Chapter 6: Channel Four

Tor's radio shack was warm and smelled of solder and old coffee.

By a quarter to nine there were five of us in it.

Tor sat at the main desk with his hand on the transmit switch.

Bets stood behind him with the scanner, and Wyatt leaned in the doorway.

Jonas sat on an upturned bucket, listening with his whole face.

"The net is open," Tor said. "Channel four is the county's, and I'm a licensed ham."

"The FCC would like a word with me about that. They can wait in line."

"Is it live?" I asked.

"Every farm radio, every trucker, every deputy with a scanner on his belt," Tor said. "Forty thousand people if the power holds."

That was the number that scared me.

In the first life I had used channel four sixteen hours a day.

But I had been a voice in a county building, and now I would be a stranger on an open line.

I thought about what I'd learned in eight years of nights.

People don't listen to the loudest voice. They listen to the one that sounds like it already knows what to do next.

So I would not tell them what I felt.

I would tell them the next thing to do.

I put on the headset.

It was heavier than mine and smelled of someone else's hair.

Tor nodded once, and the red light on the desk came on.

"This is Signe Haugen," I said. "I worked the night desk at the Public Safety Center for eight years."

"I'm speaking from a farm south of Brandon, and I need everyone listening to stay on for two minutes."

My voice was the voice I use at three in the morning.

Even, and a little low, and unhurried.

"The sickness at Hartung Feed this morning is not a flu and it is not an overdose."

"It spreads as a gray dust that comes out of the lungs of the sick," I said.

"If you breathe it, you get a fever within hours, and you sleep, and you wake up as something that is no longer a person."

The scanner crackled in the corner and went quiet.

"Do not open your door to anyone with a fever, and do not take the interstate."

"A respirator with pink cartridges stops the dust. A wet cloth does not," I said.

"They find you by sound, so keep your engines off and your voices low."

"If one finds you, go to a hard surface and be still. They lose interest in the quiet."

I stopped and took a breath, and I let the silence sit.

Then I said the thing I had come to say.

"The county has opened the arena as a shelter."

"Before you go, ask whoever is at the door one question," I said.

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