Ultraviolet Read Online Free PDF Page A

barbed wire remained.
    Ready.
    Waiting.
    Because there were still plenty more of the Hemophages—
vampires—
on the outside. The number of infected had gone from a few thousand to tens of thousands, so they weren’t gathered up all that easily or quickly. As for themselves, the Hemophages saw the proverbial writing on the wall . . . they saw their
fate.
And when that same fate had seen fit to take your life and reduce it to only ten years, why would any intelligent man or woman simply stand passively and let the government—or anyone else—steal away what little you had left?
    The Hemophages had one chance, and they took it. They went underground, melting easily into the darkness their uninfected brothers and sisters now abhorred. It wasn’t as though the night as a subculture didn’t already exist anyway—the goth clubs, the nightclubs, the entire economy of those who had already preferred the starlight to the daylight, who hated the sound of an alarm clock in the morning and the morning to night routine. Besides, they were tired of the looks of loathing, the sneers of aversion, and the snide comments—how easy it was to simply take the H.P.V. armbands off in private and be rid of them. Those same armbands began turning up in waste facilities around the world at the same time the number of newly infected registrations dropped drastically—they would not be singled out anymore. They would not be discriminated against and despised. They would not be secretly . . . or openly . . .
exterminated.
    They began fighting back.
    There were open battles on the street, with H.P.V. victims blatantly ignoring police orders and the police retaliating by trying to take them with force. Seemingly overnight the cities were filled with blood. With
infection.
The virus went from a blood-borne pathogen to something that could be caught from nearly anything, and the people of the world went from free to prisoners of their own paranoia. Fashion was lost in favor of head-to-toe anticontamination suits, vanity was sacrificed for the sake of breathing masks. Beauty disappeared behind a shield of safety that turned out to be faulty. Everything changed.
    It was the age of contagion, and the great uninfected masses weren’t pleased with the new, uncompliant breed of disease carrier. Things went from bad to worse really,
really
fast. A new unit of governmental and military control was invented almost overnight; called the Special Hazards Teams, they went through the ranks of the registered Hemophages and eliminated them, sometimes at home, sometimes in public—
    The middle-aged woman forces herself out of the hospital bed only because her doctor demands she walk daily on the hip he worked so hard at reconstructing four days ago. She used to be a dancer and while the degenerative arthritis took that career, she’s found new purpose in teaching the skills she spent her life learning. The walking hurts, a lot, but she forgets the pain when the door to her hospital room crashes open and four heavily armed men clad completely in black stamp inside. They’re wearing a kind of uniform she’s never seen before, with red biohazard symbols on one sleeve and a strange logo with a styled “SH” on the other. Her pulse jumps but there is nowhere to run to, nothing to do but face them and see what happens.
    She’s closed the blinds because her eyes are so sensitive, but she can still see the lead man point a weapon at her, something long and dark and heavy. The kids to whom she teaches class are at the elementary school level, first grade, so she has no idea what kind of a gun it is. “Are you Elizabeth P. Watkins?” one of them demands in a voice that’s probably loud enough to be heard all the way down at the nurses’ station. It’s so sadly clear that they know she has H.P.V., but perhaps he thinks her deaf, too.
    She blinks and tries to think of a way to stall, a way to reason with the insanity that this soldier represents. “I . .