Hideaway

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 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.

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 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, hut 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. 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