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Then, between the twoon 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 face--turned toward her, eyes closed, htly--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 soht, must have responded to CPR, must be in better shape than she was, or otherwise they would have tended to hiain The sense of urgency that had gripped her now abated She closed her eyes

2

Later …

In Lindsey’s hypother 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 extre of the ainst her sides Whatever the things were--electric or che war 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 hoant him"

O’Malley said, "But not too cold, Jerry Nyebern doesn’t want a Popsicle Ice crystals fore"

Epstein turned to the small half-openthat separated the rear of the ambulance from the forward compartment He called loudly to the driver: "Mike, turn on a little heat ht be, and she was alare" But she was too weary to concentrate and make sense of what they said

Her mind drifted to recollections froe that she must have slipped across the border of consciousness into a half-sleep where her subconscious could work nightmarish tricks on her e, at play in a meadow behind her house The sloped field was familiar in its contours, hut some hateful influence had crept into her rass a spider-belly black The petals of all the floere blacker still, with crilistened 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 gye light of day’s end Those machineries of joy seemed curiously oin to , blue St El blood for a lubricant, robotic vampires of alue and distant cry, the reat, mysterious beast Eventually, even in her semi-delirious condition, she realized that the sound did not originate either in her iination 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 snoept highways

The ambulance caht 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 claurney 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 s center At that late hour the lot was deserted except for the ae helicopter on the side of which was emblazoned a red cross in a white circle and the words AIR 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 round was bare, and the wheels of the gurney creaked as Epstein and O’Malley rushed Lindsey into the care of the two ine of the air aishly

The ency that it represented--was like a flare of sunlight that burned off so 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 expensivefarther than to a hospital in San Bernardino, perhaps to a treat in state-of-the-art trauht of understanding cauished, and she despairingly sought the coain

As the chopper e of her and lifted her into the aircraft, one of theine 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 are that a monumental piece of infores, 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 ly corruptedfetch 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 us beetles churned within its rotting chambers …