Read Online Code Orange by Caroline M. Cooney - Free Book Online Page A

before he could do anything?
    Perhaps there were still things to learn from those scabs, in which case some scientist or physician would love to have a look at Mitty's variola major remains. I could go one better than some lousy interview like Nate's, Mitty thought. I'm the owner, so I can make those scientists beg and plead.
    Maybe he would design a Web site. He'd call it Got Scabs. That would attract some attention. Probably notfrom the right people, though, because that was the thing about the Internet; the wrong people were there too.
    Derek had Web sites of his own and would definitely help design Got Scabs or even take over the whole project. But no matter how much work Derek did, it would still mean work for Mitty, and so Mitty rejected the idea.
    He jogged across Central Park, passing the softball diamonds with their tattered winter look and the carousel building, shuttered and sad. He cut across traffic near the Plaza Hotel, where even in this weather a few tough horses were giving carriage rides.
    He had never taken the tram ride to Roosevelt Island even though he always meant to, because in
Spider-Man
, there was a great scene involving the tram.
    The tram was waiting on its platform. When it was docked, there was nothing exciting about it. Mitty swiped his MetroCard and boarded. Gloomily, he perceived that there was going to be nothing exciting anyway. It was just a box with windows on a cable. Besides,
Spider-Man
had been filmed at night, when anything could be made mysterious.
    A lot of the other riders knew each other, the population of Roosevelt being pretty small. There were mothers with strollers, shoppers with bags, old guys looking mournful, and four little boys who, if they were with a grown-up, were ignoring that person. There was a dramatic mix of races. Probably because the United Nations building was across the river from the island, so UN people were likely to think of living on Roosevelt Island, whereas regular people cringed at the thought of being forced to live off Manhattan.
    The tram moved slowly and without bumps. For a minute, Mitty had an outstanding view in all directions. He looked down at the rough currents of the East River and the heavy car traffic on the Queensborough Bridge and then they were down. Everyone else got on a little bus, so Mitty did too. Roosevelt Island faced a boring part of Manhattan. Mitty had not known there was such a thing.
    He went into what looked like the only grocery store in town to buy some Advil and a bottle of water. He was beginning to worry about the number of headaches he was having. The clerk told him where to find the smallpox hospital ruins on the southern tip of the island.
    Mitty walked back, passing the tram station and then a long-term hospital still in use, with that hunkered-down look of institutions in winter. Cars were parked everywhere, which puzzled him until he realized that from the other direction, Queens, there must be a car bridge. Roosevelt had exactly one road, the island being too skinny to fit two roads, and not a single car was being driven. Not a single person was walking either, although it was so cold, it might just have been that everybody except Mitty had a brain.
    The pedestrian path along the East River came to a sudden eerie halt at an extraordinarily high chain-link fence topped with rolls of slicing wire. Bolted to the fence were huge NO TRESPASSING signs. There was even a call box in case you needed cops.
    The smallpox hospital ruins were kept behind
this
? They didn't even want people near the
building? After all these years
?
    Mitty took another Advil. So the CDC could say what itwanted, but in real life, New York City didn't want human beings touching the very walls where smallpox had once lived.
    The last case in the United States had been in 1949. Was New York City still worried, almost six decades later?
    Then he saw that there was a door in the fence— padlocked
open
. Mitty was disappointed, having hoped to test