" It always was a small town—only a hundred and fifty people or so when Richard and I came, with a few dozen more on weekends and isolated enough so that when things elsewhere started going really wrong it was hard for us to know it. They never had delivered a daily paper, so we couldn’t read about it each morning, or notice when publication became erratic and finally ceased...So the decline was only shown to us in subtle absences, which in the languor of this place raised small concern, at least in the beginning. Weekend people came less and less frequently, and guests to the inn. The mail truck stopped arriving regularly, and the grocery truck, and the power started going off for periods that stretched into days and then weeks, and finally it, and the phones, went dead for good. Broadcast reception had always been chancy out here. Nobody had a satellite dish. Those who tried to tune in, picked up garbled, contradictory bits of news, or nothing...
There were still more than a hundred people here when the sickness came. A hundred people, but no doctor or nurse or clue to what it was, just those who got sick and died real fast and the rest of us who somehow didn’t. It was hideous to watch. Their skin just dissolved, fell away in patches. The bare flesh grew inflamed, putrefied. Each of them flared out in a red aura of fever.
Almost all the survivors left here in a panic. By then it would have taken an act of will to expect things would be all right somewhere else. It was just desperation to get away from this scene of horror. They went by rowboat up the river, or on foot—it had been a long time since there had been any gas. Once in a while now somebody shows up here, walking up the road, or sailing in, like an apparition, from the sea. But none of the people who left ever returned.
And at the moment, the town is empty, just the four of us up here on the hill, a couple of other straggler families on the far islands and in the woods. And all those useless cars with their shiny enamel bleaching dull in the relentless sun, smooth sheet metal slowly pitting from the blowing sand. "

― Jonathan Lerner , Caught in a Still Place