Chapter 32: Nothing for Sale

Six weeks after the gate, the council gave us the old ski-rental shop by the south wall.

Bixby painted the sign himself, in white house paint, on a plank.

HARTWELL CLINIC. NOTHING SOLD.

He stood back to look at it with his spectacles mended with tape.

"It needs a comma," he said.

"It doesn't."

"It reads like a threat."

"Good," I said.

The line began at the door at six every morning.

By seven it ran down the street past the stables.

Families, soldiers and old men stood in it, each holding a numbered scrap of cloth.

Nobody paid.

The camp physician ran the ward side.

Lana ran the bench in the back, under a council order and a guard who sat reading a paperback by the door.

She had her sleeves rolled up and a pencil behind her ear.

She was writing the protocol on a wall chart in block letters, so anyone who could read could follow it.

Nobody asked her to be sorry.

She did the work, and she showed her pages, and the camp watched her do it.

I had stopped checking her wrist.

I still sometimes did.

The first patient that morning was a man in a canvas coat with a small girl on his shoulders.

"Fever?" I said.

"No, ma'am."

I put my hand on his sleeve.

"Cough?"

"Not a bit."

*I gave her my last two doses of the antiviral, and I skipped mine. My chest has been bad for a week.*

I looked at the child.

Keep reading free with an account. Start Apocalypse: I Hear My Genius Husband's Sins from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.