Chapter 12: The Board

After the voice called us a nest, nobody came.

Calvin made six runs on Thursday afternoon and came back empty five times.

"They won't open the door," he said, dropping into a chair at the nurses' station.

"A man on Linwood had a kid with a fever of a hundred and five. He talked to me through the mail slot."

"What did he say?"

"He said the voice told him your hospital's full of crabs." Calvin rubbed his face. "He said he'd rather wait."

The Red had three hundred and forty people in it.

Forty-one of them were red.

I knew every one of them by bed and hall and cot.

There were ventilators and bleeds and crab bites gone bad from the inside.

There was an old woman whose heart was quitting the way the heart of the man in Bed Four had on Tuesday.

The man in Bed Four had died on Wednesday night when the fuel ran low and we turned his machine down to save the others.

I hadn't had time to think about it until then.

"I can't hold forty-one people," I said.

"I know."

"I can swap them. All of them. If I had forty-one crabs."

Calvin looked up at me.

Then he looked out the bay doors at Eastern Avenue, where the sun was going down.

"The voice called this place a nest," he said slowly.

"So?"

"So what do you think crabs do when they hear the word nest?"

They came at dusk.

The first ones walked up Eastern Avenue from the park in twos and threes.

By full dark there were dozens of them crowding the curb in front of the ambulance bay.

They could smell three hundred and forty people inside.

Gloria opened the bay doors halfway and held them there with her hand.

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