Chapter 10: The Drive

"The registry," I told the crews that night, "is one guy in a truck."

"Nine resents that," Morgan said.

"Nine was the only one. In the whole county. If he'd been in Ohio, I'd be dead."

"And my daughter would be next on the list."

The channel was quiet for a second.

Then Crew Twelve keyed in.

"So what do we do, Four?"

"You roll up your sleeves."

That was how the Channel Four drive started.

It took me two weeks of phone calls on my days off, with Kinley on my shoulder.

The regional blood center said yes to a bus.

The union said yes to the hall.

The blood bank director said, very carefully, that the hospital could freeze and hold units of my type.

If the drive turned up matches, and if somebody paid for the storage.

"Who pays?"

"The hospital foundation funds things like this."

"Kaitlyn Delaine's foundation."

The director had the decency to wince.

"I'll send the request through anyway," she said.

The drive was on a Saturday in March, in the union hall on the South Side.

The blood center bus parked at the curb at eight.

By eight fifteen, there was a line around the block.

Linemen.

Their wives, their husbands, their grown kids.

Retired guys with canes who'd climbed poles in the seventies.

I ran it to the minute from a folding table with a clipboard and a headset around my neck.

Kinley rode strapped to my chest in a carrier.

"Station one, intake. Station two, finger stick. Nobody donates on an empty stomach, I will check."

"She will check," Morgan told the line. "She checked me."

He'd set up two roasters and a griddle at the back of the hall.

He was making pierogies and onions for three hundred people with the sleeves of his thermal pushed up and a bandage already inside his elbow.

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