He Died Saving Me on Day 87, So Now I Save Him novel · Chapter 2 of 32
Chapter 2: The Yard on Rice Street
She finds Wyatt alive, a stranger, and hires his truck for Tuesday with one fact only he would know.
"Signe, you stopped in the road," Bets said.
"I know."
"There's a truck behind us," Bets said.
"I know that too."
I pulled into the yard gate and shut the engine off, and my hands were shaking, so I put them under my thighs.
Bets turned in her seat and looked at me properly for the first time.
"Okay. Say your name and tell me what day it is."
"Signe Haugen. It's Saturday, September twelfth," I said.
"Who's the president?"
"Bets, I'm not having a stroke," I said.
"Then why are you crying?"
I wiped my face on my sleeve.
I had three days, and Bets was the only person I could afford to tell something true.
"On Tuesday morning a sickness starts," I said. "A man at a feed mill in Brandon won't wake up, and it's in the whole county by night."
"A bio thing?" she said. "Is this a bio thing?"
"It's a dust. You breathe it, you get a fever, you sleep, and you wake up wrong."
"Wrong how?" Bets said.
"White eyes. Cold. You can't talk, and you only want to find the loudest sound in the room."
Bets said nothing for a long moment.
"You're serious."
"I need you to write down three things and check them, so you don't have to take my word. Tonight a woman on Sycamore will call about her chimney. Tomorrow a bus will lose a wheel on Forty-first. Monday the river gauge at the falls will read eleven feet," I said.
"You can't know those."
"I don't. I know Tuesday."
I did not know Saturday's calls, not really.
The first life had run so hard that I had lost the ordinary days.
What I knew was the part that mattered, and I knew it in the shape of a siren.
Day 0, at 6:12 in the morning, a feed mill dock, a man who wouldn't wake.
By Day 3 the city was shut, and Osterman had opened the arena, because the county plan said the arena was where people went.
By Day 9 he'd chained the doors, because the plan said order.
By Day 11 Bets was dead.
By Day 87 the cold broke.
The cold had been the only thing on our side the whole winter.
A gray went stiff below ten degrees and froze solid below zero, white with frost, standing where it was.
It came back alive when it thawed, and nobody could tell the second thaw from the first until the herd was on you.
I looked through the windshield at the man by the trailer.
He had set the feed sack down and was watching our car with his hands on his hips.
"That him?" Bets said. "Is he part of this?"
"He's the one with the truck."
"You say that like it's all he is."
"It's all I can say," I said, and got out.
The yard was gravel and diesel and the smell of cattle that had left.
A red Peterbilt sat under the light, with a stock trailer behind it and a row of livestock gates stacked on the side of the shop.
The man came to the fence and put his forearms on the top rail.
Up close he was younger than he had looked in the dark, thirty-four, maybe, with a day of stubble and gray in the stubble.
His eyes were brown and tired.
I had never seen them look at me without knowing me.
"Ma'am, you're blocking my gate," he said. "Are you lost?"
"Are you Wyatt Brekke?"
"Depends who's asking," he said.
"I'm Signe. I need to hire your truck, and you, from now until Tuesday night."
"I haul cattle," he said.
"I know."
"Cattle don't ride in a Corolla." He nodded at my car. "And I'm full up. I've got sixteen ton of feed to drop Tuesday at Hartung's, and I'm on the road Monday to a sale barn in Huron."
"Cancel Huron."
He almost laughed.
"I can pay six thousand dollars," I said. "It's cash, in my checking account, and the bank opens Monday. I can have the first half in your hand at nine."
"Lady, nobody pays six thousand dollars to ride a cattle truck."
"Somebody does if it keeps her alive."
He stopped smiling.
He looked at Bets in the passenger seat, who gave him a small wave, and back at me.
"Who's after you?"
"Nobody's after me. It's coming for everybody," I said.
"That's not an answer."
"No." I took a breath. "Come on, Mom."
He didn't move.
"What?"
"That's what you say to the truck when she won't start in the cold. Come on, Mom. Your crew thinks it's a joke."
His forearms came off the rail.
"Who told you that?"
"Nobody."
"My mother drove this truck from the day I was nine until she got sick," he said. "She died in March."
"I've never told anyone why I talk to it."
"You said it to me," I said. "Eventually."
The pole light buzzed over our heads.
It's a terrible thing to look at a man and hold the thing he told you the night his world ended, when to him it's still tomorrow.
I wanted to say I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I know.
I said, "I'm not a stalker, and I'm not crazy. I need a truck that won't break down and a driver who stops for people. Tuesday morning at the Hartung dock I'll tell you the rest."
"Why not now?"
"Because you'd say no."
He looked at the trailer, and the sky behind it going the color of dishwater.
A ranch dog barked somewhere on Rice Street and nothing answered it.
"I'm at Hartung's at five-thirty Tuesday," he said slowly. "The loaders open the dock at six. There's a kid on the crew who's been sleeping on the job since Thursday, and the foreman's about to fire him."
My stomach turned over.
"What's his name?"
"I don't know. Someone said he's the foreman's nephew." He rubbed his jaw. "Why?"
"Because he's going to fall down at 6:12."
Wyatt looked at me for a long time.
Then he looked at the road behind me, where the first car of the morning went by with its headlights on.
"Tuesday," he said. "Five-thirty. Don't be late, I don't wait for anyone."
I knew better.
In the first life he'd waited for me a hundred times, and once he waited too long.
"Thank you," I said.
"I haven't said yes."
"You will."
I got back in the car and shut the door and held the wheel until my hands stopped.
"That," Bets said, "was the strangest thing I've ever seen anyone do to a man."
"I know."
"He looked like you'd hit him with a shovel," Bets said.
"I know."
"Is he going to be in our lives?"
I started the car.
"He's going to be the reason I do all of it."
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