Contaminated 2: Mercy Mode Read Online Free PDF Page B

and even most chicken products, cow milk has become rare. The Contaminated protein water that started everything off was supposed to be animal-protein free, but it got infected with what seems to have been a chemically altered organic protein. You couldn’t pay me to eat a real cheeseburger, and most everyone else seems to feel the same way.
    After dinner, Mrs. Holly helps Opal with her schoolwork—we gave up the pretense of her going to any sort of school last year, and have been homeschooling her ever since. Everyone else in this house is more patient with Opal than I am. They work on math problems far more useful than any I ever learned in school. Instead of lame story problems about two trains meeting, Mrs. Holly quizzes Opal on converting measurements and figuring out how much square footage of garden plots a certain number of seeds need. That sort of thing. Mom works on a pair of soft,thick socks she’s knitting from the yarn she pulled from an old baby blanket.
    And I go upstairs to finally, at last, take a shower.
    Between the sound of the water pounding all around me and the rasping cough of the generator outside the bathroom window, I don’t hear Dillon open the bedroom door. So when I come out of the bathroom, after a shower that was way too short and not nearly hot enough for my taste, I jump, startled when he says softly from behind me, “Hey.”
    “Hey.” I’m still not used to this. Sharing a house with him, much less a bathroom and a bedroom, even though we’ve set up two twin beds instead of the king-sized bed that had been my parents’. It’s certainly not the way I’d ever imagined my life when I pictured it. At least not at seventeen.
    Dillon’s riffling through the dresser to get something, his back to me and giving me the privacy he knows I still need. We might be husband and wife on paper—that’s so I can be covered under his health benefits, the ones he gets from his forced service as a garbage collector. Opal will be taken care of, too, when she’s no longer covered under the children’s initiative, and also my mom, because they’re my family and now his. But words on paper are only that. Words.
    We share a bedroom because he can’t share with Mom or Opal or Mrs. Holly. We tried having Mom share, but she keeps anyone who sleeps near her awake all night with her mutters and sighs. Mrs. Holly would share a room withwhoever we ask her to—she’s just grateful we’ve become her family so she doesn’t have to live all alone in the big house she used to share with Gerald. But Opal is such a messy kid that it’s not fair to subject Mrs. Holly to the dangers of tripping over every single possession Opal owns. Everything is always all over the floor. And I could share with Opal, but we’d end up killing each other sooner rather than later.
    So Dillon and I are roomies, which feels weird and awkward, like we’re shacking up right under my mom’s nose. In my parents’ house. Except that we went and got ourselves married for the sake of dental care. My mom didn’t even have to sign her consent, since I’m an adult now in the eyes of the law.
    It doesn’t quite feel that way, though. It still feels odd, even if we do have separate beds. Sometimes I think about Tony. Once upon a time, I’d imagined what it would be like to marry him, and I’m not at all sorry about never getting the chance. But I know Tony wouldn’t be as understanding as Dillon has been about my reluctance to turn the words that have made him my husband into the more physical reality of it. Tony would’ve been all over me, all the time, but Dillon’s not like that.
    He kisses and hugs me and stuff, but sometimes, I wonder if he’s really into me at all.
    The towel I have wrapped around me doesn’t do anything to cover the bruises and scrapes that showed up whenI washed away the mud. My face miraculously managed to miss most signs of the abuse I earned at the hands of Tess the cheerleader, but the rest of