He Died Saving Me on Day 87, So Now I Save Him novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: Day 87, Again
Signe dies in a thaw at the arena dock after Wyatt holds the door, wakes at her console three days before the world ends, is humiliated by her director, and quits with her trainee.
I died on the eleventh of December, on the loading dock of the downtown arena, in a warm wind from the west.
It was the first day above freezing in a month.
Every gray in the city had stood frozen in the streets since October, white with frost, and the wind was taking the frost off them one at a time.
Behind the dock door three thousand people were beating on chains.
Wyatt had backed his cattle trailer across the mouth of the dock to hold the herd off that door, and the grays were climbing the trailer rails.
He came to the cab window with blood through his coat and put the keys in my hand.
"Take the truck around to the south lot," he said. "I'll be right behind you."
He wasn't going to be.
I knew it when he said it, and I knew it when he turned around.
The herd closed over the place where he'd been standing.
My mask had torn when he shoved me down, and the pink cartridge hung off one side by its strap.
I drove two blocks and stopped, and sat in the cab with the heater running, and breathed the dust.
By dusk the fever was in my chest.
His thermos was still in the cup holder, and it was still warm.
I put my hand around it and held on.
I woke up with my cheek stuck to a keyboard.
The room smelled like burnt coffee and carpet glue, and a fluorescent tube over my head buzzed on one note.
I was at console nine on the dispatch floor of the Minnehaha County Public Safety Center, with my headset around my neck.
The clock on the wall said 3:58 a.m.
The calendar under it said Saturday, September 12.
I sat very still and looked at my hands.
They were clean, and they were warm, and all ten fingers bent.
Words hung in the air in front of my eyes, plain as a sign over a gas pump.
[Day 87 is ninety days away.]
Then a second line under it.
[Task: Bring Bettina Moen out of this building before the shift ends.]
They faded, and the floor came back around me.
Six night-shift dispatchers at six consoles, murmuring to the county in the voice we all use.
Across the aisle Bets Moen was walking a man through chest compressions on the phone, counting under her breath.
She was twenty-four and four months into the job, and she had green sweater sleeves pushed to her elbows.
She had died on the eleventh day of the gray, coughing in a church basement on Minnesota Avenue, and I had held her hand.
Now she looked up and gave me a thumbs-up for no reason I could see.
I put my face in my hands, because I couldn't put it anywhere else.
Ninety days.
Nobody on this floor knew that in three of them a man would fall down on a feed mill dock in Brandon and not wake up.
Nobody knew the dust that came off him would be in the city by lunch.
I knew every name I'd lost, and I knew the order they went in.
That was what the second chance cost.
I would have to remember all of them on purpose, every day, so that I could change them.
"Haugen."
I knew the voice before I looked up.
Lyle Osterman, the county's emergency management director, stood at the end of my row in his fleece vest with his name stitched on it.
He ran every plan we had, and in the first life he ran the arena, and he chained its doors on the ninth day.
I had spent seventy-eight days hating him on the radio.
He was holding a printout.
"A caller was on hold for three rings tonight while you sat there with your head on the desk," he said.
The whole floor had gone quiet, with headsets half off and mouths closed.
"I got a notice from the sheriff's office at three in the morning, because your console was open and nobody was on it."
"Bets was on the line," I said.
"Bets is a trainee. You're the senior on this floor, and you were asleep."
He held out his hand, palm up.
"Headset."
Fourteen people were watching me, and I knew each of them.
Four of them would be alive on the first of January if they listened to me, and two were already gone in my head.
I thought about telling him.
I thought about the way it would sound: a woman who'd been crying at her console, telling her boss about a plague.
He would put me on leave and keep me from this building, and I would never see the dock.
I took the headset off my neck and set it in his palm.
"You'll want that back," I said. "In three days you're going to need every one of us."
"Is that a threat?"
"It's a scheduling note."
Somebody at the back made a sound they turned into a cough.
Osterman's face went flat.
"You're done here, Haugen. Go home. HR will call you."
I stood up, and my knees held.
I took my parka off the chair.
"Bets," I said. "Get your keys."
Bets lifted her head from the phone, wide-eyed, with the caller still counting in her ear.
"I'm on till six."
"Not anymore. Finish the call, then come," I said.
"Signe, I can't just."
"Bets."
Osterman took a step toward her. "She goes when I say she goes."
I looked at him, and I thought of the dock and the chains and the three thousand.
"Then say it, Lyle," I said. "Because if you don't, she's coming anyway."
It was the first time I'd said his first name in either life.
Bets hung up the call, picked up her bag and walked past him with her chin up and her round glasses crooked.
Nobody stopped us.
In the parking lot the air was cold and clean and smelled like cut hay from the fields past the interstate.
The stars were still out over the lot.
Bets leaned on my car and breathed like she'd run a mile.
"Why did I just do that?"
"Because you trust me," I said.
"I've known you four months."
"I know," I said. "Get in."
I drove with the windows down so I could hear the city.
It was so quiet, and every light was on, and nothing in it was gray.
I had been planning my first stop since I opened my eyes, and it took me twenty minutes to find the street.
A truck yard on Rice Street, behind a chain-link fence, with a red Peterbilt parked under a pole light and a cattle trailer behind it.
A man was walking out of the dark side of the yard with a fifty-pound feed sack on one shoulder.
He was tall and broad, in a canvas barn coat, with a nose that had been broken once.
He set the sack down on the tailgate and stretched his back.
He was alive.
I had watched him die, and I'd put my hand around his coffee, and he was lifting a feed sack in the gray before dawn.
I stopped the car in the middle of the road.
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