No Safe Distance

The wall didn’t stop it. Walls never do.

For three months, Florida was a cage, quarantined, desperate, holding on by its fingernails while the world closed its borders to America and a second wall went up in case the first one fell. The nation wasn’t at ease. It was barely holding its breath. Then the disease appeared north of the wall, in places no infected person had ever reached.

Nature doesn’t wait for permission.

Jon Washington is a journalist who went into Florida on assignment and stayed too long. His beat has always been the ugliest corners of American life, gun violence, urban chaos, the places where civilization’s thin skin tears open and shows what’s underneath. He knows how to keep his head when everything around him is losing theirs, and how to find the story even when the story is trying to kill him. The story kept him in Florida past the point of no return. By the time he understood that, it was too late for the people he loved.

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