Pandemic Read Online Free PDF

across his face.
    Steve looked up to see a wrinkled old man looking down at him. Well, if it wasn’t the MMS’s main messenger.
    “Bo Pan,” Steve said. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”
    Bo Pan nodded once.
    Steve sighed. “You’re blocking my sun.”
    Bo Pan looked down, realized he was casting a shadow. He quickly stepped to the left.
    “Sorry, sorry,” the man said.
    Bo Pan wore secondhand jeans, secondhand sneakers and a Detroit Lions sweatshirt that was probably
third
-hand, if not fourth. With wispy hair around the temples of a bald head, and eyes that were deeply slanted even by Chinese standards, Bo Pan didn’t look like a threat to anything but the grass on some rich white dude’s lawn.
    Steve sat up, turned, put his feet on the sparse, cool grass and packed dirt. “There’s nothing new to report. But you know that. Here to check up on me?”
    Bo Pan shook his head. He looked out at the river, squinted at the sun, then took in Steve’s chair.
    The old man frowned. “You look comfortable. Are you enjoying yourself?”
    Steve smiled. “I am, actually. It’s a beautiful day for a pimp like me.”
    Bo Pan’s mouth pursed in confusion. For someone who had spent decades living in America, he understood little of the culture and
none
of the lingo.
    “Do your mother and father know it’s a beautiful day? I saw them working away in the restaurant.”
    Bo Pan hadn’t come around in, what … three months? Three months without a peep, and the first thing he had to communicate was a guilt trip?
    Steve eased back in his chair. He took his time, milking the motion just to annoy Bo Pan.
    “My mother and father don’t need me today.”
    “You are lazy,” Bo Pan said. “You have grown up like them.”
    Like them:
like an American.
    Steve glanced over at the girls. He couldn’t help it. As if being a semi-heliophobic nerd sitting with a laptop wasn’t enough of a turnoff, now he was hanging out with a hunched-over, fiftysomething old man.
    The girls were pulling on sweatshirts of their own, stepping into form-fitting jeans. The temperature was dropping.
    “I’m not lazy,” Steve said to Bo Pan. “I’m efficient — my work is done, remember?”
    The old man shook his head. “No longer. We have a search location.”
    Steve sat up. He forgot about the girls, forgot about the sun.
    “A location?”
    The older man smiled, showing the space where his front right incisor once resided.
    A location
. Five years of effort, millions of dollars spent — Steve didn’t know exactly how much, but it was a
lot
— the whole reason his family and the People’s Party had hidden him away in this inflamed hemorrhoid of a town, and now it was finally his moment to shine. He didn’t know what to think, how to feel. Afraid? Excited? After all this time, was it finally his turn?
    “A location,” Steve repeated. “How did we get it?”
    Bo Pan shrugged. “The American love of money knows no bounds.”
    “No, I mean
how
did we, or they — or
whatever
— get the location? Satellite? Did someone properly model the entry angle? Did someone find …” His voice trailed off.
    Did he dare to hope?
    Gutierrez’s green men. The story of the century. Steve’s task: build a machine that could dive, undetected, to the bottom of Lake Michigan. Could there be actual
pieces
of an alien spacecraft?
    “Wreckage,” he said. “Did someone find
wreckage
?”
    Bo Pan shook his head. “You don’t need that information.”
    Steve nodded automatically, acquiescing to Bo Pan as if the man was something more than a simple go-between.
    Wreckage. It had to be. Steve had finished work on the
Platypus
three months earlier. His baby was more a piece of art than a cutting-edge unmanned underwater vehicle. It sat in a crate like a caged animal, unable to move, unable to fulfill its purpose. Other than midnight test runs, there had been no point in putting the UUV to work. Unless Steve knew where to look, he couldn’t have the