Chapter 14: The Invoice

The lines kept coming, one under the other, in the dark over Wyatt's sleeping face.

[Restart paid in full by Wyatt Brekke on Day 87.]

[Day 87 repeats. Payment due.]

I read them three times.

I held my breath and kept my head on his shoulder.

If I moved, he would wake up and ask me what was wrong.

The first line was not a threat. It was a receipt.

I had always thought my second chance was a gift, and I had never asked who the gift came from.

I had assumed the system, or God, or luck.

I had assumed it was mine.

Somebody had paid for it.

I eased out from under his arm and found my coat and slid down out of the cab into the cold.

The field was black. A wind came across it that smelled of snow.

I walked until the truck was a shape behind me, and then I stopped and put both hands over my mouth.

"Who holds it?" I said aloud, in a whisper that cracked. "Say it. Who is the debtor?"

The air in front of me wrote it plainly.

[Wyatt Brekke.]

I made a sound I didn't recognize.

Then the memory I'd been refusing came up all at once, whole, in the order it had happened.

The warm wind on the loading dock.

The herd on the trailer. The three thousand pounding on the chains.

Wyatt at my window, with blood through his coat, putting the keys in my hand.

I'll be right behind you.

I had driven two blocks and stopped, and I had sat in the cab with my mask hanging by its strap.

The thermos had been warm. The heater was going.

I had breathed the dust, and the fever had come up in my chest, and I'd sat there waiting to die.

In the last of the light, with my vision going gray, I had seen a line of print hang over the dash.

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