When Shen Fever--a fungal infection causing its victims to repeat mindless routines until it kills them--wipes out most of the global population, Candace Chen agrees to stay on as a member of the skeleton crew at her office, a sojourn that leads to her joining a band of the seemingly immune on their journey to the Facility for supplies and refuge from the post-apocalyptic landscape. Though published a year before the COVID-19 pandemic began, this novel is a chilling and sometimes funny commentary on work, memory, and identity in a time of plague and mass death.