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“prepare for the worst, hope for the best” mentality, his preparedness was a comfort to her now.  “Maybe I’ll run over to Natural Grocers this afternoon,” she said, her tone as carefully casual as his had been.  “I could stock up on some necessities.  Some oil of oregano, some garlic caps, a bottle of colloidal silver.”
    “Re-supply your ‘arsenal.’  Good idea.”  Scott had always supported her natural remedies for their family’s illnesses.  “And fill your car up while you’re out, okay?”
                  “Okay.”  She paused, then spoke in a rush.  “Oh, this is silly, right?  I mean, we’re just over-reacting.  We are.  We’ll laugh about this in a few days, won’t we?”
                  Scott straightened, and again, their eyes met and held.  “Maybe.  A lot of people would say so, that’s for sure.”  He held his hand out to her, and she took it, lacing her fingers through his.  “But I’d rather live feeling silly than die saying ‘dang it.’”  He smiled when Naomi giggled.  “See?  We’re laughing already.”
     

THREE: Everywhere: The Days That Followed
     
                  Five days later, everyone quarantined in the Safeway store was sick.  Within ten days, they were dead, all of them, though it would be some time before officials confirmed this fact.  People, presumably medical or CDC personnel, were filmed by news crews entering and exiting the building encased in hazmat suits.
                  Desperate families pressed the perimeter line relentlessly, some of them even camping out in tents.  They mobbed any vehicle that crossed the yellow line, demanding information about their loved ones, but none of the officials involved were talking.  Six days after the quarantine started, police had to use riot gear and tear gas to repel a group that tried to walk through the line.
                  And all the while, the whole world watched.  News crews from all over the United States and a growing number of foreign countries formed a third perimeter around the police line and the families, vans bristling with lights, power chords snaking everywhere.  Round the clock, they broadcast very little news and a great deal of fear back to their home viewers.  Officials might not be talking, but the media had found numerous experts on communicable disease willing to speculate.
                  A biological weapon, some of them posited.  Highly contagious and deadly, they all agreed, as evidenced by the official response.  None of them could come up with a reason – other than the direst of scenarios – the families would not be allowed any kind of contact with their loved ones.  Reporters alternated their interviews between sober, grim-faced PhDs, doctors and former CDC employees, and terrified husbands, wives, parents and children of the victims.
                  Finally, eleven days after the start of the quarantine, the official announcements began.
                  Bubonic Plague.  One of the paramedics had seen the disease before, and suspecting the highly contagious pneumonic form, had immediately set the quarantine in motion.  The plague was not unheard of in the western United States – several cases were reported each year, with fatalities occurring only if the victims did not receive antibiotic treatment in time – but as it turned out, this was Bubonic Plague with a caveat. 
    The first victim, a soldier recently returned from active duty in Pakistan, was unaware she was carrying a sleeping superbug: bacteria enhanced by a mutation of the NDM-1 gene.  Known to only a few virologists in the world, the mutation had only recently been identified; antibiotics that could combat NDM-2 weren’t even in the pipeline.  Like its predecessor, NDM-2 was both prolific and promiscuous, transferring itself easily among many types of bacteria via microbial