Apocalypse: I Hear My Genius Husband's Sins novel · Chapter 18 of 32

Chapter 18: The Ward Turns

The camp physician unlocked the cottage door and walked me out into the morning like a patient he was discharging.

Jonas came behind us with Lana's earpiece crushed in his fist.

He had pulled it out of her ear and left her sitting on the floor of the cottage with a guard at the door.

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"The ward," the doctor said. "Sixty-one beds. Every one of them was given a dose from the same crate this week."

"And the strips?"

"I have forty in my bag."

The infirmary was a long barn with cots down both walls and a cooler by the door.

Sick people lay in rows with their eyes closed, gray and sweating.

A woman in the nearest cot lifted her head when we came in.

"Doc?"

"It's all right. Lie still."

The lieutenant from the clinic line was already at the cooler.

I knew him by his clipboard and his neat mustache.

He had four men behind him in gray, and he looked at me with a face I had last seen on a gravel road, watching a crowd take crates away from him.

"Miss Hartwell," he said. "You are not authorized to be here."

"I'm a nurse."

"You're a detainee."

"I'm an ER nurse of seven years, and the camp physician has asked me to assist him."

"The General's order..."

"Is the General in the room?"

He did not answer.

The doctor set his bag on the cooler and took out the strips.

"Open it," he said.

"Doctor, those crates are restricted."

"Open the cooler, Lieutenant."

The lieutenant put his hand flat on the lid.

"I can't allow that."

I stepped up beside him.

I reached out, as if to steady myself on the cooler, and put two fingers on his knuckles.

"Why not?" I asked.

"Because the stock is limited."

*Because I sell the full doses to the north barracks for gold, and put the saline on the ward. I put the dead men's names on the ration roll and I eat for them.*

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