Some people were like Dune, they thought it best to burn the bodies of the sick. But there was a small contingent that felt it was important that the bodies actually left the city. Getting sick and dead people past the checkpoints was a no go. To clear the sickness from the city, these believers would wait until the dead of night and take their corpses down to the river in cars with the lights turned off. If they made it, avoiding the patrols and police, they would slide the bodies over the railing, down into the river.

The Michigan Citizen was more of-the-people than most publications, but only available online these days. They kept publishing a weekly list of people who were known to have died after contracting H-8, alongside news of relief efforts, reporting on theories about the syndrome, and opinion pieces on how the city was mishandling the crisis.

Dune suspected that, regardless of strategy, most of these people—faithful, rebellious, reporting, grieving—would not last the winter. Not because they were right or wrong, but because they were there, in Detroit, and H-8 was an indiscriminate hunger that the city needed to slake.

Dune would have told anyone who asked that she didn’t believe Kama had contracted anything. Her mind had just quit one day, in an apparent overwhelm of … frustration? Sadness?

No one asked. Or more accurately, perhaps they gave up on trying to ask while Dune was in the initial throes of grief behind her closed door. Perhaps by now they had forgotten about Kama and Dune in the chaos of H-8, which had touched everyone in the city in some way.

Calling whatever had taken her mother away a syndrome, specifically “Syndrome H-8,” had given Dune the impression that there was a clear, known set of symptoms, something trackable, and, perhaps eventually, avoidable. Dune found herself wondering, what was H-7? Or C-3 for that matter? What were the names of the syndromes before this? How did they relate to these symptoms? Did the letters mean something, was it pure categorization? Who named syndromes like this? Had there been others like this? Had she missed some rash of random, fatal, place-based syndromes?

She imagined a group of skinny white boys with glasses and doctor coats on, playing Operation. Where did H-8 live in the body? Was the H for humanoid, hack, hell? Hate, harm, holocaust? Was this the eighth cleansing of the earth? The eighth level of inferno?

As the weather cooled, Dune found herself drawn to the syndrome like an ambulance to a wreck. The first time she noticed the list in the Citizen, she added the names to the model, at whatever address was listed. After a few weeks of this, she decided to see what she could find out about these new ghosts. She mapped the addresses and started to tour the tombs on her food runs.