Chapter 10: Wrong Color

I tore the paper plate off his shirt and put my hands on his arm.

The Hold took, and his bite came into my own arm like a burn.

He opened his eyes and looked at me.

"You're the nurse," he said.

"I'm the nurse."

"He said you'd let me die on the sidewalk."

"He says a lot of things."

He was maybe twenty, with a crew cut and a tattoo on his neck.

The black at the edges of his bite was two days old.

"When did this happen?"

"Tuesday night. On Collington." He swallowed. "He kept me out on the cars because I could still shoot."

"Two days?"

"He said it was nothing. He said he'd get us all over the line, and the voice would fix it."

There was no crab in the building to swap him onto.

So I held him.

At ten to seven the alarm on the parking garage tunnel went off.

The tunnel ran underground from the garage across the street to our waiting room, so patients could come in out of the rain.

Its gate had been chained since Tuesday.

"Somebody cut the chain," the roofer shouted from the hall. "There's crabs in the tunnel."

"How many?"

"Three. They're coming up."

I couldn't let go of my patient.

"Wheel us," I said.

Two of the fighters pushed his stretcher down the hall to the waiting room with me walking beside it, holding his arm.

The waiting room was full of sleeping people on cots.

The tunnel doors at the far end had been pried open, and three crabs were coming through them.

Out in the dark of the tunnel, somebody whistled and laughed.

The Bondsman's men had herded them in.

I read the crabs from the middle of the room.

Two were green and fast, coming along the wall toward the cots.

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