Song of Susannah - Stephen King [160]
The rathead nurse, meanwhile, was bending between her patient’s splayed legs and peering under the hiked-up hospital gown Mia now wore. She patted Mia’s right knee with a plump hand and made a mewling sound. It was almost surely meant to comfort, but Susannah shuddered.
“Don’t just stand there with your thumbs up your butts, you idiots!” the doctor cried. He was a stoutish man with brown eyes, flushed cheeks, and black hair swept back against his skull, where each track of the comb seemed as wide as a gutter. He wore a lab-coat of white nylon over a tweed suit. His scarlet cravat had an eye figured into it. This sigul did not surprise Susannah in the slightest.
“We wait your word,” said Jey, the Hawkman. He spoke in a queer, inhuman monotone, as unpleasant as the rathead nurse’s mewl but perfectly understandable.
“You shouldn’t need my word!” the doctor snapped. He flapped his hands in a Gallic gesture of disgust. “Didn’t your mothers have any children that lived?”
“I—” Haber began, but the doc went right over him. He was on a roll.
“How long have we been waiting for this, hmmm? How many times have we rehearsed the procedure? Why must you be so fucking stupid, so Christing slow? Put her down on the b—”
Sayre moved with a speed Susannah wasn’t sure even Roland could have equaled. At one moment he was standing beside Haber, the low man with the bulldog face. At the next he’d battened on the doctor, digging his chin into the doc’s shoulder and grabbing his arm, twisting it high behind his back.
The doc’s expression of petulant fury vanished in a heartbeat, and he began to scream in a childish, breaking treble. Spit spilled over his lower lip and the crotch of his tweed trousers darkened as his urine let go.
“Stop!” he howled. “I’m no good to you if you break my arm! Oh stop, that HURRRTS!”
“If I sh’d break your arm, Scowther, I’d just drag some other pill-pusher in off the street to finish this, and kill him later. Why not? It’s a woman having a baby, not brain-surgery, for Gan’s sake!”
Yet he relaxed his hold a little bit. Scowther sobbed and wriggled and moaned as breathlessly as someone having sexual intercourse in a hot climate.
“And when it was done and you had no part in it,” Sayre continued, “I’d feed you to them. ” He gestured with his chin.
Susannah looked that way and saw that the aisle from the door to the bed where Mia lay was now covered with the bugs she’d glimpsed in the Dixie Pig. Their knowing, greedy eyes were fixed on the plump doctor. Their mandibles clicked.
“What…sai, what must I do?”
“Cry my pardon.”
“C-Cry pardon!”
“And now these others, for ye’ve insulted them as well, so you have.”
“Sirs, I…I…c-cry—”
“Doctor!” the rathead nurse broke in. Her speaking voice was thick but understandable. She was still bent between Mia’s legs. “The baby’s crowning!”
Sayre let go of Scowther’s arm. “Go on, Dr. Scowther. Do your duty. Deliver the child.” Sayre bent forward and stroked Mia’s cheek with extraordinary solicitude. “Be of good cheer and good hope, lady-sai,” he said. “Some of your dreams may yet come true.”
She looked up at him with a tired gratitude that wrung Susannah’s heart. Don’t believe him, his lies are endless, she tried to send, but for the nonce their contact was broken.
She was tossed like a sack of grain onto the bed which had been pushed next to Mia’s. She was unable to struggle as one of the hoods was fitted over her head; another labor pain had gripped her, and once again the two women shrieked together.
Susannah could hear Sayre and the others murmuring. From below and behind them, she could also hear the unpleasant clittering of the bugs. Inside the helmet, round metal protuberances pressed