Hideaway (5 page)

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 alcoholic binge.

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 face—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.

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 Popsicle. 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 day’s
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.
Edmo’s fire
glowing on their
flanks and
limbs, seeking blood for
a
lubricant, robotic
vampires of aluminum and steel
....

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 snowswept 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 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 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
be
cause
a
mass of worms
and
sarcophagus beetles churned within its rotting chambers ...

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 was 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 ... O-2 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-’n’-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
come-back, 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 fluid 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 leaching 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 boy-
friend who smiled down on her as if unaware 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!”

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 from her.

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.