Compton flung her computer away, her own breath so short she had to lean forward with her face on her legs. It didn’t work. She felt dizzy; the room began to spin in great swooping circles, accompanied by a rising tide of sound. Like the components of a pointillist painting, the sound tide seemed to be composed of a thousand tiny daubs of static, all swirling and coalescing into an escalating roar, blotting out the hush of the AC vents and the chitter of the ice maker and the tinny, distant sound of a siren from so far below. Compton’s heart clanged, juddering inside her chest with the ferocity of an industrial drill. A few more seconds of this and her chest would burst open, shards of bone spraying out in a great blossoming fractal of red. She could no longer feel the rest of her body, her fingers and toes and limbs having violently detached from her core, leaving only the unbearable agony in her torso and the great throbbing noise in her brain. She felt herself panicking, and this panic begat more panic. Now her breath came in irregular hitches, huge shuddering intakes of air that somehow still failed to give her oxygen. It took everything she had not to start screaming, but she managed it; screaming would wake the children and they’d be frightened. That thought, forcing its way through the noise, provided a tiny shelf of stability amid the roiling winds of her terror. Some detached still-rational corner of her mind observed wryly that she’d managed to transform an imaginary experience of the virus into a very real somatization of it. This wasn’t a virus. This was a panic attack.

The irony of this approximation, even in the midst of horror, was not lost on her. And neither was this: Ellis—alone, or at least without her or any of his family—could have experienced something like this in the moments before he’d seized. What if everyone had lied to her about his level of consciousness? What if he’d known? Had he felt terror? Grief? Agony? She’d never know, and she’d never be able to console him or reassure him or tell him goodbye. Losing a loved one was not the ultimate grief; she knew this now. The ultimate grief was realizing the suffering of one you loved and being helpless to do anything about it.

She lowered her head between her knees and forced herself to breathe.

15

Refrain from Embracing

HANNAH

SAN DIEGO

172 Days After Patient Zero

Hannah smoothed her hands over her stomach, thrilling at her new silhouette. At this, her eighteenth week of pregnancy, a smallish but discernible swelling was apparent. Finally—finally!—she’d felt her baby move, a series of quick, tenuous flutters, as if her belly contained a tiny elf tapping on cymbals.