Read Online Scourge - A Medical Thriller (The Plague Trilogy Book 3) by Victor Methos - Free Book Online Page A

any given time. Four of those people are dead. I’m the fifth.’
    “Luther tossed the used paper towel into the garbage. ‘Then it had to have come from Russia. Sam… whoever released this, unless they were suicidal, must’ve prepared for it. They had to have engineered a vaccine and a cure. They’d be insane not to. Otherwise they were signing their death warrants, too.’
    “ ‘There’s plenty of people who would kill themselves to bring about the end of the world.’
    “ Luther shook his head and said, ‘Yeah, but not every one of those people would have the money, the knowledge, the facilities, or the patience to engineer a virus like this. This had to be a nation. And if it was a nation, they developed a vaccine and a cure. They wouldn’t condemn their own people to this.’
    “His reasoning was sound except for one thing: human being s weren’t rational, not all the time. That’s why economics could never be a real science. The fundamental basis of all economics is that people act in their rational self-interest. That’s why economists can’t predict anything. They don’t realize how much we really are ruled by emotions. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I disagree. I think they would risk it.’
    “ He stood up and walked to the door, peeking outside. ‘We have to try,’ he said.
    “The possibilities of what to do next were limited. I had thought the best course would be to hide out in my house or maybe somewhere with sunshine. Spend my last days in a place near the ocean where I could watch the surf and lie under a blue sky. But then I looked at Jessica. I saw her youth and the terror in her eyes. She didn’t want to die. She didn’t think it was a way to bypass the horror the world was about to face. For her, the only thing left was to fight. So for her, I had to fight, too. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘We’ll go to the lab.’ ”

6
     
     
     
     
    Samantha waited a beat, lost in thought, before continuing. “Sneaking out of the parking garage wasn’t difficult. All the infected were up in the parking lot outside or in the building itself. Under cover of darkness, we ran up the ramp into the open street and then down the sidewalk. Our car was gone, but we thought we might be able to convince a military patrol to give us a ride to the airport.
    “The streets had an eerie calm to them , or maybe they appeared calm because of the chaos we’d just seen. You could hear every piece of trash flutter in the breeze, every cricket, every plane that drifted by overhead, and there were a lot of planes, both military and civilian.
    “As I watched Jessica, I considered telling her about our infection —that the virus was dormant inside us but that when it was triggered, it would turn us into one of those… things. I knew she would want me to—she’d want the truth—but I just couldn’t do it. So little of her childhood remained that I didn’t want to take anything that was left by telling her that, so I didn’t tell her. I didn’t even discuss it with Luther. I didn’t ask him how long the antibody test indicated I’d been infected. In South America, during the initial outbreak, I dealt with a canister that I believed at the time had released the smallpox virus. The canister later showed no Variola . But as we walked down the darkened streets, I knew then what had been in the canister: the real plague, the one meant to bring the world to its knees. That left the question of why I hadn’t displayed symptoms yet but Eric and Ryan had. I wondered if I had received a more docile and slow-moving version of the virus, one that took years to incubate rather than months. And that made me wonder which form Jessica had.
    “ ‘The detonations,’ Luther said, ‘the green clouds. You told me once that Variola could be turned into a mist. Is that what they did? Turned it into a mist to be carried on the breeze?’
    “ I shook my head, making sure I took a couple of steps away from Jessica so she couldn’t hear