Year One by Nora Roberts Read Free Book Online Page A

can phone my cell, it’s still working. I need to know how you are. Any information from you and your location. I’m really getting worried.Melly, if you get this, please, please, go check on my parents. I hope you and yours are well. Arlys.
    She hit send and, because there was nothing else she could do, locked it in a corner of her mind and got to work.
    She brought up The New York Times , The Washington Post . Reports had thinned, but she could still dig out some meat.
    The former Secretary of State—now president, through the line of succession—spoke by videoconference with the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the current head of the CDC (the former had died on day nine of the pandemic), and the newly appointed head of the WHO. Elizabeth Morrelli succeeded Carlson Track, who succumbed to illness. Questions regarding the details of Dr. Track’s death had not been answered.
    Arlys noted that Morrelli issued a statement claiming that through global efforts, a new vaccine to combat H5N1-X should be ready for distribution within a week.
    â€œFunny, that’s what Track said ten days ago. Bullshit in a hermetically sealed bunker is still bullshit.”
    She read about a group of people hoarding food, water, and supplies in an elementary school in Queens firing on others who tried to break in.
    Five dead, including a woman carrying a ten-month-old baby.
    On the other end of the spectrum, a church in the Maryland suburbs was handing out blankets, MREs, candles, batteries, and other basics.
    Reports of murders, suicides, rapes, maimings. And a scattering of reports on heroism and simple kindnesses.
    Of course, there were the lunacy reports of people claiming to have seen creatures with luminous wings flying around. Or of a man impaling another man with flaming darts shot out of his fingertips.
    She read reports of the military transporting volunteers believedto be immune to secured facilities for testing. Where are they? she wondered. And quarantines of entire communities, mass burials, blockades, a firebomb hurled onto the White House lawn.
    The fanatical preacher Reverend Jeremiah White, who claimed the pandemic to be God’s wrath on a godless world and proclaimed the virtuous would survive only by vanquishing the wicked.
    â€œThey walk among us,” was his latest cry, “but they are not as us. They are as from hell, and must be driven back to the fire!”
    Arlys made notes, checked other sites. More going dark every day, she thought as she surfed.
    Checking her watch, she brought up Skype to connect with a source she trusted more than any other.
    He gave her his rubbery grin when he came on-screen. His hair sprang everywhere at once, a Billy Idol white slick around his pleasantly goofy face.
    â€œHey, Chuck.”
    â€œHey, Awesome Arlys! Still five-by-five?”
    â€œYeah, and you?”
    â€œHealthy, wealthy, and wise. Did you lose any more?”
    â€œI don’t know yet. I haven’t seen anyone else this morning. Bob Barrett’s still not showing up. Lorraine Marsh lost it yesterday.”
    â€œYeah, saw that.”
    â€œI’ll pick up her afternoon report because I don’t see her coming back. We’ve still got some crew. Carol’s in the booth, and Jim Clayton’s been coming in every day for the last ten or so. It’s pretty surreal when the head of broadcasting shows up to pick up as gaffer or whatever needs filling in. And Little Fred’s still stocking the commissary, writing some copy, playing gofer, doing some on-air.”
    â€œShe’s totally cute. Why don’t you set me up with her?”
    â€œHappy to. Give me your address and I’ll bring her right to you.”
    He gave her that grin again. “Wish I could, but the walls haveears. The fucking air has them. Your friendly neighborhood hacker needs his Batcave.”
    â€œBatman wasn’t friendly, he was a brilliant psycho. And Spider-Man didn’t