Plagued: Book 1 Read Online Free PDF

awhile, which is fine by me.”
    She expected a rebuke from her aunt. Kara was her only sibling and sisters are supposed to love each other.
    Instead, her aunt sighed. “She is an egotistical pain in the butt. It's not just me, right?”
    “Totally!” Sky agreed.
    Captain Kara Christensen was much too busy with her ambitions to be bothered engaging in casual chats with her little sister. At twenty, she was one of the youngest Captains in the regiment and the girl planned on making major before she was thirty. She certainly looked the part. Tall, blond, with striking good looks, long legs, and perfect proportions. It wasn't that Sky didn't love her, she did. Only Kara loved herself a lot more. When Mom – her personal cheering squad – wasn't around, Kara had little interest in coming home. Apparently Sky's ego-massaging skills were inadequate.
    Maybe if they'd had similar interests it would have been different. Sky thought of herself as an introverted-extrovert or an extroverted-introvert depending on the day. She needed just a couple of close friends, video games, music, movies, and at least one TV series to fixate on and she was a happy girl.
    Kara was exhaustingly social. Zeroing in on how each person could serve her needs. Connections, not companions. At least that was Sky's take on it.
    Kara didn't need Sky and she didn't need Kara, and Sky was okay with that.
    In fact, all she really wanted to think about right now was the very delicious Hugo St. James.

Chapter 4
    Blood check
    “ Rebuild. Repopulate. Renew! For you, and you and you.. .”
    The public service billboard at the school bus stop sang cheerfully as the students triggered the motion activated sensor and the disinfectant fan blew everyone out the doors. The jingle followed Skylar along the sidewalk to the school entrance.
    “Rebuild. Repopulate. Renew,” resonated deeply for most Negatives. Especially re-populate. Birthrates had plummeted for other blood types. So many people didn't want to bring babies into the world since fifty percent wouldn't reach their fifth birthday and another twenty-five percent after that could be gone by high school. Not very inspiring odds. She had forty people in her eleventh-grade class. The biggest class in nearly ten years, the teachers said. They were proud of those numbers. There were only eighteen in the senior class, one year ahead of her. Half of them Negatives.
    Palo Alto had been lucky. Not only for Negatives. The transfusion technology keeping Positives alive was pioneered at University Hospital nearby and perfected in labs around Silicon Valley. Early successes from control groups kept many survivors clustered in the area. Though that wasn't the only reason people migrated there.
    Silicon Valley had remained relatively calm and civilized -- beyond the flash of violence during the PharmCon riots – throughout the plagues. The area had a highly educated, ambitious demographic that had no desire to see chaos take over. Technology was not so labor intensive, so manpower was diverted towards farms in the vast San Fernando and San Joaquin valleys during the worst of the die-offs. The military maintained a calm and democratic presence for much of this part of the state. For the few years that federal control was only sporadic, they worked with town councils constructing centralized warehousing of non-perishables from the superstores and separate warehouses for cold storage to conserve power. Corporations were in no position to protest this sudden shift from capitalism to socialism since no one knew if civilization would even survive.
    Working on an even/odd system of social security numbers, teams were organized for both harvesting and supply chain logistics all year round. An equitable system of rationing-- volunteering meant you earned points – kept real hunger rare in northern California, unlike so many other states.
    Everyone knew the Bay Area was better off than LA. That city burned for years. Sky had seen