Read Contaminated 2: Mercy Mode for Free Online Page A

side of my face. He hesitates. Then kisses my cheek. Lower. He finds my mouth, and even though he kisses me all the time, it hasn’t been like this for a long time, either. He breaks it before more than a few seconds have passed, and pushes away, leaving me blinking and confused.
    “I’ll go turn off the genny. Make sure Opal’s tucked in. Check on your mom and Mrs. Holly. You,” Dillon says, mock sternly with a shake of his finger, “get into bed and sleep. You need it. You’re going to be in a lot more pain tomorrow. Did you take anything?”
    “A couple of aspirin.” A couple is all we have, and I lied; I took one. It’s hard to get more.
    “You need ice for those bruises. And some ibuprofen or something.”
    We’re both silent at that. Like pioneers, we keep our perishables cool in the basement because we don’t want to use the energy to run the fridge. We haven’t had ice in months. Well. Since winter. And we have a small bottle of aspirin that came a few weeks ago in the rations, but I don’t want to use it unless we really have to.
    “I’m all right.”
    “I’ll take care of things. Go to sleep,” he whispers after a moment, when I slip my legs under the sheet and curl against my pillow.
    But I can’t sleep. Not for a long time. Everything hurtsso much that I can’t get comfortable. I doze a little, but that’s almost worse than not sleeping at all. The lights go out when he turns off the generator, and the silence helps, but even after he comes to bed and the soft, regular hush of his sleeping breaths should lull me into dreams, I stay awake.
    Eventually, I can’t stand it anymore. I get out of bed, quietly as I can, though Dillon’s exhausted from working so hard all day and probably wouldn’t wake up unless I banged a gong in his ear. From Opal’s room comes the soft whistle of her nighttime breathing—she’s got a constant cold or allergies or something that makes her snore. The room at the end of the hall glimmers with the flicker of candlelight. Mrs. Holly is almost always the last of us to go to sleep. She says it’s because she’s old enough to feel how close she is to sleeping forever. Mrs. Holly can be kind of depressing sometimes.
    In my mom’s room, the one that used to be mine, I find her tucked into her big bed. It takes up most of the room, but she uses only one small piece of it. With a shudder, I remember how I used to have to tie her up at night to keep her from wandering. The shock collar that was supposed to keep her under control had almost killed her.
    Mercy Mode, they call it.
    I call it murder.
    “Mom?”
    She blinks her eyes open and holds out a hand for me tocrawl into bed next to her. I’m too old for cuddling, but we hold hands and lie side by side, staring into the darkness. I can distinguish the night sound of everyone’s breathing, and Mom’s is raspy and hoarse, the way her voice is.
    “I miss you,” I tell her, knowing she won’t say anything. “And Daddy.”
    Beside me, she turns and strokes a hand down my hair. “Hmmm.”
    I tell her about the Connie in the woods and the riot at the ration station. About how the woman had tried to take our peanut butter and how I’d knocked her to the ground. My fists clench and open while I talk. I can still feel the thud of flesh against my knuckles. My hands are bruised and aching, just like all the rest of me, but they feel good, too. As if they remember how it had felt to defend myself, to punch and slap and pinch, as if that’s supposed to feel good. I know it’s not, and ashamed, I look at her.
    “I liked it,” I whisper. “When she fell on her butt, I wanted to laugh. I wanted her to hurt and be scared, Mom. Because she was trying to hurt us, maybe not with her fists, but by stealing what was ours. And we needed that peanut butter. It’s ours. We deserve it.”
    “Shhh,” my mother says. Her fingers tangle in my hair, pulling, but not on purpose. She’s clumsy, that’s all. The Contamination