Rewriting the Apocalypse novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: September Fourteenth

On September fourteenth, Jo woke at four in the morning and lay still, listening for the end of the world.

Nothing came.

The rowhouse creaked.

A bus went by on Linden Street.

Down in the clinic, someone was moving quietly, and she knew the step.

She put on a sweater and went downstairs.

Eli was at the front desk with a mug of coffee and the schedule book, two hours before his shift.

He wore no gloves.

The monitor was gone from his ankle.

A judge had given him five years of probation and a hundred hours a month at the clinic.

He had worked every hour of them.

"You're up early," he said.

"So are you."

"I knew what day it was."

"I know you did."

He did not ask whether she was afraid.

He pushed the second coffee across the desk, and when she took it, he kept his hand where she could see it.

At eight, Bess made pancakes for everyone in the clinic's tiny kitchen.

Sam ate eleven.

He did not mention the date, and neither did Bess, and Jo loved them both for it.

At ten, the stranger from Sublevel 3 came in for his checkup with a bag of tomatoes from his sister's garden.

He could talk now, and he did, a great deal.

At noon, a woman brought her small son in with a fever.

Eli carried the boy to the exam room himself.

Jo watched him do it, with the child's head on his shoulder and his bare hand spread across the little back.

His hand was not shaking.

At three, she climbed the ladder to the clinic roof.

The gutters ran clean along the edge.

Eli had fixed them in August, on Bess's orders, in the rain.

He was waiting by the chimney.

"This is when," he said.

"This is when."

Below them, Columbus went about its afternoon.

A mail truck turned the corner.

A man walked a dog.

Jo sat down on the warm tar paper and held out her hand.

"Let me hear," she said.

He sat beside her and gave her his wrist.

She laid two fingers on it and opened the power as gently as she could.

His nerves ran clean and bright, a young man's.

She waited for the hum.

It had been thinning since the roof, week by week, a note held a little less long each time she listened.

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