“Good,” the captain breathed, then to the operator: “You okay?”
He let out a breath that sounded like the end of a long day and the start of another. “Still my hands,” he said.
The bus, now on a long leash, drifted to a new bad angle. The operator took up a whisper of slack and decided not to be proud of it. “Ma’am, if the second surge hits while she’s chewing like that, I’ll have to let her go. Otherwise she moves me, or worse, moves your bridge.”
“You let her go,” the captain said, already turning to the next problem. “We’ve got what matters.”
At the church lot, the Sunday school rug turned triage pad was a small country of order. Doc moved through it, two fingers at pulses, eyes counting breath, handing out cups of warmish water like diplomas. Ms. Patel’s hair stuck to her cheeks, pencil in her hand, voice steady. “Say your name like a song,” she told a boy with a hiccup-sob. He did, and she sang it back. The woman with the pizza box peeled the damp top layer and started a fresh list on the cardboard clean beneath, ink bleeding and still legible. A volunteer set a line of paper cups on a folding table. The older man at the door poured coffee with the ceremony of a sacrament, added hot cocoa packets as the choir.
