Plague Town Read Online Free Page B

fiddle for two weeks now, it was something I planned to exploit mercilessly as soon as he returned. But while I was a little concerned about Zara, I pretty much assumed she’d get over it, like I had.
    Still, I’d keep an eye on her.
    Speaking of sickness and death , I mused, I’m going to be late for Pandemics if I don’t leave right away. So I grabbed my bag and dashed out the door.
    There was only one other person in line at the coffee kiosk; an androgynous-looking hipster with a pixie cut, American Outfitters hoodie, and distressed jeans tucked into L.L. Bean boots. The smell of cloves tipped me off to his cigarette even before he raised it to his mouth for a long inhale.
    He started hacking right after the puff, a deep, rattling cough that made me step back a foot. I didn’t think I could catch Walker’s again, but still...
    While I waited for the girl in the kiosk to make the hipster’s foamy double extra-hot vanilla latte, I looked around. There were surprisingly few people, given that the outbreak had been going on for more than a month.
    But we had to be in the home stretch. Hopefully by the next week most of them would be back, and the campus would return to its usual beehive of activity. I hoped so, ’Cause for the moment it resembled a ghost town.
    I ordered my usual double cappuccino and blueberry muffin.
    “Is it just me, or is it even deader than usual today?” I commented.
    The girl tamped down two shots of espresso with an expert hand.
    “It’s crazy dead today. You’re, like, my fifth customer this morning. Normally we have a total mad rush by eight.” Frothing the non-fat milk, she made my cappuccino as automatically as a robot would. Android barista .
    “Weird,” I said. “I mean, I know a lot of people have been sick the last couple weeks, but you’d think they’d be back in class by now.”
    She handed me my cap.
    “I heard the ER’s still hopping.”
    “Seriously?”
    She nodded, using tongs to pull a fat streusel-encrusted blueberry muffin out of the case. I tried not to drool.
    “Yup,” she added. “And from what I’ve heard, some people have been getting kind of crazy.”
    “Crazy like how?”
    She shrugged, putting the bag on the counter.
    “Fights and stuff. Really sick people attacking folks in the hospital and on the street.”
    “Wow.”
    “Yeah.”
    “I haven’t heard any of this stuff.”
    She glanced around, then leaned closer.
    “My brother works for the Redwood Grove PD. He says it’s no big deal, but the cops are trying to keep it quiet so people don’t freak out.”
    My turn to nod.
    “Yeah, I can see why they wouldn’t want to have that getting around.” Forking over four fifty, I stuffed a buck in the tip jar and headed to D.B. Patterson Hall, dodging a gaggle of grim-faced ROTC types in full-on military gearjogging across the grass in front of the student union.
    Be all that you can be, and all that.
    I hoped Gabriel was back today. I couldn’t wait to ask him how his diet of fruit, nuts, soy and whole grain had worked out for him.
    Granted, our student-TA relationship had improved since that contentious first day, but we still sniped at each other. His sanctimonious attitude definitely brought out the worst in me. And if I behaved badly... well, he started it.
    I made it to room 217 at five minutes before eight, plenty of time to have my pick of seats. From the look of things, I probably could have arrived at eight-thirty and still picked a seat pretty much wherever I wanted. The classroom was only half full.
    Jamie—whom I still thought of as Miss Hot Topic—stood in Gabriel’s usual spot at the lectern, getting the projector set and doing whatever else Gabriel did to make himself feel important before class
    Meow .
    She looked up at the sound of the door creaking, but when she saw it was me, she went back to her work without acknowledging my presence.
    Jamie did not like me. I’d figured this out after three consecutive classes where my