He rolled over and reached for Annie, but his hand touched empty sheets.

Like everyone else, he had spent the night dreaming. His dream had seemed vividly real… was real, some part of him insisted. But Matt was equally determined that it must not be real, and he screwed down that determination like a carpenter’s clamp over all errant and contrary thoughts. A dream, he instructed himself, was only a dream.

The house smelled of frying bacon and buttered toast. Matt dressed in weekend clothes, Levi’s and a sweatshirt, and headed for the kitchen. A bar of sunlight crossed the tiled mosaic floor. A window stood open and morning air plucked at the curtains.

Annie and Rachel were collaborating on breakfast. Matt stood in the doorway a moment before they noticed him. They were giggling at some joke, heads together, Rachel in shorts and an old khaki shirt, Annie still in her nightgown. They cracked eggs into a blue plastic bowl.

It was Annie who turned and saw him. Her smile didn’t fade, exactly. But there was a hitch in it—a blink of uncertainty.

“Breakfast coming up,” she said. “For late risers. Jim and Lillian left early, by the way. They said thanks for the party and they’d stop for food at McDonald’s.”

“Wasn’t much of a party,” Matt said.

“Some wine, some friends. What else do you need?” Annie shooed him toward the table. “Go on, Matt, sit down. If you try to help you’ll just get in the way.”

He watched her move around the kitchen, tousle-haired and pretty in her nightgown. They hadn’t made love last night. Blame it on the Taiwan Flu. But it had been much, much too long since the last time. Matt recalled five separate occasions when he had considered asking Annie to marry him, and each time he had shied away from the question, diverted by some lingering guilt or just a fear of disturbing the status quo, their fragile dalliance. Should have asked her, he thought. We’d have had more of these mornings. More nights in bed.

Rachel was curiously cheerful serving up the scrambled eggs. It was a rare pleasure to see her smiling. When she was a toddler, that grin had been big and infectious. Celeste would take her shopping and strangers would offer compliments—“Such a happy baby.” She’d been a happy baby, happy toddler, happy little girl. It had taken Celeste’s death to erase that smile, and Matt was surprised at the depth of his own reaction now that he was seeing it again. How long since she’d smiled like that? Not a brave smile or a halfhearted smile but a big Rachel grin?

But this was a thought both maudlin and dangerous, and Matt suppressed it and focused his eyes willfully on the varnished tabletop.

Rachel joined him at the table; Annie did not. He said, “You’re not eating?”

“I ate. I have to dress. You two take your time.”

She left the room, but not before Matt noticed a glance that traveled between Annie and Rachel like a semaphore signal.

He looked at his watch and saw that the date crept ahead an extra day. How had that happened? In his dream he had seemed to sleep much too long—but that was only a dream. Focus, Matt thought. He suffered a momentary fear that the world might fade around him, the walls of reality shatter to reveal… a void.

“Want to hear the radio?” Rachel asked.

Christ, no, Matt thought. “No—please.” He was afraid, for reasons he could not admit, of what the radio might say. She recoiled a little. “Sorry, Daddy.”

“It’s all right.”

She picked at her eggs. The silence in the room was suddenly weighty, and Rachel’s smile had faded.

“Daddy,” she said, “I’m okay. Really.”

“Of course you are.”

“You’re worried about me. But I’m fine. I really am. Daddy?” She looked at him intently. “Daddy, did you dream last night?”

He would not endure the weight of the question. He fought a childish urge to close his eyes and cover his ears. He looked away from Rachel and said, through a wave of shame that seemed to thicken his tongue, “No, honey, I didn’t. I didn’t dream at all.”

He drove Annie home along the bay shore.

Buchanan was quiet again today, but it was a normal Saturday quiet, not yesterday’s odd and uneasy tranquility Folks were out in the morning cool, mowing lawns, weeding, making grocery runs. Matt allowed himself a moment’s appreciation of all this suburban peace.

A blue haze rode up the slope of the mountain. The air through the wing window carried a rich bouquet of pine resin and sun-warmed asphalt. Matt followed the lazy curve of the road past the commercial dock, where a trawler stood in rust-colored repose, through the business district and beyond a high bluff of land to the apartment complex where Annie lived.

He had never understood why she chose to live in this down-at-the-heels corner of town, in an old walk-up building with pasteboard walls. She had never explained. There were a lot of things Annie had never explained. Where she disappeared to the second Saturday of every month, for instance; or why she had never replaced her genteel but ancient furniture.

But she invited him up, and he accepted the invitation. For all its apparent poverty, this was still very much an Annie kind of place: a bedroom and a big living room overlooking the bay, sparsely furnished, clean wooden floors, the elderly tabby-cat Beulah snoozing in a patch of sunlight. The apartment was as economical as a haiku: Every detail mattered.

Annie spooned out coffee into the basket of her coffee maker. Beulah had been fed by a neighbor; she paid no attention to the kitchen noises. The machine began to burble. Annie said, “We have to talk, Matt.”

He knew that “we have to talk” was polite code for an impending emotional meltdown, and he didn’t like it. He stood at the window and watched the ocean roll out blue and calm to the horizon. Did they have to talk? Was silence such a bad thing?

“Matt?” she said. “Did you dream last night?”

It was almost possible to hate her for the question.

He said, “Rachel asked me the same thing.”

“Oh? What did you tell her?”

“I told her no.”

“I don’t think she believed you.”

“She didn’t say.”

“J don’t believe you.”

He turned away with enormous reluctance from his view of the sunlit sea. “What’s this about, Annie?”

“I had a dream,” she said. “Rachel had a dream. I think every living human being on the surface of the Earth had that dream. Even you.”

He fought an urge to bolt for the door. He was sweating, he was tense, and he couldn’t resist his own diagnosis: Denial, announced the premed hotshot inside him. You’re denying what you don’t want to face.

He sat down at Annie’s lacquered pine dinner table and closed his eyes. Beulah bumped against his leg. He picked her up. Beulah began to purr.

“All right,” he said flatly. “Tell me what you dreamed.”

But it wasn’t a dream, Annie said, not really. It was a visitation, and the agency of that visitation had been the microorganisms—or machines—Jim Bix had warned him about.

(“No, Matt, don’t ask me how I know these things. I just do. Let me finish.”)

The microbes were neither organism nor mechanism, Annie said; they were an amalgam of both, or something beyond either. They were capable of reproduction and were even, in their own dim way, intelligent. They had been distributed into the atmosphere by the trillions upon trillions, had ridden the jet stream to the extremities of the Earth, and by the end of July they had colonized every human organism on the surface of the planet. Within the last week they had begun to reproduce; their growth and their activity was what had produced the alarming hematology results.