THE NEIGHBORHOOD » CARL Hod and I parked the LV and SUV — a bit North of Oroville on a dirt pullout about a mile beyond a fire station. At this point in the road it looked like almost no one came up this far, but we moved up here late Saturday night after the last dialysis shift, so we couldn’t see what traffic was normally like. It was also hard to see the road, although I could see lots of fauna around it in the bushes. We were definitely in some nice woods, but our goal was to hide and blend in… at the same time. To “look casual”. We unhooked the 450, leveled the RV, and simply laid back for the next 48 or so hours reminiscing about glory days.
❦ We had gone to college together: — I started a year after Hod, but somehow managed to finish before him. I was not a genius (or cutthroat as we called them), there were just some tough things about that school and Hod got bitten by them. The torture made us life-long friends. Hod visited me in Stanford shortly after I was admitted. This was pre-Covid, so visitors were not a problem.
❦ Hod recruited intensely — with the local DaVita dialysis clinics: he posed as a short-term visiting patient, and shift-by-shift he convinced both the vampire (easily recognized when you know what to look for) and patients to try out a new ‘free clinic’. Within two weeks we had a total of eight vampires including me, sixty patients, and could run every shift. DaVita has so many clinics in the area that they shouldn’t have any service-delivery issues: they can just get other vampires to - 107 -
