Pandemic Page 97

@TwistahSistahBB5

I don’t get this hostility — if you want to take their drugs, take them, if I don’t want to, that’s my choice! It’s a Big Pharma trick.

@BadAstronomer

Hey, antivaxers, heard of a thing called “the news”? You know, those fancy moving pictures that keep showing what happened on the Brashear? #TakeTheMeds

@BootyHooty912

You don’t want to drink your gunk? s.h.i.+t, dawg, give it here — I’ll put it next to my Glock, which you’ll see again when you change.

MANIPULATION

She had to find a way to control the men.

Margaret sat with her back against the mission module’s thin, metal wall, her thighs parallel to the ground, her feet on the floor — the chair position. Her thighs burned. A fight was coming: she needed to be strong.

At the count of one hundred, she bent forward, extended her body and started doing push-ups.

One … two … three … four …

Math. The most basic language of the galaxy. The language created by G.o.d. Not the human G.o.d, or G.o.ds, but the real G.o.d.

Sixteen … seventeen … eighteen …

If the men on this s.h.i.+p had converted, she knew she would have been able to control them. They would have followed her, did whatever she said; G.o.d had made it that way. But the men weren’t converted — they were merely human.

Human, yes, but trained killers. Dangerous.

Thirty-four … thirty-five … thirty-six …

She was smarter than they were. She could find a way to make them do what she wanted. If she started now, when the right time came she could play them against each other. Or, at least, she could stay alive long enough to find her own kind.

Fifty-nine … sixty … sixty-one …

Her arms and chest burned. She ignored the pain. Years spent hiding away had made her soft. She needed to make her body hard.

Clarence would be the easiest to manipulate. She knew what motivated him — the simple sentiment of a soon-to-be extinct species: he loved.

One hundred two … one hundred three … one hundred four …

BIG PHARMA

EXCERPT FROM THE WEBSITE “BEYOND TOP SECRET”

By SmrtEnough2See

For decades the government has been the p.a.w.n of Big Pharma, funneling billions of taxpayer dollars to companies that produce improperly tested drugs and vaccines. And now that same government is telling you that you must take this new “inoculant” drug for the mysterious “alien infection”? An infection that has not been proven to exist? And a drug that has not been properly tested, even by the rubber-stamping Big Pharma p.a.w.n known as the FDA?

The government “tested” the drugs and vaccines that gave our children autism. Our friendly overlords aren’t even bothering to pretend to test things anymore.

And now our government says we must take this untested “medicine.” If we don’t, why, we’ll become murderers! We’ll kill our own families!

How frightening, and how convenient.

Until the government publishes the science behind this claim, do not believe the lies.

Demand information. Demand proof.

THE WEST COAST

The Situation Room was getting crowded.

Murray tried not to stare across the table at the latest person to join the party. Dr. Frank Cheng looked like the cat that ate the canary: smug, self-satisfied and quite impressed with his new place of importance.

You don’t even realize you’re choice number two, jacka.s.s — if Margo wasn’t stuck on that s.h.i.+p, she’d be here instead.

Murray, Cheng, Admiral Porter, André Vogel, the president and a standing-room-only crowd of other directors, a.s.sistants and important people listened to Nancy Whittaker, secretary of homeland security, describe the ma.s.sive inoculation project.

“The West Coast response was phenomenal,” Whittaker said. “All major breweries and ninety percent of independents have cultures and are either in full production or close to it. Bakeries all over the country have joined in. They’re collaborating with any bottling facility they can find. We estimate that eighty-five percent of the populations of Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose and San Diego are inoculated. The Los Angeles basin is lagging behind at around sixty-five percent.”

The speed of the national response boggled Murray’s mind. In all his years of service he had never seen the nation unify for one cause like this. Not for 9/11, not for oil spills or tornadoes, not for hurricanes or superstorms.

Maybe it was because most disasters were regional — a flooded Long Island had little impact on Arizona or California, didn’t affect the farmers in the Midwest and the plains states, didn’t bother anyone in the Great State of Texas. The news covered such tragedies, people donated to the Red Cross, then everyone who wasn’t in the disaster zone went on about their daily lives.

The infection outbreak, on the other hand, affected everyone.

Some people remained oblivious, as people often do, but the majority of Americans understood the situation’s stark reality: this was the potential death of their nation. Americans were banding together to fight it tooth and nail.

Banding together thanks to the leaders.h.i.+p of President Sandra Blackmon.

Murray had thought her an idiot, a Bible-thumping figurehead, but her ideology and personality seemed tailor-made for just this situation. Demons were at the door; Americans wanted a defender armored up in good old-fas.h.i.+oned religion.

Whittaker finished her report, but she didn’t sit down. She s.h.i.+fted uncomfortably, like a high schooler who had to tell her strict parents she’d been caught s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g in the parking lot.