All this didactic stuff comes to an end after weeks of hard-core schooling, when the trainees confront the terrorism portion of the course just before they start their specialized research or leave for real-life field investigations. On an average day, bioterrorism is not something to which the average citizen gives much thought. The CDC, on the other hand, gives a colossal amount of thought to bioterrorism. To prove it, they used to haul the EIS officers down to Anniston, Alabama—of all places—and proceed to scare the shit out of them in an old decommissioned army hospital now repurposed as a ghoulish mass-casualty scene. Now: this kind of thing you probably have seen in a movie. Think crinkly white Tyvek suits, military-grade respirator masks, elbow-length black gloves. Heaps of bodies felled by one of the Big Four weaponizable biologic agents: plague, botulism, anthrax, and—the one I fear the most—smallpox.

I really, really hate the idea of weaponized smallpox.

But even more than smallpox, I fear a new twist on an old virus. At least with smallpox, there exists the consolation of knowing it’s only likely to wreak havoc if human beings will it back into being through a complex and unlikely series of actions. Even now I don’t consider myself so naive or optimistic to think that this scenario could never happen. It could. But another part of me cannot allow myself to believe something so terrible could be wrought by humanity, even with all the historical evidence to the contrary. Anyone unleashing weaponized smallpox would have to be genocidal but also suicidal, since biologic weapons don’t respect borders. As horrifying as the terrorist mindset might be, outside of a doomsday cult or something similar, many of them have enough capacity for rational thought that they wouldn’t want to risk the destruction of their own people. You can at least argue with a human.

A virus, though. You cannot argue with a virus.

As if tacitly acknowledging this, Wally broke into my train of thought. “It may not be a novel influenza, or whatever. It might be nothing.”

I waited.

“Or,” he said, “it might be the next big one.”

This, of course, should have been the wake-up call for which I’d been waiting, the moment my years of training and expertise would kick in to provide me with some spider sense of impending calamity. Even as Wally spoke, an insidious enemy was preparing a full-scale assault on humanity, slithering its way into the first few lungs and bloodstreams, mounting an attack on our cells with a battalion of miniature hooks and lances and morning stars. Shouldn’t I have had some subconscious awareness? When I think back on the conversation, however, I cannot recall anything of the sort. Wally had been alarmed enough to contact me, but Wally has a well-known tendency to portray every minor outbreak as an impending apocalypse. He also thrives on drama, which makes us good colleagues; we level each other out.