Free The Parasite War by Tim Sullivan

building," said Flash. "That's the armory."
    " The armory! " Jo cried.
    "Quiet, Jo," Alex said anxiously. "You want them to hear us?"
    "They're too far away, aren't they?" she whispered.
    "I don't know. You really want to chance it?"
    "I see your point."
    They withdrew, retracing their path and making their way back under the river the way they had come. Alex was silent much of the way, and when they emerged into the light on the other side, Jo said, "Stop sulking, Alex. You could have been right. It just turned out that you weren't."
    "It's not that," he said. He frowned as Jo rolled her eyes. "No, really. It's a good thing we went that way."
    "Oh?"
    "Yeah, because now we know something about the enemy we didn't know before."
    "And what is that?"
    "The colloids are trying to keep us from getting in the armory, which must mean there are still weapons in there."
    "Makes sense," said Flash.
    "It does, doesn't it? And you know what else it means?"
    Both Jo and Flash looked at him curiously.
    Alex smiled. "It means that the infected don't know how to use them . . . at least not yet."
    "How do you know that?"
    "There were no armed guards down there. Why wouldn't the colloids just arm a few of those zombies and tell them to shoot anything that comes near the armory? I'll tell you why. Because their brains are not functional enough for hand-eye coordination that complex."
    "Probably because the colloids eat away at the nervous system right from the beginning," said Jo. "Infected people can only walk for a few days, let alone chew gum and shoot rifles."
    "And after a few weeks they start melting down into colloids," Flash said. "And the colloids look for food, which there is less and less of these days, now that the human population is way down."
    "That means that if we can hang in there long enough, they might all die," Jo said.
    "They might," Alex said. "But most likely some of them will survive, no matter what, just as some of us have survived."
    "You're such an optimist," Flash said.
    "Just a realist, I'd say," Alex replied. "Besides, Flash, we might only be seeing the tip of the iceberg."
    "What do you mean?"
    "Look how this epidemic has spread, and what it's evolved into in thirty-six months. Maybe it's some virus genetically designed to mutate rapidly, but got so out of control that the scientists couldn't come up with a cure for it in time to stop it from spreading. Now that it's been out of control for three years, it's quickly reaching a crisis situation, since it's running out of host organisms."
    "So what will it do next?" said Flash.
    "The only thing it can do to survive," Jo replied. "Evolve into something new."
     

CHAPTER TEN
    "Viruses don't necessarily die out," Dr. Siegel said as she leaned against the stone wall of Flash's hideout. "Some of them can lie dormant for extraordinarily long periods."
    "So even if the entire human race disappears, this thing can still survive?" Elvin said.
    "It might." Siegel assumed the air of a professor, stalking back and forth across the floor as she spoke. "We don't know enough about it to determine what will happen. We don't even know that it is a virus, not for certain."
    "Well, where does that leave us?" Polly, the newest addition to the group, asked. "It's indestructible, and it's everywhere, and now it's immortal, too."
    "Not immortal," Siegel corrected. "Just adaptable."
    "We know that it can live on animals," Flash said. "I've seen it myself, eating away at pigeons and rats."
    "But when was the last time you saw that?" Siegel asked. "No, that was only when the epidemic first started. They quickly learned to distinguish between humans and other mammals. Furthermore, so far as we know they have never eaten anything cold-blooded."
    "Right to the top of the food chain," Flash said. "You almost have to admire its chutzpah ."
    "We've known for quite some time that it's selective," said Jo. "But this recent development of massed attack is way beyond any virus I've ever heard