Read Online A Flock of Ill Omens by Hart Johnson - Free Book Online Page B

you don't get that job back, you can get another one. Nurses are always needed.”
    “But with crap hours. I don't want to start over.” Sarah had hated her years of nights.
    “It's not worth it,” David said. “I mean, I know it's a small number, but we've heard too many cases of getting it after the vaccine and no cases of not getting it after the vaccine.”
    “One,” Sid said.
    Instead of asking what Sid meant, she asked for hope. “No luck reaching your brother?”
    “Not yet.”
    Sid tried him again, then took her laptop up to her room. Sarah followed her and stood in Sid's doorway as Sid dug for an address book, then used her computer access to dial what Sarah figured was Jeff''s house phone. She thought Sid was calling through the computer for her benefit, so they could both hear.
    It was answered with a groan.
    “Jeff?” Sid said.
    “Nuh.”
    “Pierre?”
    “Yuh.”
    He sounded worse than Grant did.
    “Pierre, this is Sidney. Jeff's sister. Do you have the flu?”
    “Yuh.”
    “Is Jeff there? Does he have it?”
    “Nuh.”
    Sarah looked at her and Sid shrugged. She'd asked a double question and they didn't know which one he'd answered. “He's not there?”
    “Nuh.”
    “I can't get him at work.”
    “Luckdun.”
    “Luckdun? Oh! Lockdown? For the virus?”
    “Yuh.”
    “Holy crap! They locked the CDC down?”
    He mumbled something incoherent. An explanation of some sort, but Sarah could tell it was wearing him out to talk. Sid let him go.
    “Take care of yourself. Wait! Did you have the vaccine?”
    “Nuh.”
    “Okay—that's helpful. Thank you!”
    She hung up and took a deep breath.
    “What, exactly, does a lockdown at the CDC mean?” Sarah asked.
    “It can't be good news. I wonder if this is confidential. Pierre probably only told me because he was delirious.”
    Sid searched on the internet while Sarah stood watching her, feeling like a broken appliance. Sid didn't seem to be having much luck. Finally, when she'd tried a number of options, she leaned back. “I'm not finding anything about the CDC or what they're doing. Certainly nothing about a lockdown. Where the hell is this information?”
     

1.8. Matt Jacobs:
    Tallahassee, Florida
    Dead Men Can Multiply
     
    The headquarters of the Kraken made the headquarters of Eagle Corp look like the fucking Pentagon. There was a biker bar in Tallahassee, and if you went past the bathroom to a broom closet, there was a flight of stairs at the back that led to a locked door. If you knew the fuse box next to it was actually an access pad and intercom, you didn't need a key—provided somebody inside knew who you were and believed you had any business being there.
    Matt had done a handful of jobs with men from Kraken in the last few years. Enough that one of his two remaining friends, Brian Craig, worked for them, along with a dozen friendly acquaintances.
    He drank a beer at the bar for the sake of appearances, and then headed toward the bathroom. When he was sure nobody was watching, he ducked down the passage and into the closet with the staircase. Inside the fuse box he pushed the red button that should have been the intercom. Nobody answered.
    He and Craig had gotten drunk together once while they waited to be picked up from an assassination attempt in Pakistan. The target hadn't been there, and since he and Craig weren't in direct danger, they'd been low priority for retrieval. They'd both sworn about being low-priority soldiers, but Matt figured Craig was as content to have the down-time as he was.
    While they waited, they'd joked about things they thought would never matter, including their commanders' quirks, which for Craig included a passcode tendency based on the board game Monopoly. The man had memory issues, but figured if they rounded the board, a new property every month, along with the price to get a number into the formula, people with bad memories or who had been away for a while could figure it out.
    Two years ago, plus or