Chapter 4: Bixby's Clinic

We walked all day along the county road and saw eleven of the turned and no living people.

Jonas killed the turned with a short hatchet and did not make a sound doing it.

I watched, and I was not afraid of him.

The clinic stood at a crossroads in what had been a feed store.

A hand-painted sign on the door said BIXBY, M.D. and under it, in smaller letters, NO WEAPONS INSIDE.

Fifteen people sat in the waiting room on feed sacks and folding chairs, coughing, bandaged, holding each other's hands.

A man with a white beard and wire glasses came out of the back wiping his hands on a stained vest.

He was sixty-four, thin, and tired in a way I knew from the ER.

"Mercer," he said. "You're alive."

"So are you."

"Who's this?"

"A nurse," Jonas said. "Deaconess-Aldine. She needs a hand sewn."

I held up my cut palm, and Bixby looked at me for a second too long.

"Nina Hartwell," he said slowly. "The radio says you're dead."

"The radio's wrong."

"The radio is Dr. Reeve."

"The radio is wrong," I said again.

He studied my face and then Jonas's.

"Come in the back," he said.

The back room was a storeroom with a camp bed and a lantern.

Bixby cleaned the cut, shook his head at the glass in it, and said the stitching would have to wait for his steady hand.

"Let your pilot wrap it," he said. "I have forty people out there and one nurse who quit yesterday."

He went to the door.

"Doctor," I said. "Is the Reeve serum safe?"

"It's been tested," he said. "It's what the camp is giving everyone."

And I heard him.

I had touched his sleeve as he passed, and it was enough.

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