O’Malley said, “But not too cold, Jerry. Nyebern doesn’t want a Pod
sickle. Ice crystals form in the tissue, there’ll be brain damage.”
Epstein turned to the small half-open window that separated the rear of
the ambulance from the forward compartment. He called loudly to the
driver: “Mike, turn on a little heat maybe.”
Lindsey wondered who Nyebern might be, and she was alarmed by the words
“brain damage.” But she was too weary to concentrate and make sense of
what they said.
Her mind drifted to recollections from childhood, but they were so
distorted and strange that she must have slipped across the border of
consciousness into a half-sleep where her subconscious could work
nightmarish tricks on her memories.
… she saw herself five years of age, at play in a meadow behind her
house.
The sloped field was familiar in its contours, but some hateful
influence had crept into her mind and meddled with the details, wickedly
recoloring the grass a spider-belly black. The petals of all the
flowers were blacker still, with crimson stamens that glistened like fat
drops of blood. .
she saw herself at seven, on the school playground at twilight, but
alone as she had never been in real life. Around her stood the usual
array of swings and seesaws and jungle gyms and slides, casting crisp
shadows in the peculiar orange light of days end. Those machineries of
joy seemed curiously ominous now. They loomed malevolently, as if they
might begin to move at any second, with much creaking and clanking, blue
St. Elmo’s fire glowing on their flanks and limbs, seeking blood for a
lubricant, robotic vampires of aluminum and steel. 3
Periodically Lindsey heard a strange and distant cry, the mournful bleat
of some great, mysterious beast. Eventually, even in her semi-delirious
condition, she realized that the sound did not originate either in her
imagination or in the distance but directly overhead. It was no beast,
just the ambulance siren, which was needed only in short bursts to clear
what little traffic had ventured onto the snow-swept highways.
The ambulance came to a stop sooner than she had expected, but that
might be only because her sense of time was as out of whack as her other
perceptions. Epstein threw the rear door open while O’Malley released
the spring clamps that fixed Lindsey’s gurney in place.
When they lifted her out of the van, she was surprised to see that she
was not at a hospital in San Bernardino, as she expected to be, but in a
parking lot in front of a small shopping center. At that late hour the
lot was deserted except for the ambulance and, astonishingly, a large
helicopter on the side of which was emblazoned a red cross in a white
circle and the words AMBULANCE SERVICE.
The night was still cold, and wind hooted across the blacktop. They
were now below the snow line, although just at the base of the mountains
and still far from San Bernardino. The ground was bare, and the wheels
of the gurney creaked as Epstein and O’malley rushed Lindsey into the
care of the two men waiting beside the chopper.
The engine of the air ambulance was idling. The rotors turned
sluggishly.
The mere presence of the craft-and the sense of extreme urgency that it
represented-was like a flare of sunlight that burned off some of the
dense fog in Lindsey’s mind. She realized that either she or Hatch was
in worse shape than she had thought, for only a critical case could
justify such an unconventional and expensive method of conveyance. And
they obviously were going farther than to a hospital in San Bernardino,
perhaps to a treatment center specializing in state-of-the-art trauma
medicine of one kind or another. Even as that light of understanding
came to her, she wished that it could be extinguished, and she
despairingly sought the comfort of that mental fog again.
As the chopper medics took charge of her and lifted her into the
aircraft, one of them shouted above the engine noise, “But she’s alive.”
“She’s in bad shape,” Epstein said.
“Yeah, okay, she looks like shit,” the chopper medic said, “but she’s