He Died Saving Me on Day 87, So Now I Save Him novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: The Dock

At 6:12 on Tuesday a man falls on the feed mill dock, the crew listens, and the first gray stands up.

On Monday I had put every dollar I owned into forty-four respirators, the pink-cartridge kind that painters wear.

On Tuesday at 5:40 a.m. I stood on the Hartung Feed dock in the first gray light with that bag on my shoulder.

Every minute I had already lived pressed on me.

The mill sat at the Brandon exit, a cluster of concrete silos with a loading dock on the south side.

It smelled of molasses and wet corn.

Nine loaders in coveralls were stacking pallets under the dock lights, and none of them looked at us.

Wyatt had backed the Peterbilt to the bay, and he leaned on the trailer with his arms folded.

Bets stood beside me in her green sweater, holding a thermos like a weapon.

"Which one?" she whispered.

I had seen him before I let myself look.

A kid of nineteen or twenty sat on a pallet by the scale house, in coveralls three sizes too big.

His lips were gray at the edges, and sweat ran down his neck in the cold.

"That one."

"He just looks sick," Bets said.

"He's been sick since Thursday. Everything else comes out of him."

The dock boss came out of the office with a clipboard, saw the kid, and made a face.

"Get up," he said. "I'm not paying you to sit."

The kid didn't answer.

In the first life I had heard the call from a console across the county, a man screaming still, still, he won't stop.

Then nothing.

I had never seen this place, only how it ended.

Now I stood in the middle of the beginning with a bag of masks and no way to make anyone take one.

"Wyatt," I said.

He came over, slow.

"Before it happens, I need your crew to put these on."

"They aren't my crew," he said.

"Then I need you to put one on first."

He looked at the duffel and then at me.

He had every reason to say no.

I was a stranger in a stranger's lot, telling him about the end of the world.

"How sure are you?" he said.

"I've never been surer of anything."

He held my eyes, and I watched the choice go through him.

Then he unzipped the bag, took out a respirator and put it over his nose and mouth.

It made his voice flat and a little funny.

"Everybody on this dock," he said, loud enough to carry. "Get a mask from the lady. I'm not asking."

"What the hell is this?" the dock boss said.

"A safety drill," Wyatt said. "Free equipment."

The loaders came over one by one, because he was the biggest man on the dock and he asked like a man cattle listen to.

Bets handed out masks and made up fit instructions as she went.

Seven of the nine put one on.

The dock boss didn't.

"I run this dock," he said. "I'm not wearing that."

"Then stand upwind," I said.

"Of what?"

"The kid."

He barked a laugh and walked straight toward the pallet.

The kid sat up.

It happened all at once, like a man hearing his name from a long way off.

He coughed, and a fine gray cloud came out of his mouth and hung in the light.

It looked like flour thrown in the air.

It drifted slowly toward the dock boss's face.

"Jeez, kid, cover your mouth," the dock boss said.

He breathed in.

The boy fell sideways off the pallet, and his head hit the concrete, and he didn't move.

The clock over the scale house said 6:12.

"Oh God," the dock boss said, and got out his phone. "Somebody call nine-one-one."

He was the one who did.

Somewhere across the county a girl who wasn't Bets took that call and said what we all say.

"Nine-one-one, what's the address of your emergency?"

I had heard her say it once before.

I took Bets by the arm.

"East door," I said to the loaders. "Everyone out the east door, and nobody touch him."

"Is he dead?" one of them asked.

"Not yet."

The boy on the floor began to shake.

It started in his heels, a rattle on the concrete, and then his arm lifted and his hand opened and closed on air.

The dock boss was still shouting the address into his phone.

Behind his mask Wyatt had gone white.

"Why's he getting up?"

"Because he hears the loudest thing in the room," I said. "Kill your engine, Wyatt. Now."

He ran for the cab.

The kid got to his feet.

His eyes were white all the way across, and his skin was gray, and his hands hung open as if he'd forgotten them.

He turned his head toward the one voice screaming over everything.

I had known it was coming, and I still couldn't breathe.

He crossed the dock and took the dock boss around the chest.

The phone skittered away across the floor.

The dock boss screamed once, a wet sound, and gray dust poured out of both of them.

"Horn!" I shouted. "The forklift horn at the far end. Somebody hit it!"

One of the loaders ran.

The horn blared long and loud at the other end of the dock, and the boy's head came around.

He let go.

The dock boss fell on his back, coughing.

The kid walked away from him toward the noise like a man called to supper.

Two loaders shut the roll-up door on him, and the metal rang when he hit it from inside.

The dock went quiet.

The dock boss lay on the concrete, wheezing, with gray on his lips.

I knelt by him because I couldn't help it.

He looked up at me with the face of a man who has just been told the date of something.

"It hurts," he said.

"I know."

"How did you know?" he said.

"I'm sorry."

"Call my wife," he said.

I couldn't tell him that by dark she would hear him on the other end of her own phone and never be able to answer.

I took the phone off the concrete and found the one entry under Home.

I put it in his hand and stood up.

The loaders had already gone, running to their cars with the masks on.

I had told every one of them the same three things: go home, get your family, don't open the door to anyone sick.

Wyatt stood at the foot of the dock with his engine silent behind him.

Bets's phone sat on a pallet with the scanner app turned up, and the county dispatcher's voice came out of it, calm and bright.

"Brandon Fire, Medic Six, respond to Hartung Feed, man down, unresponsive, possible overdose."

Later it said, "Medic Six, say again?" and then, "Medic Six, do you copy? Medic Six?"

It was the same words and the same pauses.

Wyatt listened to the whole thing with his hands open at his sides.

Then he looked at me.

"Tell me the rest," he said. "All of it. In the truck."

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