Chapter 5: The Line

By noon the next day, two hundred people were standing in a line that ran from the clinic door to the end of the gravel lot.

Mothers held children on their hips, and old men leaned on each other.

Some were already sweating through their shirts, and a few were shaking.

I stood at the clinic door in a borrowed white coat with my hair pinned up and Bixby's name tag on my chest.

Jonas leaned against the wall next to me with his hatchet under his jacket.

"Stay at my shoulder," he said.

"I'm the nurse."

"Then be a nurse who stays at my shoulder."

A green army truck came up the county road, and the line went quiet.

Two soldiers jumped down from the back.

A lieutenant climbed out of the cab with a clipboard and a clean uniform, and he did not look at the crowd at all.

On the side of every crate in the truck bed, there was a printed photograph of my husband.

He was smiling in his lab coat with his arms folded.

Underneath it said, THE CURE IS HERE.

A woman near the front began to cry with relief.

"Doctor Bixby," the lieutenant said. "Two hundred doses of the Reeve serum, as promised. Sign here and my men will unload."

Bixby took the pen with a trembling hand.

"Two hundred?"

"Two hundred doses," the lieutenant said. "Count them if you like."

And I heard him.

I had stepped forward to hold the clipboard steady, and my fingers rested against his.

*A hundred and twenty. Eighty went to the General's list in the north barracks. Nobody will count.*

I looked at the crates in the truck bed, the stack of boxes with my husband's face on them.

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