After a crazy Thursday house party and his Friday overnighter at Steak and Eggs, Harry’s Saturday evening was more sedate, celebrating Kirsten’s forty-seventh birthday at a creepily deserted tapas restaurant, with a bunch of her friends, co-workers and James, the latest in her line of much younger boyfriends.

There was talk of LHV, though Harry noted how fast the catchier Killer-T moniker had taken hold. Bleak conversation and the empty tables all around stifled any hint of celebration.

The quarantine around San Francisco had been extended to the whole of Northern California. One of Kirsten’s guests had spotted Nevada State Guards preparing to block the I-15 freeway between Las Vegas and Los Angeles, and everyone agreed that Nevada and the rest of California would get locked down soon.

Harry was the only guest under twenty, and the gloomy conversation made him feel like he was dining on the Titanic as he got tipsy on red wine, flirted unproductively with one of Kirsten’s junior chefs and made it home by ten thirty after saying that he had a ton of school stuff to catch up on in the morning.

Harry got woken by Matt and Lana fighting in his kitchen, just after nine on Sunday morning. He usually went to the fridge for juice when he woke, but he didn’t want to go near Lana in case she tried interrogating him about what Matt had been up to on Friday night.

Instead, he filled a glass from his bathroom tap, sat up in bed and logged into the Vegas Local content management system. The site had 11,000 active users, double the average for a Sunday morning. Visitors would usually focus on local sports and downloading 2-for-1 coupons for Sunday lunch, but the stats screen showed eighty per cent of visitors were logged into the gossip boards, talking about Killer-T and the prospect of quarantine.

The news kept getting darker. Since Harry had left Kirsten’s birthday meal the night before, the governors of California and Oregon had confirmed state-wide quarantines. Seventeen clinics had been constructed in the Vegas area, designed to prevent virus outbreaks ravaging regular hospitals. There were rumours that a family of visitors from San Francisco had been admitted with Killer-T style haemorrhaging. Four cases had been confirmed in Canada, at least five hundred in San Francisco and more than a hundred thousand in Europe.

Harry felt sick. Even the optimists were predicting thousands of deaths and he reckoned his readers might appreciate some light relief on the Vegas Local home page. Ellie had linked all his local news sites into a central database, and Harry trawled it, hoping to find a nice car chase out of Omaha, or a skateboarding pig in Philadelphia.