Eventually, Dune left Red at the table and went upstairs to check on Mama Vivian. She sat next to her grandmother and contemplated just how alone she was and would be. She resisted it briefly, then surrendered, letting it pass through her, a shudder of something not ready to be a full cry, weaker than that. Mama Vivian was no comfort, she was scarcely a witness.

Dune was walking around downtown Detroit.

At the bottom tip of Campus Martius Park, facing the river, she approached an exquisitely old man who was dripping with thick mummified skin. He was sick, but he turned to face her, rocking and crying. He crawled over to her and up, and as he touched her she realized there was a hole through her middle, all the way through, rib to pelvis. He pulled himself up and crawled right through that hole, she could feel his hands heavy and grabbing, his shoulders pressing up against her diaphragm as he pushed through. The tickle of his hair passing out of her, the texture of his flannel shirt brushing against her sensitive innards, she felt everything. He went all the way through but never fell out, never exited. He used her, passing on to some place out of this world.

She leaned forward and looked through herself, red and slippery, and then at the floor behind her, clear through her belly. He was gone and she couldn’t see where he’d gone to. Before she could think too much of it, a tiny Black woman was standing before her, sick, weeping in rhythm. She followed the man into, through and beyond Dune.

After that, Dune lost track of the sick people who came to their senses enough to crawl through her.

The next morning, Bethany Brown, a stranger, was dead in the living room armchair. Dune let her sit there for a few hours while she scavenged wood and newspaper from around the neighborhood. As she gathered, she decided that the company of others wasn’t worth the emotional cost of their cremation. She would move people, help them, be their death companion. But she wouldn’t bring them home again and she wouldn’t let them die where she had to dispose of them.

She felt along an edge of awareness in her too, the massive distinction between well and sick, the slender shade of difference between sick and dead. Whichever man or god created this demon, they’d raised the question in her: What makes life worth living?

She had one answer: It’s more than breath.

chapter fifteen: Quarantine

The realm of the basement was expanding and evolving. Dune couldn’t guess or hack her way into Brendon’s desktop, so she brought down Kama’s old computer to process all the death data.