still alive. Nyebern’s expecting a stiff.”
O’Malley said, “It’s the other one.”
“The husband,” Epstein said.
“We’ll bring him over,” O’malley said.
Lindsey was aware that a monumental piece of information had been
revealed in those few brief exchanges, but she was not clearheaded
enough to understand what it was. Or maybe she simply did not want to
understand.
As they moved her into the spacious rear compartment of the helicopter,
transferred her onto one of their own litters, and strapped her to the
vinyl-covered mattress, she sank back into frighteningly corrupted
memories of childhood: she was nine years old, playing fetch with her
dog, Boo, but when the frisky labrador brought the red rubber ball back
to her and dropped it at her feet, it was not a ball any longer. It was
a throbbing heart, trailing torn arteries and veins. It was pulsing not
because it was alive but because a mass of worms and sarcophagus beetles
churned within its rotting chambers 4
The helicopter was airborne. Its movement, perhaps because of the
winter wind, was less reminiscent of an aircraft than of a boat tumbling
in a bad tide. Nausea uncoiled in Lindsey’s stomach.
A medic bent over her, his face masked in shadows, applying a
stethoscope to her breast.
Across the cabin, another medic was shouting into a radio headset as he
bent over Hatch, talking not to the pilot in the forward compartment but
perhaps to a receiving physician at whatever hospital awaited them.
His words were sliced into a series of thin sounds by the air-carving
rotors overhead, so his voice fluttered like that of a nervous
adolescent.
….. minor head injury no mortal wounds apparent cause of death seems
to be … drowning On the far side of the chopper, near the foot of
Hatch’s litter, the sliding door was open a few inches, and Lindsey
realized the door on her side was not fully closed, either, creating an
arctic cross draught. That also explained why the roar of the wind
outside and the clatter of the rotors were so deafening.
Why did they want it so cold?
The medic attending to Hatch was still shouting into his headset:
mouth-to-mouth . mechanical resuscitator C.O2 and cO-2 without results
epinephrine was ineffective…”
The real world had become too real, even viewed through her delirium.
She didn’t like it. Her twisted dreamscapes, in all their mutant
horror, were more appealing than the inside of the air ambulance,
perhaps because on a subconscious level she was able to exert at least
some control on her nightmares but none at all on real events.
… she was at her senior prom, dancing in the arms of Joey Delvecchio,
the boy with whom she had been going steady in those days. They were
under a vast canopy of crepe-paper streamers. She was speckled with
sequins of blue and white and yellow light cast off by the revolving
crystal-and-mirror chandelier above the dance floor. It was the music
of a better age, before rock-and-roll started to lose its soul, before
disco and New Age and hip-hop, back when Elton John and the Eagles were
at their peak, when the Isley Brothers were still recording, the Doobie
Brothers, Stevie Wonder, Neil Sedaka making a major comeback, the music
still alive, everything and everyone so alive, the world filled with
hope and possibilities now long since lost. They were slow-dancing to a
Freddy Fender tune reasonably well rendered by a local band, and she was
suffused with happiness and a sense of well-being-until she lifted her
head from Joey’s shoulder and looked up and saw not Joey’s face but the
rotting countenance of a cadaver, yellow teeth exposed between shriveled
black lips, flesh pocked and blistered and oozing, bloodshot eyes
bulging and weeping vile flu from lesions of decay. She tried to scream
and pull away from him, but she could only continue to dance, listening
to the overly sweet romantic strains of ‘Before the Next Teardrop Falls,
“aware that she was seeing Joey as he would be in a few years, after he
had died in the Marine-barracks explosion in Lebanon.
She felt death leeching from his cold flesh into hers. She knew she had