No Safe Distance, Book Zero of the Of Sudden Origin saga

The wall didn't stop it. Walls never do. Jon Washington is a journalist who knows how to find the story — even when the story is trying to kill him. He went into Florida on assignment. He stayed too long. By the time he understood that, it was too late for the people he loved. The world has already closed its doors to America. A second wall is going up in case the first one falls. Three months into the quarantine, the nation isn't contained — it's holding its breath. Then the disease appears north of the wall, in places no infected person has ever reached. The logic of a wildfire doesn't care about concrete and steel. Neither does nature. Now the quarantine is meaningless, the infected are evolving into something that hunts with a terrifying collective purpose, and Jon is one of the last reporters still standing inside what used to be a containment zone. Responsible for a group of abandoned children who have survived the nightmare with a resilience that shames every adult around them, he has one job left: get them north. But as he documents the exodus, Jon glimpses something in the wreckage that doesn't fit. Something gestating in the ruins of the old world that suggests the wall didn't just fail — it was never going to be enough. No Safe Distance is the first dispatch from the end of the old world, and the terrifying dawn of the next.