Read Online Chimera (Parasitology) by Mira Grant - Free Book Online Page B

wasn’t an entirely bad place. There were people like Paul and Carrie. I’d liked them when I met them on the truck, and after living with them for a week and a half, I trusted them as much as I was capable of trusting outside of Dr. Cale’s lab. But there were also people like John, who’d been squatting in the house when USAMRIID dropped us off and told us that this was our home now. He’d tried to do… things… to several of the women who were living with us, until Paul threatened to stab him. He’d been brave when faced with unarmed women. He wasn’t so brave when up against Paul, who was a foot taller and thirty pounds heavier. John had run, vanishing into the fenced-off streets of Pleasanton.
    There were good people in the quarantine zone, but they were in the minority. There were killers in here. There were thieves. There were people whose minds had snapped under the pressure of what was happening to the world, dropping them into endless spirals of panic and despair. They needed professionalhelp, therapy, and oversight, but what they got was a quarter or less of a bedroom in someone else’s home, with a bunch of strangers sleeping around them and claiming to be friends. It was no wonder that some people started screaming and never stopped.
    It was more of a wonder that the rest of us were so quiet.
    Something smashed outside. The screaming finally stopped. I resisted the urge to move to the window and look out. Having a window wasn’t a privilege. It was a burden at best, and a punishment at worst. The USAMRIID teams that had prepared this area for us had taken down all the curtains and blinds in open houses, citing the need to have a clean line of sight if something happened—and we all understood that “something” was code for “a sleepwalker outbreak.” The people who slept in windowless rooms, or on the other side of rooms like mine, could hang blankets and give themselves the illusion of privacy. Not me. I got the pleasure of sharing my life with anyone who wanted to stand on the opposite sidewalk and look up, and when things went wrong, I was one of the people who were expected to man the window and keep everyone else up-to-date. The only good thing about it was airflow, but most days, none of us were brave enough to open the windows. We didn’t want to attract attention.
    Inside the Pleasanton quarantine facility, attracting attention from the all-too-human monsters surrounding us was death. Maybe not immediately, maybe not even overnight, but soon enough that none of us were willing to take the risk.
    There was a sound behind me. I turned to find Carrie standing in the doorway, twisting a dishrag in her hands like it had done something to personally offend her. She had lost weight since arriving in Pleasanton, and her hair was growing out, revealing brown roots under the artificial green of her hair. It was a small thing, but it seemed indicative of the tragedy unfolding around us. People were going to bed hungry and afraid; thewater ran red with rust sometimes, like we were expected to bathe ourselves in blood; the government that was supposed to protect us had turned against us, just like the genetically engineered tapeworms that were supposed to protect humanity had turned against their creators; and Carrie couldn’t re-dye her hair.
    Maybe that was the most human thing about me. Even in the depths of tragedy, I could find the smallest things to seize upon.
    “What’s wrong?” I asked.
    Carrie shook her head. The motion was tight and controlled, designed to make her look as inoffensive as possible. She had started shaking her head like that sometime in the past week, and I didn’t even think she knew that she was doing it. It was just another small piece of protective coloration, and unless she held to it religiously, she wasn’t going to survive in here. None of us were.
    “Paul hasn’t come back yet.”
    I blinked at her for a moment, absorbing the meaning behind her words. They