I sat on the side of the bed, one hand drifting to my mouth before I yanked it back down again. Why was it so damn hard not to touch your face?

“Dozens? In a few hours? Where?”

“They’re all being directed to the tent hospital.” Most cities had begun doing this, both for safety and to maintain enough resources in the actual hospital for normal emergencies.

“How are supplies?”

“I’m told they’re good,” Wally said, adding, “I also heard we’re supposed to receive a large compassionate-use shipment of Artenivir.”

Artenivir was an experimental antiviral treatment not yet approved by the FDA. The initial data trended toward limited success in adults, but it had been discontinued for children after it had been discovered it caused a massive inflammatory reaction in children with fevers. In any case, Artenivir was a stopgap, useful if you were already quite sick; the country had pinned most of its hope on a vaccine.

“Do I need to come in tonight?”

“Wait until tomorrow, Kira. The team will work tonight, and we’ll have better data by then.”

Hanging up, I crossed the room to the kitchen and helped myself to a tiny pour of Blanton’s. Standing at the darkened window, I sipped the bourbon and attempted to will my mind into blankness. If only I could erase from my thoughts, for even a short while, the sheer overwhelming impact of the events of this year. All the deaths, all the suffering; all the disruption and loss.

For a moment my efforts to smooth out my worries seemed successful; I dissociated, a shadow-person standing in a shadow-room, the whiskey burning its way down my throat the only proof of life. I drank and I floated and I didn’t think.

The buzzing of my phone brought me back. I didn’t intend to answer; whatever it was could wait until tomorrow. Unless, of course, it couldn’t wait until tomorrow. That was the problem with being a subject matter expert at the CDC during a plague involving your personal virus. Almost nothing could wait.

This call didn’t involve work, though: Georgia’s picture lit up the screen. I might have let it go to voicemail but for two things: first, Georgia never called anyone; and second, she’d just had a baby. Curiosity flooded me as to how my freewheeling friend was handling motherhood. Perhaps she wanted parenting advice.

I answered a split second too late. I’d just lifted a thumb to jab at redial when the phone rang again. I answered it reflexively, assuming it was Georgia calling back. “Hey, how’s it going? Are your breasts about to fall off?”

A brief silence, then from a voice that wasn’t Georgia’s: “No worse than usual, and not any more than usual, I guess. They looked a lot better before I had kids.”