The Regulators - Stephen King [49]
'Gary!'
The skinny guy with the gin on his breath took a step toward her, then looked back at Steve and Cynthia. The tight, knowing smile was gone. Now he only looked sick. 'I don't know what to do for her,' he said.
'Gary, you diseased ratbrain,' Marielle said in a low, hopeless voice. 'You total dumbwit.' Her face was growing ever whiter. She had gone, in fact, that fabled faded whiter shade of pale. There were brown patches beneath her eyes — they seemed to be unfurling like wings — and her left sneaker was now a solid red instead of white.
She's going to die if she doesn't get help right away, Steve thought. The idea made him feel both amazed and somehow stupid. Professional help was what he was thinking about, he supposed, ER guys in green suits who said things like 'ten cc's of epi, stat'. But there were no guys like that around, and apparently none coming. He could still hear no sirens, only the sound of thunder retreating slowly into the east.
On the wall to his left was a framed photograph of a small brown dog with eerily intelligent eyes. On the matting beneath the photo, carefully printed in block letters, was DAISY, PEMBROKE CORGI, AGE 9. COULD COUNT. SHOWED APPARENT ABILITY TO ADD SMALL NUMBERS. To the left of Daisy, its glass now splattered with the thin woman's blood, was a Collie that seemed to be grinning for the camera. The printed legend beneath this one read: CHARLOTTE, BORDER COLLIE, AGE 6. COULD SORT PHOTOS AND CULL OUT THOSE OF HUMANS KNOWN TO HER.
To the left of Charlotte was a photograph of a parrot which appeared to be smoking a Camel.
'None of this is happening,' Steve said in a conversational — almost jovial — tone of voice. He didn't know if he was talking to Cynthia or to himself. 'I think I'm in a hospital somewhere. I had a head-on in the truck out on the thruway, that's what I think. It's like Alice in Wonderland, only the Nine Inch Nails version.'
Cynthia opened her mouth to reply and then the old guy — the one who had presumably observed Daisy the Pembroke Corgi adding six and two and coming up with eight,
ABSOLUTELY NO PROBLEM FOR DAISY —
came in carrying an old black bag. The cop (was his name actually Collie, Steve wondered, or was that just some weird fantasy engendered by the photographs on the walls of this room?) followed him, pulling his belt out of its loops. Last in line, drifting, looking dazed, came Peter What's-His-Face, husband of the woman who was lying dead out there.
'Help her!' Gary yelled, forgetting Steve and his conspiracy theories, at least for the time being. 'Help her, Doc, she's bleedin like a stuck pig!'
'You know I'm not a real physician, don't you, Gary? Just an old horse-doctor is all I — '
'Don't you call me a pig,' Marielle interrupted him. Her voice was almost too low to be heard, but her eyes, fixed on her husband, glowed with baleful life. She tried to straighten up, couldn't, and slipped lower against the wall instead. 'Don't you . . . call me that.'
The old horse-doctor turned to the cop, who was standing just inside the kitchen doorway, barechested with the belt now stretched between his fists. He looked like the bouncer in a leather-bar where Steve had once worked the board for a group called The Big Chrome Holes.
'I have to?' the barechested cop asked. He was pretty pale himself, but Steve thought he looked game, at least so far.
Billingsley nodded and put his bag down on the big easy-chair that sprawled in front of the television. He snapped it open and began rummaging through it. 'And hurry. The more blood she loses, the worse her chances become.' He looked up, a spool of suture in one gnarled old hand, a pair of bent-nosed surgical scissors in the other. 'This is no fun for me, either. The last time I saw a patient in anything like this situation, it was a pony that had been mistaken for a deer and shot in the foreleg. Get it as high on her shoulder as you can. Turn the buckle in toward