Jennifer B set out sometime around dawn.

If she stayed in the house she was sure she would die. She’d slept for an unknown period of time—hours? days?—on the floor, with her blankets gathered around her.

The chills came in waves. She would be too hot and would kick off her blankets. Then the fever would start to spike again and she would feel cold, cold all the way down to her bones.

Jennifer H was dead. Jennifer L didn’t answer when Jennifer B moaned to her to join her.

“Jen . . . I’m going to . . . hospital.”

No answer.

“Are you alive?”

Jennifer L coughed, she wasn’t dead, and she coughed normally, not the crazy spasms that had killed Jennifer H. But she didn’t answer.

So Jennifer Boyles set off, on her own. She slid on her butt down the stairs, blankets gathered around her. Shivering, teeth chattering.

She managed to stand long enough to reach the front door and open it. But she sat down again very unexpectedly on the porch. Hard on her butt. She sat there shaking until the chills passed.

She tripped walking down the porch stairs. The fall bruised her left knee badly.

This destroyed the last of her will to stand up. But not the last of her will to live.

Jennifer began to crawl. Hands and knees. Down the sidewalk. Impeded by her blankets. Delayed by coughing fits. Pausing whenever the chills rattled her so hard she could only moan and hack and roll onto her side.

“Keep going,” she muttered. “Gotta keep going.”

It took her two hours to crawl as far as Brace Road.

She lay there, facedown. Coughing wracked her chest. But it was not yet the superhuman coughs that had killed Jennifer H.

Not yet.

Plague, Chapter 4