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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 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 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