They Fed Me to the Dead, So I Woke Up Before the End novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: Day Zero

"We share locations, babe," Keaton said, and held up his phone with the little blue dot on it. "I got worried. You've been dodging me."

I looked at the dot.

It sat on the exact spot where I stood at the bottom of my stepfather's lane.

"Right," I said. "I forgot."

"Nice spot. Real private." His eyes went up the road, then came back to me and warmed. "Don't worry. I won't come up and spook your folks. Not until you want me to."

"Thank you."

"Anything for you."

He kissed my forehead.

I let him, and I thought about Ray's heavy shoulders and Ray's old shotgun in the cabin closet.

That night I turned off my location sharing and left my phone in the cabin, and I never carried it up that lane again.

*

On the morning of October 14, I punched in at St. Anne's pharmacy at 6:55 and put on my badge.

I had been dreading this shift for twenty-four days.

I had also asked for it.

The pharmacy sat on the first floor behind a steel cage, with a long counter, a back room of locked cabinets, and a door that opened straight onto the corridor to the loading dock.

By noon the day had been so ordinary that I checked the clock every ten minutes anyway.

At 3:40, a code came over the intercom.

Then another.

Then a third, from the lower level, where the morgue was.

The tech at the next window, a sweet, talkative girl who had once brought me soup when I had the flu, looked up from the register.

"What's going on?"

"Get in the back," I said.

"What? Why?"

"Please. Now."

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