Doomsday Rebirth novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: The Kitchen

I went alone, and Ezra stayed in the cellar with Tuck and a promise.

"If a county van comes down Lorain, you go out through the alley hatch," I told them both. "You don't wait for me."

"Boss," Tuck said, "I'm not leaving you."

"I'm not asking you to. I'm asking you to leave him."

The guard drove me the nine miles in a white van with the Commissioner's seal on the door.

I sat in the back with the axe across my knees, and nobody asked me to put it down.

The east ramp had changed.

There was a second gate now, a chain-link run with a guard box, and a crowd of people waiting in a line along the wall.

They held plastic bags and small children.

None of them looked at me, which meant they had been told not to.

Inside, the main hall smelled of bleach and boiled cabbage.

Cots stood in rows under the old convention banners, and there were more people than I had ever seen at this stage of the Red.

The Commissioner waited in the hall's side office, behind a folding table, with a thermos and a stack of lists.

He had silver hair, a gray suit and a mild face, and he stood up when I came in.

"Ms. Corrigan," he said. "Thank you for coming. Please, sit."

"I'll stand."

"Of course."

He sat anyway, and folded his hands.

"My deputy tells me you walked away from a hollow's claw on the lake road. My aide tells me you keep thirty-seven people fed in a cellar that, by every report, should have flooded."

"They're neighbors."

"They're a miracle. I'd like one more." He smiled. "Our kitchen has been failing for a week, and I understand you were a kitchen manager. I'd like you to run it."

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