Since the epidemic started—Had it been a week? Ten days? Fourteen?—no one dared let anyone but family into their homes, and sometimes not even them. No children played in the alley below, no women hurried out to run errands, no men whistled or smoked on their way home from work. Even the laundry lines hung empty. The only living things she’d seen over the past few days were a street sweeper sprinkling some kind of powder along the cobblestones and a brown dog sniffing two sheet-wrapped bodies across the way before dashing down the alley, his nose to the ground. More often than not, she
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