Chapter 12: The Net

Signe's POV

On the thirtieth day the net had six hundred voices, and I knew most of their addresses.

That was the secret of it. A dispatcher doesn't need to see a person to find him.

She needs a mailbox number and a bad intersection and the name of the dog.

Tor's radio shack had grown a second desk.

Bets sat at it with her round glasses pushed up in her hair.

A headset was clamped over one ear, and she worked the south half of the county.

Mine was the north.

Between us, on the wall, Bets had taped a map of the county.

She pinned a bead of colored yarn on every place that answered.

Green for safe. Yellow for hungry. Red for the ones that had gone quiet.

There were too many red.

"Colton Lutheran," Bets said, over her shoulder.

"Forty people in the basement, one gray in the parking lot, and it keeps knocking on the door."

"Does the church have a bell?" I said.

"Yeah."

"Then ring it, from the tower, and make them climb out the back window while it's ringing."

She relayed it.

A minute later the lot at Colton went quiet.

A man's voice said thank you, thank you, and cried into the mic.

I took off my headset and let the quiet sit.

This was the part nobody puts in a story.

You save forty people, and the next call comes in, and there's no time to feel it.

Jonas was in the corner with a school notebook on his knee.

He had begun to keep a tally of what brought the grays and what didn't.

The pages said things like boat horn, nine. Diesel idle, fourteen. Baby crying, five. A radio left on, twenty-two.

It was the most useful document in the county, and it was in a ten-year-old's block capitals.

"Signe," he said, without looking up. "A car's at the gate."

I knew who it was before I got to the window.

It was a white county SUV with a flag of truce taped to the antenna, a dish towel on a coat hanger.

A man in a captain's uniform stepped out of it and stood with his hands open at his sides.

Wyatt came from the barn at a walk.

Tor came from the house with the shotgun, and a dozen people drifted out into the yard to watch.

"Ms. Haugen," the captain called. "I'm here for the director."

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