Nancy Forester followed Tim up to his room but there was no thought of anything happening between them, no spark. Or if there was something they had tacitly agreed it was on hold until they could get some more information. Tim unlocked the door then dashed inside and switched on the television. Nancy picked up the remote and flipped through the channels while he took off his jacket and hung it on the back of a chair.

He didn’t pay much attention to what the commentators were saying. They were repeating the same scant bits of information over and over. At least twenty-one confirmed fatalities reported, hospitals were bracing for a heavy case load. Police and Army units were in the streets and all public transportation had been shifted to a reduced schedule. None of that meant anything.

It was the pictures that mattered. There were five or six video clips they repeated in tight rotation, only breaking them up every so often to show a talking head giving out a new list of statistics. Whenever the video stream was interrupted Nancy would switch to a different channel.

The clips showed:

Helicopters in the air over Seattle, hovering motionless just above the haze and fog. Military helicopters in green and Coast Guard in orange and white stripes. Television helicopters painted bright colors—Tim saw the King5 News logo. Police helicopters with badges on their sides. They stood in the air not drifting at all. It could have been a still image if he hadn’t seen their rotors spinning.

A line of people waiting at the bus station, filling the aisles between rows of benches. A cute toddler was climbing over her obese mother, who looked distinctly worried, her eyes focused on something outside of the camera’s view.

A military authority—a General, Tim figured—standing at a podium, talking animatedly and gesturing at a chart Tim couldn’t understand. It showed a pyramid made of stick figures, their faces painted green.

In a hospital downtown (for some reason he thought it must be Virginia Mason) a team of nurses, their torsos wrapped in yellow plastic, their faces covered by complicated-looking respirator masks, pushed an empty gurney down a hallway full of people with blood on their arms and faces.

Finally—a man staggering down a suburban street. The image was grainy as if it had been shot in low light or from far away. It was detailed enough to show that most of his hair was gone, as if he’d pulled it out in thick handfuls. His face was pale and drawn and when his mouth opened a rope of black spit drooped down across his plaid shirt.

“That’s your home town,” Nancy breathed, shaking her head.

Tim shushed her with a finger across his lips. The traditional gesture of the annoyed librarian. He saw the irony but not the humor. He sat down on the heavy bedspread with its pattern of black and fuchsia flowers and stared at the screen.

The bald man’s eyes weren’t focusing properly. One of his arms hung down straight at his side and sometimes it twitched violently. There was something—something about him. Something Tim responded to, but he couldn’t say what. The image was horrible, sure, but he’d seen similar pictures before. It showed a victim of the Russian Flu in the final, tertiary stage. Tim had watched video taken in Vancouver just weeks earlier, of a hospital ward full of people like that. He’d read all about the Flu, about what it did to you. About how it wasn’t really a flu at all but a new strain of cranial meningitis, much more virulent and nasty than the old kind. He’d heard unconfirmed reports of what it had done to Siberia and Vladivostok—hence the name, even though the latest theory held it originated in India or Pakistan. It had been traveling east all that spring. It had hit Canada in early March, and then seemed to stall there.

The President had been on television urging calm. The old Surgeon General with the sideburns had come on and told people they just had to be careful, that it was important not to travel if you felt like you had a headache. That you should cover your mouth when you coughed.

There had always been a chance, they’d said, that it could come to the States. Nobody had really seemed to take that seriously. They’d said the same thing about SARS, and Avian Flu, and those had just fizzled out.

Was that why the picture of the infected man bothered him so much? Just because it showed an American citizen, perhaps the first to show such marked symptoms? Tim didn’t think of himself as that provincial.

He tried calling home, of course. He called every number Karen had—home, cell, work, fax. He kept getting a message from FEMA asking him to keep the lines clear for emergency use. He called his parents, and Karen’s parents, and all his cousins. He called his cousin Angie in San Francisco, the college student, and spent half an hour calming her down and telling her it was going to be alright.

At some point he fell asleep. He didn’t remember even closing his eyes, just opening them later. Nancy Forester was asleep in the easy chair across the room, her hair down and partially covering her face. She must have taken his shoes off and loosened his collar—he didn’t remember doing those things, either. She’d also muted the sound on the television.

It was dark outside the windows. He sat up slowly, his head aching, his eyes half shut with mucus. On the tv they were still showing the same clips. Except when they got to the one of the infected man staggering down the street it looked as if they’d found more footage. The clip was twice as long. As Tim watched the man moving painfully around he got a sudden flash of recognition and knew exactly where he’d seen that man before. The missing hair threw him off but yeah, it was Phil Nero. He saw in his mind’s eye an electrician’s van with a cartoon image of a Roman emperor on the side, a fiddle in his hand. Phil Nero. He’d done some work on their house in Seward Park, fixing a light switch that had just stopped functioning. It was the same guy. Tim was sure of it.

If he needed any confirmation he got it in the expanded footage. Whereas before the camera had cut away after showing Nero walking down an unidentifiable street, now it followed him farther. It pulled back to get a wide shot showing a pair of cars that had collided in a wide intersection. One was a red Nissan Sentra that Tim recognized immediately. He could almost read the license plate, and what he couldn’t make out he could fill in from memory.

The door of the Nissan swung open hard and a woman in a long skirt spilled out onto the pavement. She looked horrified. She had a claw hammer in her hand and as Nero approached she raised it as if she would hit him right in the face with it.

Nero just grabbed her arm and held it there. The woman was screaming by that point. She didn’t stop as Nero bit deep into her arm with a mouth full of white teeth. She didn’t stop until he’d torn a long strip of flesh out of her arm, until blood fountained across the street.

“Karen,” Tim wheezed. His wife’s name came from deep inside of him. He stared at the car, then, tried to force the image to gain resolution by pure willpower. There was a shadow in the backseat. A shadow the size of a ten year-old boy.

“Jake,” he said. Loud enough to wake Nancy.