Second Wave Read Online Free PDF Page B

along the walls. His dark hair, formerly close-cut, was long and matted. He stank. There was much to drink in the kitchen but since he could not reach the villa’s generator from the kitchen or any of the places he had seen Khorii clear, he had not been able to reactivate the water pump.
    One corner of the room he had used as a toilet and in other areas he had vomited. Many times.
    Surprising the others, who regarded the sleeping thug with distaste, Jalonzo ignored the stench and knelt beside him, tapping him on the shoulder. “Hey, amigo, wake up.” When Marl grumbled, sputtered, and drooled but otherwise made no response, Jalonzo, who had organized care for plague victims in an auditorium full of his gaming friends and become used to the foulness of human illness, maneuvered Marl so that he could lift his shoulders, then nodded for the others to help him. Together, they hauled him out to the waiting shuttle.
    Khorii struggled with her conscience. She was supposed to rest so she could help with the search and rescue missions but really, she still felt fine, with lots of energy again and no signs of depletion of her horn’s power. The plague seemed to be absent from the areas she’d previously cleared, so she thought it would be no trick to decontaminate the rest of it. The mansion could serve as a center for rebuilding the area once survivors migrated this far. She didn’t want them to blunder back into the plague. Besides, she was curious to see if the plague still lingered in the other rooms. If it was gone there, too, and she could determine why, the contamination throughout the galaxy might be far less prolonged than they had dared hope.
    Her shipmates were dead set against her returning to the mansion.
    “You know the rules, Khorii,” Elviiz told her. “Every bit of cleansing work you do when you should be resting may mean one less sick person you can heal.”
    “But I hardly heal anyone on those missions, Elviiz!” she protested. “The teams are so afraid I’ll get so tired that I won’t be able see the plague anymore that they won’t let me do anything else. You can tell by looking at my horn that I’m fine. I really am. If survivors blunder into an area as contaminated as this one, they could start the plague all over again. And you know how it mutates.”
    She won, as she knew she would. Who was the one with the horn among them, after all? Who was the one who could see the plague? She was.
    Besides, she didn’t think she would be taxing her horn at all going back in there. If the plague was gone, she’d have spent none of her horn’s energy except maybe to make the place smell better.
    She didn’t win when she tried to persuade Elviiz to stay with the shuttle. He insisted that he come with her while the others returned to the Mana and secured Marl Fidd. Then the shuttle could return for Khorii and him. Khorii had to agree that this was a good plan. Although she hated to tell him everything since he already knew so much more than she did, his data-collecting capabilities would doubtlessly be helpful in trying to determine the various conditions in the atmosphere, aside from her horn’s power, that might have caused the plague to dissipate.
    They began a systematic search of the mansion. She had previously glimpsed bodies in some of three rooms, but although the stench from them remained, the plague was not in those rooms either. And except for the skeletons and a few scraps of flesh and clothing, plus quite a lot of very fat insects, little remained of the corpses. Khorii was glad of that.

    M eanwhile, having collected the data and samples she requested, Elviiz decontaminated the kitchen. The android activated the water pump without the aid of the larger generator and pulled what seemed like a vein from his leg, pulling and pulling until it reached the required length, attached it to the faucet of the lake-sized sinks, and sprayed down the floor. It was made of a solid sheet of granite aggregate