She returned to the hardware store, which had definitely been touched by another someone since her last visit, but was unoccupied when she entered and otherwise intact. She was less afraid, but still moved quickly in the spooky half-light, finding index cards, tape, sharpies in different colors, a pack of filing folders. With a bit of guilt, she broke open a cabinet hidden behind a 4x4 piece of lumber where more expensive items were kept, grabbing a handful of ancient hard drives. Dune hoped they would be compatible with one of her parents’ computers.

She was making it up as she went now.

Once the supplies were down in the basement, she created a little filing system, numbering each person and matching them with index cards to hold the extended clues, hints, fragments of life. Hundreds of people, thousands of small particles of data, millions of intimacies.

The signs each had the date and address of discovery. The card had the rest of the description. She used pencil if they were sick, and then black ink, black crosses on tiny white flags when she found someone already gone, or when she returned to find a sick person had finished the silent occupation of their own flesh and joined the fully dead. The white and black shapes spread across the model as she circled outward from her home in the center, the virus a spiraling, bleak art.

She briefly wished she had little figurines, but then thought perhaps that would be morbid, stacking dead bodies in the basement. Then again, perhaps this harvest of death data was already a private catacomb, a morbid research.

chapter fourteen: Detroit Red

New snow had dusted the city two days earlier and Dune felt more urgency about finding people, listening, gathering data. The colder it got, the shorter these stolen days would be, the whispering space between life and death.

One night she set out to find flannel sheets for the winter. She thought she could get them quietly if she drove to the suburbs.

That’s when she’d seen the woman, facing a house on Outer Drive. Her skin was a faded brown, her short red hair at odds with her coloring. Her neck seemed a bit broken. Her clothing was flamboyant, a short puffy winter coat over a low-cut black mesh dress that had probably once fit perfectly where it now drooped and gathered. She wore high top sneakers with gold wings on them. There was a network of frost on her tights where she had wet herself.

Up close, Dune saw that her wig was askew, that’s what gave the initial impression of a broken, useless neck. Dune felt relief seeing it was just the wig, though that didn’t change the woman’s status as mostly-dead.