Plague War Read Online Free PDF

surrounded by empty dark windows and ghosts, but this was different. A noise. The dead had mostly settled long ago, but rot and imbalance were always itching away at things. Buildings shifted. Garbage moved. And yet his subconscious had pulled this one sound out of the soft whispering all around them, a low, distant sound like the breeze, even though the late morning sky was clear and still.
    “Hey,” he said.
    Newcombe looked up from the Honda. “What?”
    The noise reminded Cam of the storm winds in the mountains, but there was no wind here and the rising shhhhhhhhhh seemed localized. He turned to follow it, afraid now. It was very big, he realized, somewhere north of them. The environment had changed so drastically, the land stripped and baking, was it possible that some temperature differential between this muddy sea and the dead earth was causing tornados?
    “Oh God,” Ruth said, just as Cam ‚nally recognized the echoing drone way out across the water.
    Fighter jets.
    * * * *
    They holed up inside a sewer drain, musty but dry, crowding in one after another. Newcombe thought the concrete box and the dirt-pack above it would conceal them from airborne sensors—and as the jets swept back again, crisscrossing the sky, he said they might as well settle in. Their allies in Colorado had transmitted bad commands to all of the U.S. spy satellites under Leadville’s control, causing those eyes to tumble and burn down through the atmosphere, but Leadville still had a thermal imaging sat which would pass overhead twice during the next two hours... unless they’d moved it.
    Hiding from the sky was complicated. Leadville might have used some of the satellite’s fuel reserves to alter its orbit and its timing, and spy planes could pass so far overhead as to be invisible. The space station was still up there, too. Even uninhabited, the ISS made a ‚ne satellite with its cameras operated remotely from Colorado. Newcombe didn’t have good intelligence on what its last orbital path had been.
    They could only work with what they knew. That was one reason they got moving so early every day, to gain a few miles before ‚nding cover again. In his systematic way, Newcombe had even taken ‚ve watches from a store, still ticking perfectly. He kept three for extras in his pack and wore the other two— two for safety—having set both alarms to give them at least thirty minutes to look for a place to hide before the thermal satellite passed overhead. The bugs also seemed worse in the afternoon, mindlessly responding to the same heat that made them vulnerable to the plague, so it wasn’t a bad time to go to ground. They always needed to eat, reorganize, and nap.
    First they emptied a pint of gasoline over the street above them, trying to cover their smell. Then they shared ‚ve cans of greasy uncooked soup and it was good beyond words, rich in fat and sodium. Cam’s stomach cramped. He ate too much too fast, dragging his mask down to gulp straight from the can, but slowly that knot relaxed as his body sang with new energy. Unfortunately all they’d found to drink were stale, odd-tasting boxes of juice, and they were leery of the water, certain it was teeming with bacteria and common household toxins like weed spray, detergents, and motor oil. Boiling it would at least kill any parasites, but they couldn’t risk a ‚re.
    “Insects don’t have hemoglobin, either,” Ruth said, resuming their conversation from before. She was tenacious if nothing else, and Cam smiled to himself.
    “What does that mean?” he asked.
    “They don’t have iron in their blood like we do, and the plague uses both carbon and iron to build more of itself. That could give them a little more protection. It might confuse the nanotech.” Her good hand shrunk into a ‚st. “Places that get hotter than this must have been absolutely wiped out, though, Arizona and New Mexico and Texas. Large parts of the South.”
    “Yeah.” Cam thought of Asia and