Reading Time: 4 minutes They sent a Mercedes to the shelter. I tried to enjoy the leather seats and chilled water bottles. When we got to the clinic, the driver politely declined my crumpled $5 tip. I’d answered the Craigslist ad because it’d be enough to pay back the people who’d put me up, fed me, funded my stints at the methadone clinic, and supplied me with narcotics. Not all the same people, of course. There was an interview in an empty office in a strip mall, and then this. In the clinic’s reception, the fashion model behind the marble desk didn’t smile when she handed me a clipboard full…

Reading Time: 5 minutes Han came upon them unexpectedly, and his eyes widened behind his adapted dive mask at these people shoulder-to-shoulder in a street side dining area. It was near twilight at the bougie little bistro with wrought iron tables and chairs, and sparkling, laughing customers sipping from wine glasses and microbrewery goblets. There was even a labradoodle lying docilely under its owner’s seat.  Death swirled in the air. It emanated from their mouths with each exhale, puffed out unpredictably as they conversed, and blew twenty or thirty feet away with each sneeze. The collective disease vectors formed their own micro-climate, a general fog with currents that pooled in…