Things I will never forget: my name, my made-up birthdayâe¦The dark of the Hospital at night. My motherâe(tm)s face, when she was young.. Joy spends her days working the graveyard shift at a store outside Boston and nursing an addiction to cough syrup, an attempt to suppress her troubled past. But when a sickness that begins with silver blisters and memory loss and ends with death sweeps the country, for the first time in her life, seems to have an advantage: she is immune.