Pet Sematary(21)

"Where's Stephen now?"

"In your office, answering mail and trying to figure out the latest ton of bureaucratic bullshit from Blue Cross-Blue Shield," she said.

Louis went in. Charlton's cynicism notwithstanding, he felt comfortably in harness.

Looking back on it, Louis would think-when he could bear to think about it at all-that the nightmare really began when they brought the dying boy, Victor Pascow, into the infirmary around ten that morning.

Until then, things were very quiet. At nine, half an hour after Louis arrived, the two candy-stripers who would be working the nine-to-three shift came in.

Louis gave them each a doughnut and a cup of coffee and talked to them for about fifteen minutes, outlining their duties, and what was perhaps more important, what was beyond the scope of their duties. Then Charlton took over. As she led them out of Louis's office, Louis heard her ask: "Either of you allergic to shit or puke? You'll see a lot of both here."

"Oh God," Louis murmured and covered his eyes. But he was smiling. A tough old babe like Charlton was not always a liability.

Louis began filling out the long Blue Cross-Blue Shield forms, which amounted to a complete inventory of drug stock and medical equipment ("Every year," Steve Masterton said in an aggrieved voice. "Every goddam year the same thing. Why don't you write down Complete heart transplant facility, approx. value eight million dollars. Louis? That'II foozle em!"), and he was totally engrossed, thinking only marginally that a cup of coffee would go down well, when Masterton screamed from the direction of the foyer-waiting room: "Louis! Hey, Louis, get out here! We got a mess!"

The near-panic in Masterton's voice got Louis going in a hurry. He bolted out of his chair almost as if he had, in some subconscious way, been expecting this. A shriek, as thin and sharp as a shard of broken glass, arose from the direction of Masterton's shout. It was followed by a sharp slap and Chariton saying, "Stop that or get the hell out of here! Stop it right now!"

Louis burst into the waiting room and was first only conscious of the blood-there was a lot of blood. One of the candy-stripers was sobbing. The other, pale as cream, had put her fisted hands to the corners of her mouth, pulling her lips into a big revolted grin. Masterton was kneeling down, trying to hold the head of the boy sprawled on the floor.

Steve looked up at Louis, eyes grim and wide and frightened He tried to speak.

Nothing came out.

People were congregating at the Student Medical Center's big glass doors, peering in, their hands cupped around their faces to cut out the glare. Louis's mind conjured up an insanely appropriate image: sitting in the living room as a kid of no more than six with his mother in the morning before she went to work.

watching the television. Watching the old "Today" show, with Dave Garroway.

People were outside, gaping in at Dave and Frank Blair and good old J. Fred Muggs. He looked around and saw other people standing at the windows. He couldn't do anything about the doors, but-"Shut the drapes," he snapped at the candy-striper who had screamed.

When she didn't move immediately, Charlton slapped her can. "Do it, girl!"

The candy-striper got in gear. A moment later green drapes were jerked across the windows. Chariton and Steve Masterton moved instinctively between the boy or. the floor and the doors, cutting off the view as best they could.

"Hard stretcher, Doctor?" Chariton asked.

"If we need it, get it," Louis said, squatting beside Masterton. "I haven't even had a chance to look at him."

"Come on," Chariton said to the girl who had closed the drapes. She was pulling the corners of her mouth with her fists again, making that humorless, screaming grin. She looked at Charlton and moaned, "Oh, ag,"

"Yeah, oh, ag is right. Come on." She gave the girl a hard yank and got her moving, her red and white pinstriped skirt swishing against her legs.

Louis bent over his first patient at the University of Maine at Orono.

He was a young man, age approximately twenty, and it took Louis less than three seconds to make the only diagnosis that mattered: The young man was suing to die. Half of his head was crushed. His neck had been Broken. One collarbone jutted from his swelled and twisted right shoulder. From his head, blood and a yellow, pu**y fluid seeped sluggishly into the carpet. Louis could see the man's brain, whitish-gray and pulsing through a shattered section of skull. It was like looking through a broken window. The incursion was perhaps five centimeters wide; if he had had a baby in his skull, he could almost have birthed it, like Zeus delivering from his forehead. That he was still alive at all was incredible. In his mind suddenly he heard Jud Crandall saying sometimes you could feel it bite your ass. And his mother: dead is dead. He felt a crazy urge to laugh. Dead was dead, all right. That's affirmative, good buddy.

"Holler for the ambulance," he snapped at Masterton.

"Louis, the ambulance is-"

"Oh Christ," Louis said, slapping his own forehead. He shifted his gaze to Charlton. "Joan, what do you do in a case like this? Call Campus Security or the EMMC?"

Joan looked flustered and upset-an extreme rarity with her, Louis guessed. But her voice was composed enough as she replied. "Doctor, I don't know. We've never had a situation like this before in my time at the Medical Center."

Louis thought as fast as he could. 'Call the campus police. We can't wait for EMMC to send out their own ambulance. If they have to, they can take him up to Bangor in one of the fire engines. At least it has a siren, flashers. Go do it, Joan."