Contaminated 2: Mercy Mode Read Online Free PDF

ration station, but he’ll worry even more. And he can’t miss work. You can lose your ration card for that. Or worse.
    “Hey! Can we have mac and cheese and beanie weenies for dinner?” Opal nudges against us, pushing us apart.
    Dillon and I exchange a glance. “With a vegetable,” I tell her. “And you have to promise to eat it.”
    In the kitchen, I pull out a can of green beans and tossit to Dillon, who opens it and pours the slimy, soft beans into a saucepan we’ll heat over the small fire in the fire pit outside. Our generator runs on gasoline, and we use it only for a few hours when it gets dark, to give us lights and some hot water. That’s one thing I forgot to get today, even though I was at the station. A gallon or so of gas. It’s all you can really buy anymore. No more than five gallons at a time, unless you have paperwork. But you can still buy the red gas containers, and I buy and fill them whenever I can, keeping them in the shed.
    My dad would’ve said that’s dangerous, but what else are we supposed to do? Someday, we won’t be able to get any. Right now everything we get, we put half away for the winter.
    We live like pioneers in a house filled with electronics gone dusty. We hoe and weed and build up compost heaps in the yard, and fight the deer and squirrels and birds to keep them from eating our crops. We wash our clothes in pails of water because the washer and dryer take too much electricity to run, even if we do have enough water to use. It’s not so bad, really.
    While living in the crappy apartment in the days after the last wave, when Opal and I didn’t know if we’d ever find our mom, we had “more,” but it felt like so much less. Now, at least, we’re a family, and if we have to work harder for everything we get … well, my mom always used to say, “You appreciate what you have to work for more than what you don’t.”
    She’d say it again, I think, if she was able to say much at all, but even though we got the collar off her, Mom is mostly still silent. She understands what we say, especially if we speak slowly and are very, very clear about what we mean. She communicates just fine, mainly with hand gestures. But she hardly ever talks, except at night when she dreams. Sometimes, she wakes us up with her screaming.
    Dinner is, as Opal requested, macaroni and cheese and beanie weenies, all from cans. The green beans, which I tried to spice up with a little soy sauce and some garlic and olive oil, aren’t terrible, but you’d think we were asking her to gulp down live spiders by the way she wriggles and gags. I frown, tired and frustrated and still thinking about the showdown at the ration station. I’ve been half expecting a knock on the door any minute. The police. Or worse, the army. Coming to take me away for the part I played in it.
    “C’mon, Opal. You have to eat your veggies.” Dillon’s so much better at getting her to do whatever she needs to do than I am. I lose my patience with Opal, but he’s never had a younger sibling. For him, it’s still sort of a novelty.
    “And your vitamin.” I hold out the bottle.
    Because Opal’s under thirteen, she’s issued the government vitamins that are supposed to give her 100 percent of her daily requirements, including vitamin C. It took an epidemic of rickets and other vitamin deficiencies for the pills to start showing up in the ration shipments. Thegovernment might once have declared ketchup a vegetable, but at least in this brave new world of post-Contamination insanity, they’re trying to keep the kids healthy.
    “I hate it!” Opal cries.
    Mrs. Holly tut-tuts, which makes Opal look at least a little ashamed. “It’s good for you, dolly.”
    Mom says nothing, but fixes Opal with a look that leaves no interpretation necessary. With a put-upon sigh, Opal eats a few bites of beans and washes down her vitamin with a giant swig from the glass of reconstituted soy milk I made earlier. Along with any kind of beef