This Plague of Days Season One (The Zombie Apocalypse Serial) Read Online Free PDF Page A

that we need to prepare for the worst and hope for the best. By the time we have enough information, it could be too late.”
    Theo crossed his arms and looked away. “I’m not disagreeing with you. I’m just saying we already used the vacation budget for this.”
    “If Cliff’s wrong and it all blows away, we’ll go camping this summer. It’ll be good for ’em. In the meantime, I need you to help me with the yard. I’ll get Anna out here, too, if I can drag her away from the phone.”
    He hesitated. “How much do you want to dig up?”
    “A rectangle, from the swing set to the edge of what used to be my flower bed.” The swing set sat in the middle of the large yard.  
    Theo whistled and put his hands on his hips the way he did when he was upset. “That’s a lot of square footage, Jack.”
    “We get awfully hungry. I’ve got a lot of unanswered questions and your brother’s got a lot of scary answers. He should know what he’s talking about.”  
    Jaimie watched his father’s healthy green colors slowly turn to that now familiar sour yellow, mixed with red.  
    “Are you with me?” Jack asked.
    “Of course,” he said.
    North Americans expected their doctors to have all the answers they needed when they needed them. They expected limitless supplies of all the basics and luxuries without end, too. They’d depended on technology and wealth for so long, North Americans had difficulty telling the difference between wants and needs. They had more illusions to lose, so they held on to them harder.
    That afternoon, Jaimie dug in the ground for the first time. He pulled worms out of the dark, brown soil and arranged them in a line for sorting by size. He counted them and wondered what worms think about. Anna complained a lot at first and then retreated into a stony silence that felt warm and pleasant, at least to Jaimie. It was those times that he felt closest to his sister. The depth of her silence met his own, though her colors flared red around her head and in the center of her chest.
    The family dug through the afternoon, overturning turf and softening the ground. Jack worked with a clawed hoe, Theo and Anna with spades and the boy with the small trowel. They broke the clumps of grass, taking turns with a new pick axe. After half an hour, they were all shiny and wet with effort. The backyard was the family’s first farm and the first time they had all worked together.
    Jack’s anger was a red that dulled to a blue-black bruise the harder she swung the pick. Anna stayed angry red. Theo was yellow but getting greener, like a lime.  
    The color around Jaimie’s hands went from purple to a deep violet. Jaimie decided later that those were the hues of his purest happiness.

Tomorrow's for the promises we'll fail to keep
    J aimie got out of bed and listened at the crack at the bottom of the door. His parents whispered back and forth, but he could hear his sister clearly. “How bad?…How long?” More urgent whispers. Anna stomped up the stairs, passed Jaimie’s bedroom and slammed her door.
    When Jaimie got up early the next morning, his parents were dressed in the same clothes from the night before. Both their laptops stood open on the dining room table and Jack had a pad of paper. Jaimie couldn’t read her scrawl, but Jaimie recognized the look of a list, each word or groups of words in a stack.
    “I’m taking the day off work,” Theo told Jaimie. “You come with me and you can push the cart and help carry things.”
    His mother looked to her husband, her face a question.  
    “He’s sixteen and strong,” Theo said. “We’ll take the van. Give me what you’ve got so far and we’ll go work on that. When Anna gets up, take the other car and fit what you can in it.”
    She nodded and ripped several pages off her pad. She held them out to him, but looked in his eyes and didn’t let go of the pages. “Who should I call?”
    “Call everyone in the family.”
    “Really?”
    “Everyone should