Plague Nation Read Online Free PDF

the clock.
    “It’s five till ten,” she pointed out. “We should start.”
    Emmett heaved a sigh worthy of the drama queen he was.
    “Right, then. No rest for the wicked.”
    Mika smirked. “You must not sleep too much.”
    “Funny girl.” He hauled himself up again. “How about you get the first two victims, and I’ll grab more vaccines so we’re stocked for the day.”
    Swigging the last of his Coke, Emmett went into the stockroom, heading straight for the refrigeration units that held the various vaccines the drugstore chain was authorized to dispense. He skimmed over shingles, polio, and Japanese encephalitis, wondering yet again why the shipping and receiving clerks never put things in alphabetical order. TB... rabies... and the unit dedicated to flu vaccines. Emmett opened it, and found himself staring at empty shelves.
    “Well, shit on a shingle.” He put a hand on one hip, and glared at the shelves. “Kenny! Kenny, you in here?”
    Kenny—one of the two shipping and receiving clerks and, as Emmett always said, skinny as a drink of water—sauntered around the corner.
    “What can I do you for, Em?” he asked.
    Emmett rolled his eyes.
    “First of all, don’t call me Em. I am not Dorothy’s aunt, got it?”
    Kenny stared at him blankly.
    “Who’s Dorothy?”
    Emmett opened his mouth to answer, then shook his head.
    “Never mind. Your lack of cultural awareness isn’t my problem. What is my problem, however, is the fact we appear to be out of flu vaccinations, and I’ve got a line of people running half the store, all wanting one.”
    “No prob.” Kenny vanished back around the corner, reappearing minutes later with a cart piled high with cardboard boxes, all labeled “Keep Refrigerated!” Brandishing a box-cutter like a switchblade, he sliced the top box open and pulled out a hard-sided styrofoam container, sliding the top half off to reveal small boxes filled with little vials.
    Emmett took one of the boxes.
    “What happened to the rest of the stock?”
    “Got a message from corporate, telling us to pull ’em ’cause we were getting this new batch in.”
    “Why? The others were well under the expiration date.”
    “Heck if I know.” Kenny shrugged. “I just work here.”
    “Alrighty, then.” Emmett tucked the box under his arm, gave the clerk a little salute and headed back into the store. It wasn’t his business if corporate wanted to waste money and toss out perfectly good drugs. Time to go shoot up a bunch of local venture capitalists and bankers.

CHAPTER FOUR
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    “What the hell is he doing here?”
    I was tired, I was grouchy, and my blood sugar was beyond low. The last person I wanted to see sitting across from me in Patterson Hall’s cafeteria was Dr. Albert— my childhood physician, flu vaccine researcher, and the man responsible for the zombie plague.
    Judging from their expressions, I gathered that Tony, Mack, and Gentry—the three other wild cards at the table—all felt the same way I did.
    “I said, why is he here?” I repeated.
    Dr. Albert peered at me reproachfully over his plate of pasta and salad, his pinched features and graying red hair reminding me of a ginger-haired were-rat. Only a day or so ago, he’d been practically suicidal after finding out the Redwood Grove zombie outbreak was his fault, and that it might have gone nationwide.
    Desperate to discover the cure for Walker’s Flu, Dr. Albert had helped falsify test results for his vaccine, in the hopes of making a buttload of money. As it was, the vaccine reacted to a normally dormant variant of a retrovirus present in about ten percent of the population. This caused a nasty but manageable flu bug to mutate into the walking death.
    Thanks a hell of a lot, doc.
    Yet here he was, sitting at the same table as several wild cards, each of whom had risked their lives to try and stop the spread of the virus he’d unleashed. Hell, one of us had died in the attempt. So much for his emotional I.Q.
    I