Chapter 54: Infirmity
The symptoms were all too familiar to Alessa. First the sneezing and cough, mild enough that - if she hadn't known better - it could just have been a simple cold. But despite her mounting dread, she'd held out hope as they'd made their way out of the mall and camped for the night in an old post office. The whole evening through she'd sung the mantra in her head like a prayer: only a cold, only a cold, only a cold, only a cold.
But her pleas went unanswered, and the next day Isaac plunged. Taken with flu-like symptoms - a slight fever, headache, aches and pains, fatigue - he was exhausted, but he still insisted on pressing onward.
And so they made progress, albeit slowly, and with every painstaking mile the buildings crept closer together, their crowns stretching higher into the sky. And still neither of them spoke the words looming in their heads, as if saying them aloud held some morbid power to make them true. So they'd kept their reservations to themselves.