Safe Houses » Mark

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 Amasa shortly after I was admitted. This was pre-Covid, so visitors were not a problem.

Hod recruited intensely — with the local Beloved 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.

Beloved has so many clinics in the area that they shouldn’t have any service-delivery issues: they can just get other vampires to

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double-up and substitute a day a week for the missing vampire. It would take a lot of vampires if they each only took a single shift, but Beloved had a lot of vampires in the area.

The loss of sixty dialysis patients might be a bit of a shock: that equals about $3M per year.

The neighbors found our LV cave — which I found out by hearing the doorbell ring. I don’t scare easily, but I can be startled, and if I could fly I would have hit the ceiling. Hod is out picking up patients with SUV, so I am alone. I go to the door and look through the peep hole. There is a camouflaged golf cart blocking the 450 (gutsy, given the size differential). There are also two guys armed with AR-15s or something over their shoulders.

Not wanting to be discourteous, I open the door. “Hello?”

The taller of the two starts out: “Hi neighbor, this is Butthead & I am Beavis [not their real names]… and you are?”

“Standing here. This is a free country right?”

“Less than we want, but let me try again. We are here to welcome you into the neighborhood.”

“You brought me a cake? Or a fruit basket?”

Butthead chimes in with “Can people on dialysis eat cake?”

“I can eat all the cake I want. Why do you bring up dialysis?”

“We, as in the town, are pretty sure you are one of the satellite dialysis clinics. So we are here to find out what is up with that”

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