“Thanks for coming on Pat, you always broaden the dialogue.” It sounded like Pat tried to respond, but Rick continued speaking in a bright cheerful flood and Pat’s audio cut out. Dune snuck a glance at Mama Vivian, but couldn’t tell if she heard the politics unfolding. “We will keep in touch with you. Now, an update from the Center for Disease Control. Bill?”

“Looking for a cause, looking for a cure. The Center for Disease Control said today that while they have not identified a clear cause for Syndrome H-8, there are patterns they are observing. Because people have gotten sick in such a high variety of conditions, with the only unifying factor being geography, the best guess is that this disease is highly concentrated, highly toxic and has a short life outside of the body, probably air borne or water borne. The CDC would neither confirm nor deny whether this has anything to do with increased incineration of toxic materials, or local water sources, which many protestors have been pointing to as recently as this past April’s riots. At this reporting, while there are cases of people surviving for months on life support, there has been zero recovery. Most people die within two weeks of contraction.”

Mama Vivian leaned forward in her chair at that and, for a moment, Dune just knew that her grandmother would speak and that her words would hold some answer. The old woman coughed and sat back, looking down at her hands. Dune smiled her frustration down and offered her grandmother water—how could the old woman know what no one else knew?

chapter sixteen: Rage

Dune spent her days going to emergency rooms and crisis centers and watching, listening, recording her dwindling Detroit neighbors as they left behind their bodies like snake skin. A conscious species was disappearing from the material world. She felt on edge, alive, but existing completely in the interstitial space between life and death. The quiet of Mama Vivian and the city’s grievers was a dangerous comfort. She became more attuned to the dying than to the living, shifting on an internal axis.

She biked down to the Wayne State Crisis Center to pick up another week of food donations to supplement what she was able to gather. She also wanted some news, some gossip, even. She was tired of all the sensational outsiders’ tales of the doomsday quarantine, tired of hearing nothing about the survivors. She wanted a trustworthy source, a human.