Read Online Cryonic by Travis Bradberry - Free Book Online Page A

with late-morning traffic. As we waited to cross One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, I watched the morning commuters making their way to their destinations and began to feel as if I was in China. Everyone behind the wheel of a car was Asian.
    Alex led me to the third floor of an ancient brownstone with cracked walls and a weathered, dilapidated front door. Alex’s apartment was a reflection of himself. It was uncomplicated, carefully organized, and sparsely decorated.
    I leaned against the back of a sagging maroon couch.
    â€œHow’d you know they were going to seal off the building like that?”
    â€œOh. I’ve seen that happen a thousand times.”
    I gulped. I read too many comic books as a kid, and my mind flooded with horrific images of futuristic societies where all hell has broken loose.
    â€œReally? A thousand times before? People attacking each other and all that?”
    â€œFor heaven’s sake, no. I’ve never seen anything like that . I meant the quarantine. The government is always putting up quarantines—buildings, city blocks, even entire cities at times. A lot of the warfare these days is biological. You have two sides that want each other’s territory and, by and large, they want it intact. Especially here. The Chinese government has weaved their operations into the city. They keep us Americans living here working for them, which keeps the US military from destroying the city. I don’t know if they’d be willing to take out New York anyway, but at some point I’d bet they would do it if it would help them to get the country back. With a couple million civilians still living here it takes wiping the city out off the table.”
    â€œSo they’ll kill us with germs instead?”
    â€œSome of us, I suppose. They’re constantly making biological attacks against the Chinese military and government institutions. Problem is, the Chinese are really good at isolating the outbreak and treating the infected. Their medicine is so advanced that the casualties tend to be very low. Bombing has killed more civilians on this side than bio warfare.”
    â€œThat thing, you know, the,” I hissed and made claws and fangs at Alex, “that Barry, Elliott, and Janet got, was that from a biological attack?”
    â€œNo, definitely not. The doctors isolated the origin virus. It was human polyomavirus, JCV.”
    â€œWhat is that?”
    â€œWe all have it, actually. Children get it from their parents. But something about the reanimation process caused the JCV to mutate radically in those three. Up until the last moment, the doctors thought they were dealing with a variola virus.”
    â€œA what?”
    â€œYou know, like smallpox. When they were trying to make sense of Elliott, they finally realized that it wasn’t a variola after all. It was the JCV, but it had mutated so much that they hardly recognized it.”
    I didn’t understand everything Alex was saying, but one thing was clear—just like the other cryonics, I had all the ingredients for the super virus. Thinking about coming down with their illness made me paranoid. I began to feel warm and clammy like I was coming down with a fever, but I chocked it up to hypochondriasis.
    â€œSo does that mean I have it?”
    â€œI don’t know. You didn’t have the mutation in your preliminary exams, but neither did the others. It mutated so quickly. They were talking about testing you when all hell broke loose.”
    â€œWhat was up with that anyway? How come the doctors thought Elliott was dead when he wasn’t?”
    â€œHe was dead.”
    â€œHe was ? He didn’t look dead to me. I’d say he was pretty alive and hungry when he was having Dr. Feng for breakfast.”
    â€œI know, I know. That’s what was so strange. In the beginning he was breathing, but his oxygen levels keptdropping as if he wasn’t. His lungs weren’t even obstructed,