The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

When something doesn’t quite seem right about your diagnosis, respect the feeling, even if you can’t quite put your finger on why the diagnosis might be wrong. A lot of people had died because doctors had allowed their minds to come to rest before they should.

The simplest explanation is usually the best.

She was gathering intelligence.

Charity accepted the job. She typed out that one sentence of law and taped it to the wall of her new office. Once a TB quarantine room, her office still had the original grates in the wall used to get fresh sea air into the patient’s lungs. Sitting at her desk in Building 4, she could hear the screams of the psychiatric patients from across the courtyard in Building 3. In the halls, cabinets as old as the building stored medical instruments that belonged in a museum. The stairs led to a dank tunnel under the building that went to the old morgue. It was her kind of place.

But the fact remained that, from a very young age, when she was feeling low, she had cheered herself up by reading books on bubonic plague. The ones with the grisly drawings she liked best.