Even though she'd known it was coming, the chaos of preparing to inoculate an entire company of soldiers caught Charlie off guard. It was the first time all four of the nurses had been on duty at the same time, but Lieutenant Maddox had pulled Mabel away the moment they'd all walked through the door. On each of their first days Maddox had watched, eagle-eyed, as she made each of them perform different rudimentary tasks for her so she could gauge how good they were at what they'd been trained to do. They'd already had to do as much in their final exams at nursing school, obviously, and Charlie had a niggling suspicion in the back of her head that this wasn't actually standard procedure and instead something Lieutenant Maddox had invented and implemented all on her own. Still, each of them had had to do it, and since it was Mabel's first day, inoculation day or otherwise, she had to be pulled aside.
With Mabel and Lieutenant Maddox off doing the examinations - or, indeed, whatever the whole affair was supposed to be called - that left Charlie, Autumn, and Violet to organise the ward to allow for the registration, injection, and then processing of each of the soldiers who'd be getting inoculated today.
Maddox, of course, had given them little instruction before pulling Mabel away, though her eyes had been hard and expectant and left no confusion as to the level of perfection required of them. So, with little-to-no direction but an awful lot to do, Autumn devised their game plan and they immediately set to work trying to turn their small, secluded ward into a processing centre.
A desk had to be dragged in from another ward to be set in the hallway. Whoever was sat behind it would be tasked with signing each of the boys in and giving them their clipboard, which would be passed through all of the nurses to make sure it was properly marked and processed.
Three beds had been set up in one corner to create the Inoculation Station - as Charlie, who had set it up, liked to refer to it. She wasn't sure whether they'd have Mabel and Maddox back by the time the soldiers started arriving but she was trying to be optimistic, so she chose to have three stations in the hopes they'd be able to get through three boys at a time.
Then, in the back office they were using another desk to process the rest of the paperwork, to sign off on and approve each boy's injected status.
It was all terribly official and made Charlie feel much older and more important than she knew she was. It was only when the rush to get everything done was over that she finally had time to worry about what came after organising everything, when they'd have a ward full of paratroopers and probably not enough people to get through them all on time.
"Do you think Lieutenant Maddox will let Mabel go before the soldiers get here?" Violet wondered, approaching Charlie from the back office she'd been setting up.
Charlie tried to hide her worries over that exact thing and put on a mask of optimism for Violet. "I'm sure she will. She'll know we need all the help we can get."
Violet nodded, not looking convinced.
Finding herself also suddenly overcome with nerves about the whole thing, Charlie added hastily, "Do you think we should work out between us who will be on each station? Just in case they're not finished in time?"
Violet nodded, but before Charlie could say anything else she was interrupted by the sound of footsteps clacking on the floor. Both Charlie and Violet turned to find Autumn approaching from the desk she'd been setting up in the hallway outside.
As soon as she saw their faces, Autumn grinned. "Why do you two look like you're trying to decide which one of you should shoot the other first?"
In spite of her nerves, Charlie couldn't help but laugh. "We were thinking that, in case Lieutenant Maddox isn't done with Mabel before the soldiers get here, maybe we should decide ourselves who's going to do what."
Autumn hummed her agreement, coming to stand with them in their own tiny little triangle. "That makes sense." She looked between the pair of them, her eyebrows furrowing but her grin only widening as she took in their expressions.
Charlie felt a pang of envy, then, for Autumn's seeming inability to ever be thrown off by anything. Life seemed to be smooth sailing to her whether things were going right or wrong. How Charlie would love to be that easy going about it all.
"Why don't we just take the stations we set up?" Autumn suggested, throwing a gesture behind her to the registration desk she'd taken charge of. "I'll sign them in, Charlie will inject them, and Violet, you'll sign them out. Does that sound like a plan?" As an afterthought, she added, "Only if Maddox and Mabel aren't done in time, of course." Even Autumn didn't want to be caught attempting to usurp their lieutenant's authority.
"That sounds like a plan," Charlie agreed, glancing at Violet as she nodded beside her.
"Alright." Autumn looked around her. "Do you know how long we've got?"
"Not long," Violet fretted.
Charlie also began to look around the room, seeking out a clock, before Violet murmured something about the back office and scurried off. She returned with the time and a nervous utterance of, "We have ten minutes until they start arriving."
The soldiers of the company were due to arrive in waves, first the officers, then First Platoon, then Second, then Third. None of this meant much of anything to Charlie, who didn't have a clue who was in each platoon and had never met any of the officers; she found the prospect of each wave equally as bad as the others. If anything, the fact that the officers were coming first only added to her nerves, because surely they'd be expecting a certain level of organisation that Charlie couldn't say they really had covered at the moment - not without Lieutenant Maddox overseeing them and micromanaging everything, as Charlie had known her to do for the entirety of the four days she'd worked under her.
Hoping to calm herself down, Charlie looked over Violet's shoulder and out of the window, where the blackout blinds were pulled up to reveal the hospital's garden beyond. It was a pretty day outside considering the time of year, the sky blue and the birds chirping. Trees which were just beginning to turn green swayed gently in the light wind, flowers which were desperate to bloom started to show pops of colour. Looking at it from the other side of the glass, Charlie wanted nothing more than to go out there and sit on one of the benches, where she'd sat and eaten her lunch alone on her first day of work, but duty called and there simply wasn't time. Instead of wasting her time in wanting for things she couldn't have, Charlie turned back to Autumn and Violet, and sighed.
"Should we go and find Lieutenant Maddox, maybe? I hope she hasn't lost track of time."
Before either Autumn or Violet could reply, a nurse from another ward came hurrying through the door.
"There are inoculations happening here today?" the nurse asked hurriedly, out of breath. "In this ward, I mean? Soldiers' inoculations?"
"Yes," Autumn replied warily, sharing a quick glance with Charlie and Violet. "In about ten minutes' time. Why?"
"They're arriving now. I wasn't sure where they were supposed to go so I just left them standing outside."
Now the reason why she was out of breath made sense; she'd probably run through the whole hospital searching for a ward which had military nurses in it. And theirs was tucked right at the back and out of the way, so she'd probably been searching for a while.
"I'll go and get them," Autumn declared, nodding confidently at the nurse before she hurried off again. "Charlie, are you all good to go with the injections?"
"Yes," Charlie confirmed. She hoped she looked and sounded more confident than she felt.
"Violet, you're ready with the exit paperwork?"
"Yes," Violet all but squeaked.
"Okay." Autumn nodded. "We can do this. Until Lieutenant Maddox comes back, we can hold down the fort. How hard can it be?"
Very hard, as it happened.
Paratroopers could be incredibly rowdy when they were nervous, as it happened.
They did not show up in waves, as it happened.
Charlie didn't know where the miscommunication had happened or why, and she was, frankly, too busy to ask. Instead, she focused on putting her head down and getting her work done as quickly as possible. A downside to the job she'd been given, one that she critically hadn't realised when she'd accepted it, was that registering patients was much quicker than asking them which arm was their dominant arm, having them roll up the sleeve of their non-dominant arm (because they all came in with long sleeves on, of course), wiping down the area, injecting them, pressing a cotton pad to the area to stem the blood flow, and then wrapping the site up afterwards. Which meant Charlie had a very long queue of increasingly antsy paratroopers and only two hands to work with.
Yes, keeping her head down and getting on with it was definitely the best course of action. And she seemed to be doing a decent job of it, too; some of the soldiers flirted with her, sure, while others took longer than they needed to because they kept shying away from the needle, but most of them were content to let her do what she needed to do and move on.
That was, until...
"Freckles!"
Charlie looked up from where she was preparing her next needle and resisted the urge to groan. "I told you not to call me Freckles."
"Sorry," replied Sergeant Talbert, not looking sorry in the least. "I forgot."
"Which is your dominant arm, Sergeant?"
Sergeant Talbert grinned. "My name's Floyd."
Charlie looked at him blankly. "I'm pleased for you. Which is your dominant arm, Sergeant?"
"Right," he answered, his smile never faltering.
"Roll up your left arm's sleeve, please."
"Your wish is my command."
Even when he'd enlisted her help in trying to charm Mabel he was still flirting with her. He was shameless! As Charlie turned back to preparing the needle in her hands she wondered vaguely whether she might call off their little arrangement, then disregarded the idea immediately because she knew Mabel wanted to be charmed by him, for whatever reason. She supposed she'd never understand.
When his left arm was exposed, the sleeve of his ODs bunched up over his shoulder, he presented his bicep to her and she gestured to the bed. "Have a seat."
"Getting me into bed already? Damn, you sure do move fast -"
"Oh my goodness!" Charlie exclaimed, exasperated. "I'm trying to work! Please, please, stop flirting for one second so I can inject you and get to the next person."
The next boy in line hissed sharply before laughing around a teasing, "Oooooh!" but Charlie ignored him. She wiped down Sergeant Talbert's arm now that he was finally sitting quietly.
"So," he began a moment later, and this time Charlie let her groan aloud. "Where's Mabel?" he wondered, looking around the ward in search of the nurse in question.
"If you find out please do pass the information on," Charlie answered, picking up the needle again and filling it with the injection fluid. "I would so love to know."
"You haven't seen her?"
"Not since this morning."
"What about the guy you're crushing on? You seen him yet today?"
Charlie levelled him with a warning glare. "Do you need me to remind you which of us is holding the needle and which of us isn't?"
"Well," he began, clearly the beginning of a flirtatious reply. But he was cut sharply off when Charlie stabbed the needle into the skin of his bicep, admittedly a little bit harder than she'd done to any of the others.
Or a lot harder.
"Oops?"
Sergeant Talbert's jaw was tight, working with the effort not to make a sound that would give away how much pain he was in.
Charlie extracted the needle and placed it to one side, ready to clear it away in place of the next one, before pressing a cotton pad to his bicep and then taping it up.
"All done," she declared brightly. She picked up the clipboard he'd placed beside him on the bed and pressed it into his hands. "I'd rest that arm for a little while, if I were you."
Gone were his flirtatious comments. He gritted his teeth and ground out, "Thanks for the tip, Freckles."
"Don't call me that."
"See ya."
As Charlie moved on to preparing for, and eventually inoculating, the next boy, she prayed the seemingly never ending line was getting shorter, and hoped with every soldier she injected that Mabel might appear to take some of the work off her hands. At the same time, she wondered about her next encounter with Sergeant Talbert, when she'd inevitably have to give him some advice and he'd give her some in return. She could only hope that whatever help he gave her really was helpful, though she was losing faith in that hope by the second.