Chapter 5: The Line

Calvin parked Medic 19 sideways across Pratt Street at 6:40 in the morning, and I was out before it stopped.

The line ran right across the road in front of us.

It was a strip of white light on the asphalt as wide as my hand, and it hummed.

On the far side was the harbor, all the way down to the water.

The sun was coming up over the Aquarium, and people sat at café tables with blankets on their shoulders, drinking something hot.

On my side were six hundred people who had bounced.

They sat on the curbs and lay on the sidewalks of Pratt Street, wrapped in coats and shower curtains.

I could read every one of them without trying.

I saw yellow after yellow, a scatter of reds, and two blacks under a bus shelter with nobody beside them.

"Mom."

Connor was sitting on the curb with his crutches across his knees.

A little girl of about eight was leaning on his shoulder, wheezing.

Her mother sat on his other side holding an empty inhaler, and over the mother's head the color was green.

The girl was yellow, and the yellow came from her chest.

I'd wanted to yell at him the whole way down Eastern Avenue.

I knelt in front of the girl instead and counted her breathing.

"How long since her last puff?" I asked the mother.

"Midnight. That was the last one."

"Calvin, albuterol."

He was already there with the jump bag.

I looked at my son over the girl's head.

"You walked a mile and a half on a sprained ankle in the dark."

"On crutches," he said. "It's different."

"How is it different?"

"It took longer."

The girl laughed between wheezes and then had to stop.

Her mother put her hand on Connor's knee.

"He found us at four in the morning," she said. "I wasn't going to leave her, and I couldn't carry her and all our stuff."

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Surgeon Got a Blade and I Got a Clipboard, So I Decided Who Lives from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.