The Blackout List

By 10:00 a.m., the grocery store’s refrigerated cases were only half alive. Erin Blake moved a melting ice pack aside and checked an old man’s temperature. The thermometer beeped once and settled on 104.2. The man blinked with cloudy eyes and cracked lips, asking the same question over and over: “This is just heat exhaustion, right?” “Sit down first,” Erin said. She had worked emergency medicine for nine years and knew that most people did not go down because the body failed. They went down because they kept insisting they were fine. Today the wheelchairs outside the ER were already in short supply. Security had pushed IV poles in front of the doors as a thin, useless barrier. In the hallway, six or seven patients were lying on the floor.