Reborn before the outbreak, Now they beg at my gate

CHAPTER 3: A BRILLIANT DOCTOR

"I am not going to ask you again," the woman said quietly. "Where did forty cases of water go?"

I forced my fingers to loosen on the cart handle, one at a time, and I made myself breathe the way I used to when a client tried to cheat me on an invoice. Slow, even, and unimpressed.

"Delivery," I said. "I am buying for a community kitchen, and the supplier sent a truck around the back. It is easier than carrying everything through the front."

"The loading dock is locked on Thursdays. Inventory day." She did not blink. "I stopped by to pick up supplies for my clinic, and the manager told me himself."

Of course she had. I looked at the woman in front of me and felt something old and painful twist beneath my ribs, because I knew her face. I had seen it only once in my previous life, across a burning checkpoint on the highway, while she stood on the hood of a military truck and directed two hundred starving strangers into a convoy. Every survivor in the city had whispered her name like a prayer. Dr. Nora Vale. The surgeon who never left anyone behind.

She did not know me, of course. She was looking at me the way a stranger looks at a stranger, with polite suspicion and tired gray eyes.

"You are very observant," I said.

"I am very tired, which makes me blunt." She gave a short, humorless exhale. "Mister..."

"Hart. Leo Hart."

"Nora Vale." She did not offer her hand. "Mr. Hart, I am not a police officer, and I do not care what you buy with your own money. But I have spent three nights in a hospital basement doing something I was told not to discuss, and today I watched a man buy a month of survival supplies as though he had been handed a list."

The words landed in my chest like a stone dropped into still water. A list. I almost laughed, because she was right, and I could not tell her so.

"Maybe I am cautious," I said. "Maybe I read the news."

"What news?"

"The weather has been strange this month. The power grid is old. Prices are rising." I shrugged, and the shrug felt stiff on my shoulders. "People stock up."

"People stock up on toilet paper." Her gaze slid pointedly to my cart, which was empty, and then back up to my face. "They do not stock up on iodine tablets and rice in twenty-pound sacks, and they certainly do not make the cart vanish between the register and the exit."

My stomach dropped.

For a long, dangerous moment neither of us spoke. A forklift beeped somewhere behind the shelves. The overhead lights hummed, and the glass doors at the front slid open and shut for a customer who did not look our way.

I did the only thing I could think of. I took out my phone, opened the store's order confirmation, and held it up so that she could read the screen.

"Pickup order," I said. "Curbside. The cart is empty because an employee already loaded the van, and the van is waiting around the corner. If you would like to walk me to my car and watch me drive away, I would be delighted."

She looked at the screen for what felt like a full minute. A faint line appeared between her brows. I had not lied about the confirmation. I had placed a pickup order for fifty bottles of hand sanitizer three days before my death in the old timeline, and the file had somehow come along with me when I woke up. It was not the order from today, but the layout looked enough alike that a tired woman might not notice the date.

She did notice. I saw it in the way her mouth tightened. But she did not say so.

Instead she lowered her voice even further and said, "Mr. Hart. I would like to tell you something, and I would like you to be honest with me in return."

"That depends on what you tell me."

"Two days ago, three patients were admitted to my hospital with a high fever, a rapid pulse, and a rash I could not identify. By the next morning, all three were dead." She said it flatly, like someone reading a chart. "The administration ordered the records sealed. They told us it was a food-borne illness and that we should stop asking questions."

The overhead lights seemed to dim, although nothing had changed.

I knew that rash. I had seen it on the faces of a hundred infected, in the weeks before the fever turned to something worse. But in my memory it did not appear in this city until the last week of July.

"That is not possible," I said.

Her eyes sharpened. "Why not?"

I closed my mouth. The cold was spreading down my arms, and I could feel the blue panel flickering at the edge of my vision, as though it sensed my alarm. The first infection was supposed to surface on July 29. There were forty-four days left, not zero. I had counted them myself.

Unless someone had already moved the date.

"I only meant," I said slowly, and I heard how thin my voice had gone, "that a food-borne illness does not usually kill so quickly."

"No," said Nora Vale. "It does not."

She reached into the pocket of her jacket and took out a small plastic sample bag, the kind used for evidence. Inside lay a single folded sheet of paper, creased and stained. She held it out between two fingers.

"This was in the pocket of the first patient," she said. "He could barely speak by the time he arrived, but he pressed it into my hand and begged me to find the man whose name was written on it."

I took the bag with numb fingers and unfolded the page.

There were only five words, scrawled in a shaking hand, and the last one was my name.

Tell Leo Hart it's starting.