Read The System #2 for Free Online

life.
    No one else left.
    “Is it time, Mom?” asked a young woman in the corner. She was tall, with frizzy auburn hair which she wore tucked behind her unpierced ears.  
    Doctor Krause nodded to her daughter and to the audience spread throughout the room. “Is it about noon? Yes. It’s time.”
    Darla tied her sleek black hair up into a bun and took a step forward. She looked down at Ethan, his chest rising and falling, his hair matted to the side of his head. Then she turned to the doctor. “The light is best now. Joey and I already set up the house yesterday. If we need to move, we move now.”
    Darla had spent the better part of her day yesterday hunting through the Whispering Waters subdivision looking for an empty, open, full of light, house that would convert into an operating room for Doctor Krause.
    Doctor Krause, her daughter Ainsley, and a bumbling thirty-something Raider named Joey came into the picture through Principal Spencer. The principal was the black market mastermind, who emerged with a vengeance after the world was attacked by bioterrorists, and who had been given precious vaccines and one task: find a doctor for the ailing Ethan. When Darla had handed over the vials of the lifesaving medicines to the borderline sociopath, she had no way of knowing if Spencer would be able to fulfill his end of the bargain.
    The day Lucy and Grant floated away over the Portland landscape, Darla left her five year-old son Teddy with the ailing Ethan and marched her way back to Pacific Lake High School, where she found the three recently vaccinated people waiting for her to explain their roles in this bizarre stage-play.  
    Spencer had used Joey to locate Doctor Krause and her surviving family—but the details after that were murky, told to Darla in snippets over the past week; little pieces of the puzzle slipping together to form a dark and depressing tale. All Darla knew was that Spencer had dumped them all unceremoniously out in front of the school to wait for her—like children waiting for the bus on the first day of school.
    Darla met the unlikely trio in a mess of tangled expectations and doubts. Doctor Krause had been firm with Darla—they did not just want to be a pawn in someone else’s chess game. But Spencer gave them no choice; he had vaccinated them against their will, dragged them down to his school, kept them captive until Darla arrived, and then released them without a thought for their future well-being. In the most basic and drastic terms, the vaccinated strangers arrived like slaves. You will live, but you will help, was the spoken decree.
    In the time since Darla brought the resentful newcomers back to Whispering Waters, Ethan took a turn for the worst. His legs, crushed after a truck driven by a dead-man ran into him on his way home, showed signs of infection.
    He needed amputation. Without it he would die.
    Since that news came to light, Ethan’s surgery trumped everything. Darla was certain she had forgotten to eat yesterday, and she’d barely spent time with her own child.  
    She found a home only a few doors down that would work as an operating theater. Into the afternoon, the sun flooded a former dining room with enough light to aid the doctor in her surgical task. With the equipment gathered, the stage set, and the patient slowly slipping away, they knew the time had come.
    “The tissue damage is too extensive,” Doctor Krause told them. “The blood vessels are crushed and his fever is spiking. I thought we could avoid it, I really did.”
    “We knew it would come to this,” Darla said. “We’ve prepared for it. Let’s go. The longer we sit and talk about it, the better chance we have of realizing how stupid we are for trying.” She made a move toward Ethan, but Doctor Krause put out her hand.
    “There is no way to prepare for this, Darla,” she said sternly. “Finding supplies and covering a room in sheets isn’t quite the medical miracle you’re hoping for. This is a