The Second Convoy

transport for them from their homes or work is very appealing. I had discussed this with most of them, without giving much in terms of details, and they were definitely enthusiastic. Ultimately though, they are mostly resigned to doing whatever is necessary to stay alive.

To be honest, I don’t have much in the way of details to give them. All I have is instructions to drive my truck to a Mountain View office park, and then simply drive a different truck and trailer back home. I would do the return trip with my new coworker, Jo-Anne, who has some knowledge of dialysis. I believe she will also be my first confirmed patient too.

I believe some dialysis teams have multiple vehicles, but we were not going to someplace new, so that seemed pointless. And I don’t care about the truck, which recently passed another hundred thousand miles. Beyond knowing about Mountain View, Jo-Anne, picking up a truck, and returning home to Bishop, I also had a number for someone named ‘John’. Apparently John was some kind of a get-out-of-jail free card.

Time to go visit some flowing water… that is really flowing.

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 southeast, 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 to Boardwalk 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 approximate location. I am (and will always be) the only person that knows where they are. At least where they were initially: they are supposed to move every week to a new location within a 30-mile area of their starting position.

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-room 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 unless the system responded to the strike. The remaining vampires would need to do very long (eight-hour) shifts or something similar.

We had reduced the symbiotic-ratio between vampire and patient in the last few months when we realized a vampire’s blood-loss 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.