The Drawing Of The Three by Stephen King

Author:Stephen King
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Signet Classic
Published: 2010-12-30T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 2

Ringing the Changes

1

August, 1959:

When the intern came outside half an hour later, he found Julio leaning against the ambulance which was still parked in the emergency bay of Sisters of Mercy Hospital on 23rd Street. The heel of one of Julio’s pointy-toed boots was hooked over the front fender. He had changed to a pair of glaring pink pants and a blue shirt with his name written in gold stitches over the left pocket: his bowling league outfit. George checked his watch and saw that Julio’s team—The Spics of Supremacy—would already be rolling.

“Thought you’d be gone,” George Shavers said. He was an intern at Sisters of Mercy. “How’re your guys gonna win without the Wonder Hook?”

“They got Miguel Basale to take my place. He ain’t steady, but he gets hot sometimes. They’ll be okay.” Julio paused. “I was curious about how it came out.” He was the driver, a Cubano with a sense of humor George wasn’t even sure Julio knew he had. He looked around. Neither of the paramedics who rode with them were in sight.

“Where are they?” George asked.

“Who? The fuckin Bobbsey Twins? Where do you think they are? Chasin Minnesota poontang down in the Village. Any idea if she’ll pull through?”

“Don’t know.”

He tried to sound sage and knowing about the unknown, but the fact was that first the resident on duty and then a pair of surgeons had taken the black woman away from him almost faster than you could say hail Mary fulla grace (which had actually been on his lips to say—the black lady really hadn’t looked as if she was going to last very long).

“She lost a hell of a lot of blood.”

“No shit.”

George was one of sixteen interns at Sisters of Mercy, and one of eight assigned to a new program called Emergency Ride. The theory was that an intern riding with a couple of paramedics could sometimes make the difference between life and death in an emergency situation. George knew that most drivers and paras thought that wet-behind-the-ears interns were as likely to kill red-blankets as save them, but George thought maybe it worked.

Sometimes.

Either way it made great PR for the hospital, and although the interns in the program liked to bitch about the extra eight hours (without pay) it entailed each week, George Shavers sort of thought most of them felt the way he did himself—proud, tough, able to take whatever they threw his way.

Then had come the night the T.W.A. Tri-Star crashed at Idlewild. Sixty-five people on board, sixty of them what Julio Estevez referred to as D.R.T.—Dead Right There—and three of the remaining five looking like the sort of thing you might scrape out of the bottom of a coal-furnace . . . except what you scraped out of the bottom of a coal furnace didn’t moan and shriek and beg for someone to give them morphine or kill them, did they? If you can take this, he thought afterward, remembering the severed limbs lying amid the remains

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