By the time Danny heard, Steve Coyle had been sick for five hours. He’d woken that morning, thighs turned to plaster, ankles swollen, calves twitching, head throbbing. He didn’t waste time pretending it was something else. He slipped out of the bedroom he’d shared last night with the Widow Coyle and grabbed his clothes and went out the door. Never paused, not even with his legs the way they were, dragging under the rest of him like they might just decide to stay put even if his torso kept going. After a few blocks, he told Danny, fucking legs screamed so much it was like they belonged to someone else. Fucking wailed, every step. He’d tried walking to the streetcar stop then realized he could infect the whole car. Then he remembered the streetcars had stopped running anyway. So a walk, then. Eleven blocks from the Widow Coyle’s cold-water flat at the top of Mission Hill all the way down to the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. Damn near crawling by the time he reached it, folded over like a broken match, cramps ballooning up through his stomach, his chest, his throat for Christ’s sake. And his head, Jesus. By the time he reached the admitting desk, it was like someone hammered pipe through his eyes.

He told all this to Danny from behind a pair of muslin curtains in the infectious disease ward of the intensive care unit at the Peter Bent. There was no one else in the ward the afternoon Danny came to see him, just the lumpen shape of a body beneath a sheet across the aisle. The rest of the beds were empty, the curtains pulled back. Somehow that was worse.

They’d given Danny a mask and gloves; the gloves were in his coat pocket; the mask hung at his throat. And yet he kept the muslin between him and Steve. Catching it didn’t scare him. These past few weeks? If you hadn’t made peace with your maker, then you didn’t believe you’d been made. But watching it drain Steve to the ground powder of himself—that would be something else. Something Danny would pass the cup on if Steve allowed him. Not the dying, just the witnessing.

Steve spoke like he was trying to gargle at the same time. The words pushed up through phlegm and the ends of sentences often drowned. “No Widow. Believe that?”

Danny said nothing. He’d only met the Widow Coyle once, and his sole impression was one of fussiness and anxious self-regard.

“Can’t see you.” Steve cleared his throat.

Danny said, “I can see you, pal.”

“Pull it back, would ya?”

Danny didn’t move right away.

“You scared? I don’t blame ya. Forget it.”

Danny leaned forward a few times. He hitched his pants at the knees. He leaned forward again. He pulled back the curtain.

His friend sat upright, the pillow dark from his head. His face was swollen and skeletal at the same time, like dozens of the infected, living and dead, that he and Danny had run across this month. His eyes bulged from their sockets, as if trying to escape, and ran with a milky film that pooled in the corners. But he wasn’t purple. Or black. He wasn’t hacking his lungs up through his mouth or defecating where he lay. So, all in all, not as sick as one feared. Not yet anyway.