The Bumblebee Flies Anyway takes place in an experimental hospital for the dying, an unusual setting for a novel about teen-agers. The hospital's teenage patients are all there voluntarily, hoping, as Billy the Kid says, that "what they learned in the tests might help somebody, sometime." Most of the action occurs in Section 12, an isolated children's ward within the six-story red brick building. The neglected hospital grounds border a junkyard, "a wasteland of cars and trucks and vans and buses, a metal graveyard." From this "graveyard" Barney Snow resurrects a mock MG automobile and decides he can keep his promise to give Mazzo the one last car ride he yearns for.