“That’s good news,” Lopez reassured with a sweep of her palm. “It means that most people had such a mild illness they weren’t even aware of it. With West Nile, most people don’t get much more than a cold or mild flulike symptoms. Many have no symptoms at all. Very few develop the dreaded complication of encephalitis or brain infection.” She bit her lip, weighing whether her next sentence would reassure or provoke anxiety among the jittery crowd. She decided to take a chance. “In fact, your risk of getting encephalitis from chicken pox is not much lower than with West Nile Virus,” she said. “Does that answer your question?”

The woman in the red sweater nodded but looked as skeptical as ever.

“Hey, docs,” a hulking man asked as he stooped over to speak into the standing microphone placed in the room’s center. “How about mosquito netting? You think …”

Lopez’s felt her Smartphone silently vibrate against her belt. In the few months she had owned the device, she had already become hooked on the combined phone, electronic organizer, and e-mail retriever. A self-admitted e-mail junkie, she couldn’t resist the promise each new message held (but rarely delivered). She slid a hand down to free the phone from her belt. Cupping it in her hand, she discreetly brought it up to the table.

The “high priority” exclamation point caught her eye. And when she saw that the message—a lab report of bacteria growing in a patient’s sputum—came from Harborcenter’s microbiology lab, she knew it had to be significant. Hurriedly scrolling through the report, she saw that the lab had isolated group-A streptococcus from an ICU patient with pneumonia. The same infection had killed the Muppeteer, Jim Henson. And aside from severe pneumonia, Lopez knew the same dangerous bug caused necrotizing fasciitis, better known and rightfully feared by the public as flesh-eating disease. Lopez intended to follow up on the invasive G.A.S. result the moment the forum ended. But just as she was about to slip her Smartphone back onto her belt, something in the report popped out at her. The sensitivity list. She read through the list of antibiotics tested against the contagion in the lab and noted that beside each drug a fat R appeared. The letters implied the patient’s group-A strep was resistant to every single antibiotic, meaning none of the standard drugs would fight off this strain of G.A.S.

Lopez’s pulse quickened. There must be a mistake! she thought. No such multiresistant G.A.S. had ever been described in the world. Lopez scrolled down to the final line. In bold letters, a note read: “Sensitivities were confirmed on three separate cultures.” This meant the lab had triple-checked the result.