Okay, all that, and Dr. Wheeler still out in the storm…

But then the wind made a sound that was, in Abby’s imagination, precisely the sound the last T. Rex might have made, dying in a pool of hot Cretaceous mud…

(—her grandson Cory had been a dinosaur buff—)

…and to top it all off, that was the moment Paul Jacopetti picked to have his goddamn heart attack.

Abby was startled by the sudden commotion of voices. She turned away from Bob Ganish, spilling her coffee onto his pant leg. (“Ouch, Abby, hey!”)

Jacopetti lay face-up on his mattress, his hands clutched over his chest. His face was pale, and he was breathing rapidly, wheezing.

Worse, everyone seemed to expect Abby to do something about it.

She hurried to Jacopetti’s mattress and crouched over him. “Paul? What is it?”

“I’m having a fucking heart attack,” he gasped, “what does it look like!”

Her first impulse—she was instantly ashamed of it—was to slap him. Tell him: Not now! This isn’t the time or the place, you idiot. Have your heart attack later.

Instead she asked, not too intelligently, “Does your chest hurt?”

“Yes, it hurts. Hurts like a son of a bitch.” He closed his eyes and grimaced.

Abby looked up. Everyone had gathered in a circle around the mattress, their attention on Jacopetti, or worse, on her. The ventilator ducts screamed. Abby heard the sound of a window breaking, perhaps up on the second floor, a nerve-wrenching sound conducted directly into her eardrums.

She said, half to herself, “I don’t know what to do.” Then, as the last buckles of restraint broke loose, louder: “I don’t know what to do! Stop staring at me!”

She felt a hand on her shoulder, gently pulling her aside—Beth Porter’s hand.

Abby bit her lip but retreated from the mattress. Dazed, she watched Beth kneeling over Paul Jacopetti. “Mr. Jacopetti?” Beth said. “Mr. Jacopetti, can you hear me?” He opened his eyes. “You… what do you want?”

“Mr. Jacopetti, you have to tell me what’s wrong.” Perhaps the pain had gotten worse—Jacopetti seemed suddenly more malleable. “Chest hurts.”

“Show me where,” Beth said.

Jacopetti raised his right hand and drew a circle on his shirt above the breastbone.

“There in the center?” Nod.

“How about your arm? Does your arm hurt at all?”

“No.”

“How about your breathing?”

“Tight.”

Gendy, Beth levered back the man’s head so his chin jutted up. “Mr. Jacopetti, I know this is a personal question, but are those false teeth?”

“Dentures,” he managed. “Why?”

“Can you take them out? In case you fall asleep or anything. It’s safer. Or I can take them out for you.”

Jacopetti pried out his teeth. Abby had always been a little frightened of this man—his barrel-shaped body, his booming voice, his invincible cynicism. But Jacopetti without his teeth looked altogether less threatening. His cheeks seemed to collapse inward, giving him an old man’s gummy frown.

Jacopetti looked up at his audience. “Thuck you,” he said/Thuck all oth you.”

“We could use some more light,” Beth said hurriedly. “Maybe if everybody would just sit back down?”

They did, though Abby stayed close, mad at herself for failing this test. If it hadn’t been for the noise…

“Mr. Jacopetti,” Beth said, “are you nauseated?”

Nod.

“Feel like you might throw up?”

“Maybe.”

“Could somebody fetch a towel just in case?” Chuck Makepeace dashed for the bathroom.

“Mr. Jacopetti, listen to me… Did you ever have this pain before?”

“Not as bad.”

“But you’ve had it before?” Nod.

“Seen a doctor about it?”

“No.”

“It always went away?” Nod.

“Okay,” Beth said. “That’s good. I think what you have isn’t a bad heart attack. I think it’s angina. It’ll probably pass if you lie still.”

Joey Commoner, leaning against the wall with a strained expression, said: “How would you know?”

“Hush,” Abby told him, and got a sullen glare in exchange.

Bob Ganish, his claustrophobia forgotten—misplaced along with his common sense, Abby thought—offered: “This man should be in a hospital.”

Jacopetti: “I am in a hothpital, you athholel”

Ganish reddened. “I mean, he needs proper medical attention.”

Abby took the salesman aside a second time. “I know he does, Bob, but our proper medical attention seems to be lost in the storm. Let’s sit down, shall we?” She looked at her watch. Seven-forty-five. How much worse could this weather get? Much worse, she supposed. The eye, the Helper had told her, would probably pass directly over Buchanan, possibly around midnight. And that was only half the storm.

“I wish,” she muttered, “somebody would turn off this goddamned noise.”

Matt felt as if he had fallen into some peculiar time warp: The smaller the distance between himself and his destination, the more slowly he was forced to proceed.

The enemy wasn’t so much wind—though that was bad enough—nor even Miriam Flett’s relentless backseat driving. The enemy was visibility. More precisely, invisibility.

All traces of daylight had passed. The rain was continuous and dense as fog. It carried with it tiny particles of salt and something else, a crystalline dust, some sort of sea life, Matt presumed. The effect of this was to obscure his vision so completely that he turned onto Campbell Road, the direct route to the hospital, without any certainty that he had chosen the right intersection. There were no landmarks, nothing perceptible beyond five or six feet from the car even in the high beams. He drove hugging the right side of the road, scanning for the sign that marked the entrance to the hospital, then worrying that he’d passed it—maybe it was set too far back from the tarmac.

A particularly strong wind rocked the car up on its right-hand wheels; Miriam sucked in her breath. “I should have stayed home!”

“Home might be underwater by now,” Matt said. “Try not to worry, Miriam. We don’t have far to go, and we’ll be safe at the hospital.”

“Can you guarantee that?”

“Stake my life on it.”

“Not funny, Dr. Wheeler.”

“Not meant to be.” Desperate, he took the next available right. It looked like the entrance to the hospital—the shrub on the corner seemed familiar.

But it wasn’t the hospital. He identified, on close approach, an unfamiliar yellow speed bump, a parking lot that curved the wrong way; finally, the broken window of the local 7-Eleven.

Miriam’s hands were clenched together in her lap, arthritic knuckles knotted together. She said, “Are we stopping for snacks?”

It wasn’t the hospital, but it was at least a landmark. Matt tried to recall the relationship of the 7-Eleven to Buchanan General. He’d driven this route at least twice a week for years, but when he tried to map it in his head… was the 7-Eleven before the hospital? Certainly. Close to it? He thought so. But how many yards exactly? Was there another store en route, possibly a camera store? He seldom stopped at any of these shops; they were vague in his mind.

He navigated turtle-fashion back to Campbell Road and crawled onward.

Miriam gasped as a yard-long tree limb came whirling out of the darkness and struck the rear left window. The glass starred but didn’t shatter. Miriam whispered something inaudible. Matt clenched his teeth and drove.

He slowed where the curb yielded to a driveway on the right. He exchanged a glance with Miriam, then turned the wheel. This might be the hospital. It probably was. Better be.

The access lane seemed to crawl on forever in front of the car. Matt began to entertain the possibility that he had driven from the 7-Eleven into a horizonless limbo of rain and wind, all landmarks erased. He fought the temptation to check his watch every thirty seconds, try to calculate his progress. He was suddenly aware of the pungent smell of the sealed automobile, his own sweat mingled with the lighter, sourer odor of Miriam and the reek of wet upholstery and wet clothing.