Chapter Text
Part I - Waylon
September 1941
It started with a cough.
It wasn’t that unusual, it was autumn, after all. A lot of Waylon’s friends and co-workers were out sick with colds, and there was no reason to suspect this would be any different. His children were young, and God knew they brought enough illness into the house.
Still, in the back of Waylon’s mind, he knew that it had to be something worse. Something really, really, bad. It didn’t feel like the common cold.
He tried to push it to the back of his mind, and carried on as normal. Until the cough was accompanied by flecks of blood, and he woke up drenched in sweat every morning.
Things like this didn’t happen. Not to people like the Park’s. Not to people with well-manicured lawns and proper, furnished homes. These things happened to other people.
That’s what he kept telling himself.
Except, deep down, he knew that it had happened to them as well.