Koontz, Dean R. - Hideaway
Page 4
Lindsey. Their names were stitched on the breast pockets of their
jackets: David O'Malley and Jerry Epstein. With a curious combination
of professional detachment and concerned attentiveness, they began to
work on her, exchanging medical information with each other in crisp
emotionless voices but speaking to her in soft, sympathetic, encouraging
tones.
That dichotomy in their behavior alarmed rather than soothed Lindsey,
but she was too weak and disoriented to express her fear. She felt
infuriatingly delicate. Shaky. She was reminded of a surrealistic
painting This World and the Next, which she had done last year, because
the central figure in that piece had been a wire-walking circus acrobat
plagued by uncertainty. Right now consciousness was a high wire on
which she was precariously perched. Any effort to speak to the
paramedics, if sustained for more than a word or two, might unbalance
her and send her into a long, dark fall.
Although her mind was too clouded to find any sense in most of what the
two men were saying, she understood enough to know that she was
suffering from hypothermia, possibly frostbite, and that they were
worried about her. Blood pressure too low. Heartbeat slow and
irregular. Slow and shallow respiration.
Maybe that clean getaway was still possible.
If she really wanted it.
She was ambivalent. If she actually had hungered for death on a
subconscious level since Jimmy's funeral, she had no special appetite
for it now-though neither did she find it particularly unappealing.
Whatever happened to her would happen, and in her current condition,
with her emotions as numb as her five senses, she did not much care
about her fate.
Hypothermia switched off the survival instinct with a narcotizing pall
as effective as that produced by an úalcoholic hinge.
Then, between the two muttering paramedics, she caught a glimpse of
Hatch lying on the other gurney, and abruptly she was jolted out of her
half-trance by her concern for him. He looked so pale. But not just
white.
Another, less healthy shade of pale with a lot of gray in it. His lab
turned toward her, eyes closed, mouth open slightly-looked as if a flash
fire had swept through it, leaving nothing between bone and skin except
the ashes of flesh consumed.
"Please," she said, "my husband." She was surprised that her voice was
just a low, rough croak.
"You first," O'Malley said.
"No. Hatch. Hatch needs ... help."
"You first," O'Malley repeated.
His insistence reassured her somewhat. As bad as Hatch looked, he must
be all right, must have responded to CPR, must be in better shape than
she was, or otherwise they would have tended to him first. Wouldn't
they?
Her thoughts grew fuzzy again. The sense of urgency that had gripped
her now abated. She closed her eyes.
2
Later In Lindsey's hypothermic torpor, the murmuring voices above her
seemed as rhythmic, if not as melodic, as a lullaby. But she was kept
awake by the increasingly painful stinging sensation in her extremities
and by the rough handling of the medics, who were packing small
pillowlike objects against her sides. Whatever the things were-electric
or chemical heating pads, she supposed they radiated a soothing warmth
far different from the fire burning within her feet and hands.
"Hatch needs warmed up, too," she said thickly.
"He's fine, don't you worry about him," Epstein said. His breath puffed
out in small white clouds as he spoke.
"But he's cold."
"That's what he needs to be. That's just how we want him."
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
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
to tear herself from his embrace before that mortal tide filled her.
But when she looked desperately around for someone who might help her,
she saw that Joey was not the only dead dancer. Sally Ontkeen, who in
eight years would succumb to cocaine poisoning, glided by in an advanced
stage of decomposition, in the arms of her boyfriend who smiled down on
her as if una ware of the corruption of her flesh. Jack Winslow, the
school football star who would be killed in a drunken driving accident
in less than a year, spun his date past them; his face was swollen,
purple tinged with green, and his skull was crushed along the left side
as it would be after the wreck. He spoke to Lindsey and Joey in a raspy
voice that didn't belong to Jack Winslow but to a creature on holiday
from a graveyard vocal cords withered into dry strings: "What a night!
Man, what a night!"
Lindsey shuddered, but not solely because of the frigid wind that howled
through the partly open chopper doors.
The medic, his face still in shadows, was taking her blood pressure.
Her left arm was no longer under the blanket. The sleeves of her
sweater and blouse had been cut away, exposing her bare skin. The cuff
of the sphygmomanometer was wound tightly around her biceps and secured
by Velcro straps. Her shudders were so pronounced that they evidently
looked, to the paramedic, as if they might be the muscle spasms that
accompanied convulsions. He plucked a small rubber wedge from a nearby
supply tray and started to insert it in her mouth to prevent her from
biting or swallowing her tongue.
She pushed his hand away. "I'm going to die."
Relieved that she was not having convulsions, he said, "No, you're not
that bad, you're okay, you're going to be fine."
He didn't understand what she meant. Impatiently, she said, "We're all
going to die."
That was the meaning of her dream-distorted memories. Death had been
with her from the day she'd been born, always at her side, constant
companion, which she had not understood until Jimmy's death five years
ago, and which she had not accepted until tonight when death took Hatch
Her heart seemed to clutch up like a fist within her breast. A new pain
filled her, separate from all the other agonies and more profound.
In spite of terror and delirium and exhaustion, all of which she had
used as shields against the awful insistence of reality, truth came to
her at last, and she was helpless to do anything but accept it.
Hatch had drowned.
Hatch was dead. CPR had not worked.
Hatch was gone forever.
she was twenty-five years old, propped against bed pillows in the
maternity ward at St. Joseph's Hospital. The nurse was bringing her a
small blanket-wrapped bundle, her baby, her son, James Eugene Harrison,
whom she had carried for nine months but had not met, whom she loved
with all her heart but had not seen. The smiling nurse gently conveyed
the bundle into Lindsey's arms, and Lindsey tenderly lifted aside the
satin-trimmed edge of the blue cotton blanket. She saw that she cradled
a tiny skeleton with hollow eye sockets, the small bones of its fingers
curled in the wanting-needing gesture of an infant. Jimmy had been born
with death in him, as everyone was, and in less than five years cancer
would claim him. The small, bony mouth of the skeleton-child eased open
in a long, slow, silent cry 5
Lindsey could hear the chopper blades carving the night air, but she was
no longer inside the craft. She was being wheeled across a parking lot
toward a large building with many lighted windows. She thought she