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file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Stephen%20King%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htm“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 athim.”“Come on,” Chariton said to the girl who had closed the drapes. She was pulling the corners of hermouth 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 whitepinstriped 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 theonly diagnosisthat mattered: The young man was suing to die. Half of his head was crushed. His neck had beenBroken. One collarbone jutted from his swelled and twisted right shoulder. From his head, blood and ayellow, pussy fluid seeped sluggishly into the carpet. Louis could see the man’s brain, whitish-gray andpulsing through a shattered section of skull. It was like looking through a broken window. The incursionwas perhaps five centimeters wide; if he had had a baby in his skull, he could almost have birthed it, likeZeus delivering from his forehead. That he was still alive at all was incredible. In his mind suddenly heheard Jud Crandall saying sometimes you could feel it bite your ass. And his mother: dead is dead. Hefelt 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 youdo 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 wascomposed enough as she replied. “Doctor, I don’t know. We’ve never had a situation like this before inmy 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 theirown ambulance. If they have to, they can take him up to Bangor in one of the fire engines. At least it hasa siren, flashers. Go do it, Joan.”She went but not before he caught her deeply sympathetic glance and interpreted it. This young man,file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Ste...%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htm (51 of 333)7/28/2005 9:21:49 PM