Chapter 174: House Call

/Norton’s Third Person POV/

The mudroom door banged shut across the yard, and Nikki came down off the porch with an open can of energy drink in his hand and his face the color of the snow.

Norton had been waiting beside the Ascender with his bag on his shoulder for twenty minutes. He had read faces across a trauma bay for thirty years, and he didn’t need thirty years for this one. Whatever had happened to the young man in that house, he was carrying it out on his face.

Norton didn’t ask him what it was.

Nikki walked straight past him to the Ascender’s side door without a word, held his hand out over the empty bench seat in the back, and boxes began dropping onto it out of thin air until the bench was full and the floor was filling up.

Norton read the labels as they landed, antibiotics, saline, suture kits, splints, insulin in a cold box, and a tray of forty pairs of reading glasses in four strengths, which he had asked for at dinner last night without expecting anybody to remember. That one touched him more than he would have admitted.

"Everything comes out of the truck, sir." Nikki didn’t look at the last box as it landed. "Nothing comes out of the air... Not in front of a hundred and three people."

"Understood."

Kara came down the porch steps with a parcel in foil while Norton was shutting the side door, and she gave it to him, not to Nikki.

"For the road." She didn’t look at the parcel.

Norton took it, warm through the foil and smelling of grilled chicken, while Kara looked past him at the back of Nikki’s head in the driver’s seat, and Nikki looked at the dashboard.

Norton read that too, without meaning to. It was none of his business, and he put the parcel in his bag.

Nia was waiting at the gatehouse, leaning on the inside of the portcullis with her rifle on her back and the first of the new snow in her black hair.

"Bring him back in one piece, big guy~" She looked at her father through the windshield, then at Nikki. "If he comes back in two, I want the bigger one."

"Yeah." It came out of Nikki flat.

Nia’s grin stayed where it was, but her eyes went over his face once, fast, and Norton watched his daughter see what he had seen.

The farm road ran four kilometers east to St. Jude’s between the Infected standing along both verges, and not one of them turned its head as the truck went by.

What Norton felt, watching them stand still for an eleven-ton truck, was the cold interest he used to feel for an X-ray that didn’t make sense.

Nikki drove with one hand, half lost in thought, the can in his other hand forgotten. When Norton held a sandwich out to him across the cab, he kept his eyes on the road.

"I’m good, sir."

Norton ate it himself, and it was the best thing he’d eaten in a month.

He told the young man so once, and Nikki’s hand tightened on the wheel. Tikki came down off the dashboard and sat in Norton’s lap until he got the second one.

The camp came up out of the snow past the thirty dark houses of Coldwater, tents and campers in crooked rows around a churchyard wall, a small helicopter down in the corner of its yard.

A hundred faces came out of the tents to watch the truck come, and Norton read them the same as he’d have read a waiting room.

The men with deer rifles at the gate looked first at the turret on the truck’s roof, where an M3M heavy machine gun lay back in its armored ring, and they all visibly shuddered.

Stroud stood in the open gate in his long black coat and his orange hat, smiling, a big man with a broad pink face and white hair combed straight back. His eyes went up to the turret, stayed there for a second too long, and came back down without the smile moving at all.

"Has the doctor eaten?" That was the first thing out of him, through Nikki’s open window. "There’s a pot of stew on for you both... Gideon Stroud. Welcome to the holy land, Doctor."

"I’ve eaten." Norton held up the empty foil.

"Good. Good..." Stroud looked at the turret again, then at Nikki. "You brought the Lord a chariot, son."

"Roads are bad." Nikki didn’t smile back at him.

Stroud led them to the clinic tent, and Nikki parked beside it with the Ascender’s nose pointed back at the gate. He always parked ready to leave.

Their tent stood at the north edge of the camp, as far from the church as the camp went.

Inside, the church had laid out everything it could scrape together for its doctor, down to a box of pharmacy leftovers with the insulin in the bottom frozen solid.

Norton respected it, and the man who’d done it. Then he put the insulin in the bin.

Nikki carried the boxes in two at a time while Stroud stood in the tent door and counted every one.

The first patient was Petey Huff, wrapped in a blanket in Darla’s arms. His chest still crackled under the stethoscope, but less than it had any business crackling a day into the right drug.

"It’s working." Norton took the stethoscope out of his ears. "All ten days, even after he’s better."

Darla put her hand over her mouth, and her eyes filled.

Petey wasn’t listening. He was looking at the cat, who had sat down on the end of his cot, and when he put out a hand, Tikki allowed it.

"Careful there, he’s our pilot." Nikki chuckled at him.

Petey’s voice came out as a croak. "Really?"

"He’s licensed." Nikki was leaning on the tent pole by the door.

Petey laughed, which turned into a cough, and in the doorway the young man’s mouth moved, nearly into a smile, for the first time that day.

After that they came in a line, with Petey asleep on the first cot under the cat, and the line didn’t stop until dusk.

The reading glasses went in an hour, and by mid-afternoon there were old people on the benches outside reading the labels on tins for the first time in a month.

Stroud came in the middle of the afternoon and stood with Nikki in the corner by the door, while Norton worked with his one good ear turned their way.

Tikki sat up on Petey’s legs and watched the pastor without a sound, and Stroud kept the whole width of the tent between himself and the cat.

"You haven’t eaten today, son." Stroud had his hands folded over his stomach and the smile on. "Not the stew, not the bread... Thirty-one years of weddings and funerals, and I’ve only ever seen a young man go off his food for two reasons. And nobody has died at your house this week."

"You’re good," Nikki said it without any expression at all.

"It’s the job, son."

Norton had watched a great many men take a hit in his life. He watched this one land, and he watched the young man let it, which told him it had been true.

"June’s chimney was cold again this morning." Stroud looked out toward the farm. "That’s a warm truck you came in, isn’t it a bit cramped inside with all of you?"

"Truck’s got a heater." Nikki didn’t look away from him. "The house has Walter... so no, we’re not shoving ourselves in there."

Stroud laughed, a warm, easy laugh, and Norton didn’t believe a note of it.

"Darla told my friend not to look at your Ark." Nikki tipped his head toward the church.

Stroud’s eyes went to the church for half a second, to a low side door in its south wall, and came back. Norton saw it, and he saw Nikki see it.

"Beth-shemesh." Stroud’s smile hadn’t moved at all. "Fifty thousand and threescore and ten men, for looking into the Ark of the Lord."

"That’s a lot of guys."

"It’s a lot of God, son." Stroud touched the brim of his hat. "And keep your cat out of my churchyard, if you would."

"He hates churches anyway." Nikki looked at the cat, who hadn’t taken his eyes off the pastor once. "He’s a cat of science."

By dusk Norton had seen forty-one of them, and he was more tired than he’d been in a month, and happier.

The camp went into the church for the evening service, and Stroud came back after the sharing with two mugs of tea and sat on the empty cot across from him, while Nikki smoked his fourth cigar outside by the truck in the dark.

"A doctor belongs where the sick are, Doctor." Stroud held a mug out to him in both hands. "... There’s a room in the rectory with a real bed in it, and a hundred and three people who’d pray for you every night of your life. You saw the line today."

"I have a daughter at home... and she’s very attached to the Harts." Norton took the tea from him.

Stroud didn’t answer for a while, looking down into his own mug.

"I had a daughter." It came out of him low.

Norton heard the tense and took it for what it sounded like, and didn’t say anything to it. He had learned a long time ago not to try.

"Then you understand." Stroud kept his eyes on his tea. "Everything a man would do."

"Yes."

Norton understood exactly what he meant.

He thought about Nia at the gatehouse that morning with snow in her hair, alive on an injection that cost a hundred and fifty million Credits a month, the next one due in fourteen days, and about everything he would do to keep her that way.

That list had no bottom to it.

Stroud stood and offered them both beds inside the churchyard for the night.

"We’ll sleep in the truck." Nikki had come to the tent flap.

"A man who sleeps in his armor..." Stroud smiled at him over the lantern.

"Is a man who wakes up." Nikki held the flap open for him. "Besides, it’s warm inside..."

Stroud went out into the night. Norton watched him stop between two tents to speak with a young man sitting on a crate, a rifle across his knees. The young man answered him and stayed on his crate, facing the Ascender.

By eleven the camp had gone quiet. Nikki turned off the Ascender’s lights, the brightest thing for two kilometers, while Norton lay down in the back with his shoes off and his bag beside him.

Nikki sat in the driver’s seat in the dark with Tikki on the dashboard and didn’t lie down.

His head was turned toward the window, listening to the camp, down to the young man on the crate shifting his weight.

Norton had seen a great many people wait for things in his life, outside operating theatres mostly, and he knew what it looked like.

He was nearly asleep when he heard the soft click of the door opening, and Nikki, quieter than the cat, slipping out.