Help…” Fingers grasped at my ankles and slid off my shoes. A mix of antiseptic, urine, iron, and rotting corpses hung heavy in my clothes, on my skin, and in every particle of air I breathed like dust. I collapsed against a wall, wanting a space to escape, if only for a second—a breath of fresh air—when I slipped out a side door that opened up into another room, this one much darker, and still.

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