* Frannie sewing up a body bag for her dead father and burying him in his garden. All while singing "Amazing Grace".
* The death of Larry's mother. She dies in the hallway of an overcrowded hospital with Larry kneeling beside her, and nobody else cares or even notices.
-->She had been lying on a cot in the hallway of Mercy Hospital when she died, crammed in with thousands of others who were also busy dying. Larry had been kneeling beside her when she went, and he had thought he might go mad, watching his mother die while all around him rose the stench of urine and feces, the hell’s babble of the delirious, the choking, the insane, the screams of the bereaved. She hadn’t known him at the end; there had been no final moment of recognition. Her chest had finally just stopped in mid‑heave and had settled very slowly, like the weight of an automobile settling down on a flat tire.
* Every time when Tom is traveling back to Boulder and looks forward to "seeing Nick again." Oh, the irony.
** Later, when Stu breaks the news and Tom finally realizes that he'd been in denial about the dreams' significance.
--->"I didn't want to think I knew, but I did."
* Larry having a HeroicBSOD when he and the rest of the TrueCompanions have to leave Stu behind en route to Las Vegas, dooming him to likely death from exposure and a broken leg. Stu has to talk him back to his senses, and Larry becomes the [[PassingTheTorch new leader]] of the mission.
** "And they never saw Stu Redman again."
* For any boy who was the awkward fat outcast kid in school and had trouble leaving all that behind afterwards, Harold Lauder's storyline and eventual fate will hit hard.
* Nick's arc with the sheriff and his wife ending with not only both dead but the whole town.
** Nick fulfilling the sheriff's wife last request that is to help her wear her wedding dress for the last time and later carrying her dead body in his arms all the way to the mortuary.
--->Unwillingly, he went around to her and began to remove the nightgown. But when it was off and she lay naked before him, the dread departed and he felt only pity — a pity lodged so deep in him that it made him ache and he began to cry again as he washed her body and then dressed it as it had been dressed when she wore it on the way to Lake Pontchartrain. And when she was dressed as she had been on that day, he took her in his arms and carried her down to the funeral home in her lace, oh, in her lace: he carried her like a bridegroom crossing an endless threshold with his beloved in his arms.
* The death of (infected) small-town West Virginia newspaperman James Hogliss who, after getting an inside scoop on the origins of the plague and the cover-up (from a suicidal officer who used to be stationed at Project Blue), uses the last of his strength driving around town distributing papers he isn't even sure if anyone is left alive to read, then dying while listening to the sound of a stream he grew up fishing in.
* The description of deaths described as "natural selection" soon after the plague has several, such as the very young boy who is left alone after his parents and siblings die and falls down a well looking for food, the ten-year-old girl who falls off her bike while trying to find someone, the housewife who gets drunk mourning her husband and children and passed out while smoking in bed (burning down her whole town), and a man who loses his wife and [[OutlivingOnesOffspring all eleven of his children]], one of whom [[HopeSpot almost pulled through but succumbed to the flu anyway]], and wants to die but can't just kill himself due to his Catholicism, feeling relief when a heart attack kills him in the middle of his compulsive jogging.
** Even worse? The death of the woman who dies smoking in bed, like many others mentioned in that chapter, is merely labeled as "no great loss".