“Headcounts!” Ms. Patel called, her hair stuck to her cheeks, pencil in hand. “I need names!”
The woman with the pizza box roster, hands puckered with rain, recited back the list, slow and sure. The ink bled into the cardboard and stayed legible anyway. Twenty-four names. Twenty-four small heads. A cluster of checkmarks that looked like sewing stitches across a tear.
“Warm and watch,” Doc said to the bank, moving through clusters like a gardener checking seedlings. “Hot packs in armpits and lower back. If lips are pale, tell me, not the rain.”
The heavy wrecker arrived then—big grille, amber strobes, diesel grumble that cut under the storm. The operator stepped down with the cautious speed of someone who has argued with physics for a living and still likes it. He took in the winch cable already humming and the neon strap furred by a sweatshirt sleeve and whistled low. “We’ll give her a safer leash,” he said to the captain. “But we’ll have to slack the old one to thread the hook.”
