Free - - End of All Things, The by Lissa Bryan Page A

wound up having to pick him up and plunk him down in the boat beside Carly. She felt Sam tremble a little, so she sat down on the deck beside him after strapping a child-sized life jacket around his torso.
    It was nearly one hundred miles to Haines, so Carly opened up one of the paperbacks she’d taken with her as Justin pulled ropes and rigged the sails. She wished she could have brought her e-reader, which had contained thousands of books, but she doubted she’d have been able to charge it. Like her other things, she would rather leave it in her home than have to abandon it later.
    Justin glanced down at her. “Whatcha reading?”
    “Thomas Pynchon’s Mason-Dixon .”
    Justin whistled. “I could never get into Pynchon. Too dense for me.”
    “He takes some getting used to,” Carly said with a nod, and from there, they launched into a pleasant chat about their favorite books and authors. He confessed a love for Wuthering Heights , and Carly admitted a weakness for Dean Koontz. It was a fun conversation until the thought hit her there wouldn’t be any more Dean Koontz novels. No more books, no more movies, no more music. All of it was gone, and she still didn’t know why this awful thing had happened.
    “Justin, did you ever hear anything from your sources about what caused the Infection?”
    “No. As far as I know, no one ever knew. If the government knew anything about it, they weren’t talking. I suppose we were just . . . due.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Humanity hasn’t had a widespread plague since 1918. Before that, before the CDC, we used to have them with relative regularity. The Black Death, yellow fever, smallpox, typhoid, cholera . . . Things you don’t see in developed nations any longer because of our hygiene, inoculations, and the swift response of the CDC and the WHO when outbreaks occurred. But this one was so insidious. The incubation period was so long . . . People infected hundreds of others before they even knew they were sick. This was no ordinary virus. The lethality rate alone tells me it wasn’t something natural.”
    “What else could it be?” 
    “Something weaponized.” Justin’s expression was grim. 
    “Created in a lab? Someone made this evil thing intentionally ?” Carly slumped in her seat, stunned and sickened someone could have done such a thing.
    Justin hesitated when he saw her reaction, but he answered truthfully, and for that, she was grateful. “I think so, yes.”
    “And what, it got loose or something? Someone spilled a test tube of it?”
    Justin shook his head. “Paris, London, Beijing, New Delhi, Moscow, Osaka, São Paulo . . . My contacts reported almost simultaneous outbreaks. It was intentionally released in the most populous cities all over the world.”
    “Terrorists?”
    “Perhaps.”
    “Are we immune?”
    “It seems that way. You took care of your parents while they were sick. If you weren’t immune, you should have caught it for certain from sustained close contact. But even if we’re immune, we could be carriers.”
    “Like Typhoid Mary?”
    Justin nodded. “It’s possible. There’s no way for us to know for sure at this point.”
    “Were you around any sick people?”
    “I was camping when the Crisis hit. I stayed out in the woods until . . . until it was over, but if I wasn’t immune, I should have caught it as soon as I came into the city. There were still Infected wandering around. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the virus lingered in the environment, perhaps in the water supply or even in the air itself.”
    “I thought viruses died fast if they didn’t have a host.”
    Justin shrugged. “Some do. Others can survive outside a host for days, even weeks, in some cases. If they made a weaponized virus, they’d ensure it was able to survive for long periods outside the body.”
    “Only two survivors out of over thirty thousand people in Juneau,” Carly mused. 
    “There may have been others. We don’t