Containment Read Online Free PDF Page A

's mind.
    Some of the thoughts were alarming. One of them was absolutely petrifying. And if it were true....
    The sinking feeling Gordon had gotten earlier returned in full force. Was he really so sure that the company had nothing to do with the two deaths?
    Breaking into a run, Gordon raced down the hallway toward the company laboratories.
     
    Medburg, Pennsylvania / 11:45 p.m.
     
    They are creatures of the night. Hardly ever seen by humans, they spend their year or two of life—if they're lucky—feverishly supporting their racing metabolism. And making lots of babies, litters of them, which mature in eight weeks. Enough of them for a population explosion, if left unchecked.
    They 're rarely left unchecked, even in the city. They are preyed upon by rats, owls, and cats, and some of them end their days in a steel-spring trap. But mice are an important part of the ecosystem even though they are generally concealed from human eyes, except in the worst tenements and aging row homes, whose cracked foundations invite infiltration.
    Aggressive and territorial, an adult male mouse can weigh upwards of 3 0 grams and uses his sixteen teeth to their fullest advantage. Yet on this night, throughout several blocks of the city, the normally busy and metabolically active mice were quiescent. They failed to roam, they did not hunt, they ignored their young.
    Gary Winters knew nothing of this. Lying in his bed, in the room he shared with his little brother, he fell into a half-asleep, half-awake state. His thoughts flitted from topic to topic without the usual constraint of logic or practicality. He thought about driving; driving a Mustang, and then driving another kind of car, a four-door sedan in which he could take the family somewhere, out to eat, or to the park. He thought about learning to drive, and about Alicia, his sister. His mother. Graduation. Job. College. Ha, fat chance, why even think about it? Scholarship. Yes, it was possible. College. Gradually his mind drifted more into sleep than waking, and finally out of waking altogether and into a deep but fitful sleep.
    All the while, something was happening that Gary Winters failed to notice. And also Alicia Winters, who was carrying on a whispered conversation with one of her friends on her cell phone while trying to keep from waking her little sister. Alicia and her friend Bella weren't discussing boys—their usual topic—or school or the latest Hollywood fashions, but instead they talked about a movie Bella had seen that night in which every woman in the world abstained from sex, and soon women dominated the planet and ran the government of all the countries. Loretta Winters failed to notice too. She had returned home an hour earlier and fell into an exhausted sleep in front of the television, which quietly played old reruns of Married...With Children . Unobserved by the Winters family and the rest of the people of Medburg, the mice of their city were dying.

14 April , Wednesday
     
    Medburg, Pennsylvania / 12:30 p.m.
     
    "Mondays are always the worst," said the medical examiner through his mask.
    Lisa Murdoch 's eyebrows shot up to her hair net. "It's Wednesday."
    Cecily poked her not too gently in the ribs. "He means when the bodies came in. After the weekend."
    The M.E. didn 't appear to have heard. A large, rotund man clothed in scrubs, he stood beside two bodies and looked at them with worried eyes. The worry had broken out all over his face the moment that Lisa and Cecily had appeared, and it hadn't let up.
    Cecily glanced from one body to the other. Both were males, one in his fifties, the other younger, maybe by a decade. On their torsos they had the characteristic Y-incision of an autopsy. Cecily didn 't have to ask whether the next-of-kin had given permission. Autopsies were automatic in cases like these. Should have been automatic, that is, if there hadn't been a mistake somewhere along the processing that had sent the bodies to the morgue.
    The M.E. shook his