Read Plague Zone for Free Online Page A

while she was down, blazing with lanterns and flashlights.
     
Cam shoved through the crowd. His face was hidden in his goggles and mask. “Allison!” he yelled, as another man shouted, “What are you—”
     
“They’re contagious! Get back!”
     
“Oh my God, Allison.” His voice was raw with agony. Ruth didn’t think he’d even heard what she was saying.
     
He must have been thinking of his baby. She was, too, but she struggled for control of herself. “Stop! It’s some kind of nanotech! Cam, if the wind changes—”
     
Behind her, there was a distinct gritting noise as Tony rose to his feet.
     
Ruth swung around.
     
Tony was already advancing in a clumsy, looping path. He stumbled on Allison’s hand but kept coming. Something was wrong with his eyes. They were like holes. In the many beams of light, his brown irises looked black, as if his eyes consisted only of the whites and giant, hyper-dilated pupils.
     
“Stop him!” she yelled.
     
Cam hurled his flashlight. Someone else threw a spare clip for a rifle. The clip bounced off of Tony’s arm, but Cam’s flashlight banged into his shoulder. It knocked him back. Suddenly everyone was bobbing up and down, scratching at the ground for dirt and rocks, pelting the boy and shouting as if their voices might also drive him off. Their flashlights stabbed and winked. Tony staggered in the onslaught. Then he lost his balance, stepping on Allison again and falling down.
     
Michael came at them next. His eyes were lopsided. Only one pupil was distorted. The other had shrunk to a pinpoint, and his body hunched to that side as if to compensate.
     
The brain, Ruth thought. It’s something in the brain.
     
“Oh, fuck, shoot them!” a man yelled, but Denise drew her own pistol and thrust it at the nearest person who was also armed, a woman with a rifle.
     
“Don’t you touch him!” Denise cried.
     
“No, wait!” Ruth yelled. There were too many voices. The crowd hurled rocks and gear at Michael, a knife, a belt, even stripping off their jackets just to have something to throw. In the madness, two people fled. Ruth saw another man stagger. He wasn’t running away. He simply let his head slump. Was he infected? The man dropped to the ground as someone else began to jerk beside him, shaking all over.
     
It jumped the gap, Ruth thought. She meant to shout a warning but she couldn’t breathe. The reflex was too powerful. Don’t breathe. The nanotech was multiplying, swirling unseen from everyone it touched, and she wondered if she would be next.
     
Michael continued to wade toward them through the barrage. Unfortunately, the hail of rocks and equipment was slowing as they cleaned the ground and emptied their pockets. Ruth heard a woman swearing desperately as she scratched at the dirt. Someone else turned and ran. Then a flashlight pegged Michael in the face, its white beam spinning. He collapsed. But the other two men who’d been infected would rise in seconds.
     
“Give me your shovel,” Cam said to Greg. Both of them still wore their makeshift armor. Their goggles, hoods, and gloves would offer the slightest protection.
     
“Stay upwind!” Ruth yelled. “Cam!”
     
Otherwise they were helpless. Every survivor knew how easily the invisible machines could penetrate their lungs. A new plague was their most intimate and public nightmare, shared by everyone. They would have been less unnerved by another distant nuclear exchange. Panic took over.
     
Someone fired in the dark, then someone else. Orange muzzle flashes tore the crowd apart, because not all of the shots were directed outward. Tony died in a burst of rifle fire, flailing into the ground. Denise fired, too, driving one man to his knees before a third gun popped at the base of Denise’s skull, silencing her high-pitched screams.
     
It had been less than five minutes since the old woman transferred the nanotech to Allison.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
Cam and Greg took the front line