Immunity Index by Sue Burke (best fiction books of all time txt) 📗

room (right above mine!) filled with soldiers and civilians looking at data with grim faces. Someone started sneezing, but no one seemed concerned. The attenuated virus circulated freely in that room. For all my rancor, I was glad of it.

Irene pretended that the commotion had woken her up, although she’d been lying and thinking for a long time about ways to break open the prison. She had no contacts in the mutiny. Mamá had tried too hard to shelter her. And now she couldn’t help Mamá.

All the lights in the house had come on, and Ruby and Will rushed out.

“I’m worried,” she shouted.

“I’ll drop you off and come right back,” he said.

Worried about what? Something at the prison? She checked the news on her phone yet again. She could get the official reports, but so many other channels had been shut down that she could get little else besides a weather report and some music and entertainment that was heavily vetted. Officially nothing unusual was happening. She knew from her mother’s artwork that empty space in a composition could tell the viewer something important. A news blackout means there’s news.

She slipped out of the sleeping bag. Sunrise was about to break, but for now, she was alone. In the house, she tried the main screen in the living room, although she felt like a trespasser. Maybe the problem was just with her phone and there was more news available. The screen had been left on, unlocked, but no, she couldn’t access more there, either.

Crickets still chirped outside, and Will’s dog barked a couple of times. Otherwise, all was silent. She had never felt so alone and useless. Ruby was right to hate living in the country. Alan coughed upstairs. No, she wasn’t alone, she was in enemy territory.

She could at least eat breakfast—but after she looked at her choices in the kitchen, she decided that she was too upset to eat.

Will returned. He walked into the kitchen and looked scared. “I need you to do something. Wait here.”

He never gave orders. Something strange was happening. He and Alan talked upstairs, muffled voices audible even in the kitchen, and Alan was coughing far too much. They talked for a while. Finally, Will came down, looking at his phone.

“My dad’s sick.” His voice was thin and shaky. “I’ve contacted the insurance and they asked about symptoms, and look at this message.” He held out his display. “There’s a special prescription for people with that kind of cold, a special antiviral.”

Cold? “What kind of symptoms?” She tried to sound curious, not suspicious.

“Cough. Rash. Fever. He can barely walk.”

“I’ve never heard of a rash with a cold.” But she knew very little about Sino—the delta cold—except that it killed people fast.

“Me neither. He’s really sick. Go to the pharmacy. The order’s waiting. Hurry.”

She didn’t like being ordered around, but she said yes. If it wasn’t delta, it was still very bad. And it might be contagious, and she could die. She took the ID card and dashed out. The truck could drive itself. The card sent the address of the pharmacy to the controls, and the truck pulled out onto the county road.

The route wouldn’t take her past the prison, but she could alter the route for the return trip. She looked at the farms she passed, mostly corporate, which resembled factories in the middle of fields of corn or soybeans, quiet and dark. No one lived at those operations besides animals, and the fields were tended by robot farm equipment. Homes were tucked here and there between the fields, some with lights on, some of them even more dilapidated than the mammoth farm. Her phone still yielded nothing useful, but she couldn’t stop searching.

She called a woman who had once been Mamá’s assistant. Her phone didn’t respond, not even to acknowledge a message. She called a friend who’d stayed on at the university for graduate studies. No response. Damn! She drew her hand back to throw down her phone, and caught herself just in time. The last thing she needed was a broken phone. It would be satisfying to break something, though.

A long line of cars and trucks waited at the pharmacy’s drive-through window. A lot of people must be sick. She considered parking and walking in, then saw a handwritten sign on the door: CLOSED TO FOOT TRAFFIC. If it wasn’t the delta cold, what was it? She had a thought too horrible to be possible: What if the government knew about the mutiny and released an epidemic to make it not happen? No, that couldn’t be true. Not even the Prez was that evil. Or stupid, since a lot of his backers lived around Wausau—Alan, for example—and they were getting sick. But Cal had been coughing, too. Diseases didn’t care who they got sick, and Cal had been arguing with Mamá after that.…

No matter what was happening, she’d feel less scared if she knew what it was.

The line moved quickly. At the window, she showed Alan’s card to someone in a face mask, and she got a little white paper bag. As the truck rolled ahead, she looked inside: a tiny sealed vial of eye drops and a big brochure, along with a mask and a pair of blue nitrile gloves.

She looked back at the line waiting for medicine. She’d heard complaints that the government had utterly insufficient preparations for the delta cold, and if so, the pharmacy might run out soon. Then what? She read the brochure. The eye drops contained an antiviral medicine with a long name that should be given to everyone ill or exposed as soon as possible, a maximum of two days. Exposed to what? In any case, she’d been exposed to it, but for how long?

The truck drove at the stodgy speed limit along the new route she’d entered. She considered opening the vial despite the seal, but Will would let her have some for sure. The family obeyed the rules, and the brochure