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."
She went but not before he caught her deeply sympathetic glance and interpreted it. This young man, who was deeply tanned and well-muscled-perhaps from a summer working on a roadcrew somewhere, or painting houses, or giving tennis lessons-and dressed now only in red gym shorts with white piping, was going to die no matter what they did. He would be just as dead even if their ambulance had been parked out front with the motor idling when the patient was brought in.
Incredibly, the dying man was moving. His eyes fluttered and opened. Blue eyes, the irises ringed with blood. They stared vacantly around, seeing nothing. He tried to move his head, and Louis exerted pressure to keep him from doing so, mindful of the broken neck. The cranial trauma did not preclude the possibility of pain.
The hole in his head, oh Christ, the hole in his head.
"What happened to him?" he asked Steve, aware that it was, under the circumstances, a stupid and pointless question. The question of a bystander. But the hole in the man's head confirmed his status; a bystander was all he was.
"Did the police bring him?"
"Some students brought him in a blanket sling. I don't know what the circumstances were."
There was what happened next to be thought of. That was his responsibility too.
"Go out and find them," Louis said. "Take them around to the other door. I want them handy, but I don't want them to see any more of this than they already have."
Masterton, looking relieved to be away from what was happening in here, went to the door and opened it, letting in a babble of excited, curious, confused conversation. Louis could also hear the warble of a police siren. Campus Security was here then. Louis felt a kind of miserable relief.
The dying man was making a gurgling sound in his throat. He tried to speak.
Louis heard syllables-phonetics, at least-but the words themselves were slurred and unclear.
Louis leaned over him and said, "You're going to be all right, fella." He thought of Rachel and Ellie as he said it, and his stomach gave a great, unlovely lurch. He put a hand over his mouth and stifled a burp.
"Caaa," the young man said. "Gaaaaaa-"