Communication

RAZORS

At 7 a.m.

— Two of the vampires start getting calls from their clinics. Of the two-dozen vampires, only these two are on the TuTh-Sa at 6 a.m. shift. They are from different clinics, so finding a replacement should not be a problem or particularly noticed. But the nurses say the vampires should come at the last (2 p.m.) shift, and they will bump the other vampires to earlier slots.

Sports Basement opens at 10 a.m., but none of the employees appear to care that we are blocking part of the parking lot. On a Saturday morning very few people are rushing to get equipment. All of our containers are simply white with the Firehorse logo on them, a QR code, and a web link to ‘hemodiealysis.com’. Anyone following that link will get some information about housing the homeless. The simplicity and consistency of the containers may make us look like a construction crew.

Around 11 a.m., two more vampires get called by their (different) clinics. Again, they are told to show up at 2 p.m.. In this case, one of the 2 p.m. vampires is called and asked to come in early, which she says she can’t do. There was no arguing, so there must have been an alternate.

During all this time — we finished setting up our camp: housing is assembled, water and food stations are set up, refrigerators and freezers are running in a few containers, waste management is prepared, and twenty scheduled patients and the four scheduled vampires have all done dialysis. Our ratio is a bit off because we believe we needed a lot of redundancy among vampires. But if we do it more often and mostly with compatible blood types, there should not be a blood-thirst problem.

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There are also ladders to the top of the containers and jerryrigged metal shields. We don’t expect things to get to the assault level given the value of our aces — our aces are our vampires, ever notice how an ‘A’ is mostly just a ‘V’ upside-down? — but we don’t want to be easily swarmed. Since our arrival, the containers are manned as watch towers with at least a dozen people and vampires up there. We use chicken wire backed by razor wire to fill the gaps between containers, where the chickens are used to mask the razors. ❦

At 2:30 p.m. — we get the next wave of calls to vampires. We have four that committed hooky and don’t answer the phone call. And we have two more that say they can’t come in. I believe the clinics may start calling doctors, but I doubt any doctors will answer on July 4th weekend. That supposes there is not a ‘renegade vampires ’ alerting system, or at least this wouldn’t trigger it.

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THE SECOND CONVOY

It is 7 a.m. on Monday — and a rush of calls to the 6 a.m. crew is coming in. The vampires again hedge and get told to come in by 2 p.m.. But this time we immediately get calls to the 10 a.m. crew asking if they can come in. Basically all of the vampires scheduled for today are getting called in. All of them refuse.

When my call from Fane (my RN) comes in, I answer: “Sorry, no, I can’t come in today. I should be fine though, I did dialysis through another clinic yesterday, so I should be good until Wednesday” . Fane seems a bit perturbed, but just grumbles a “Fine, see you Wednesday” . “Have a Happy Independence Day!” I finish with.

The second exodus of trucks — left our staging facility at 2 a.m. on Saturday. The group of Ford F-450 Duallies was paired with another team of 12, and with the SUV escorts, the 24 Duallies scattered as far as Redding to the north, Tahoe to the east, Bakersfield to the south-east, and Santa Barbara on the southern coastline. This was the main reason we were doing everything so early on Saturday night: we needed to get all the satellites in place so I can return with some reasonable chance of getting through the gates before the storm.

I am not an escort for any of the satellite Duallies: instead, I run the complete perimeter from Eureka through Bishop and back. This is just to confirm that all the satellites are up and working, and to note their location. I am (and will always be) the only person that knows where they are. At least where they initially were: they should move every week to a new location within a 30-mile area of their starting position.

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Upon my departure, the satellites are completely disconnected cells. They know their patients and will fetch and return them. Although we have ulterior motives, from the patients’ perspectives we are going a step-beyond by providing door-to-door limo service.

Visiting all the satellites took more than a day — the reports of what happened in the main compound on Saturday were second hand for me — and I returned to the compound 40 hours and 2000 miles later at 6 p.m. Sunday night. ❦

The activation of the satellites — was the major difference between today (Monday) and the vampire-calls from Saturday. With two dozen single-shift caves scattered throughout California, we had capacity for more than 250 shifts & vampires. As of today, all those vampires were calling in with ‘red flu’ . This strike was large enough that substitutions were not easily possible, so a couple thousand patients might no longer be getting dialysis. Or the remaining vampires would need to do very long (eight-hour) shifts. ❦

We had reduced the symbiotic-ratio — between vampire and patient in the last few months when we realized a vampire’ s bloodloss is not linear. A vampire could run for as long as a week starting and returning to ‘half-volume’. So the symbiosis from the vampire’ s perspective was only for the first five patients: they provided the half-volume needed to survive. After that additional patients were nice but not essential — some of our skills like ‘blood kinesis’ require more blood volume; others like ‘blood vision’ work even better when thirsty.

With the reduced symbiosis ratio, the satellite vampires could strike in-perpetuity with just five patients. The small single-shift satellites were all they needed to live: off the grid and no longer under the control of Stanford or other medical establishment. The

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