Year One (Chronicles of the One, #1)

by Nora Roberts

CHAPTER THREE By the end of the first week of January, the reported death count topped a million. The World Health Organization declared a pandemic spreading with unprecedented speed. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identified it as a new strain of avian influenza, one that spread with human-to-human contact. But no one could explain why the birds tested showed no signs of infection. None of the chickens, turkeys, geese, pheasants, or quail—confiscated or captured within a hundred-kilometer radius of the MacLeod farm—revealed any infection. But the people—the MacLeod family in Scotland, their neighbors, the villagers—died in droves. That detail the WHO, the CDC, and the NIH kept under tight wraps. In the scramble for vaccines, distribution ran through complex and maddening loops. Delays incited rioting, looting, violence. It didn’t matter, as the vaccines proved as ineffective as the fraudulent cures selling briskly on the Internet. Across the globe, heads of state urged calm and called for order, promised assistance, spoke of policies. Schools closed, countless businesses locked their doors as people were urged to limit contact with others. The sale of surgical masks, gloves, over-the-counter and prescription flu remedies, bleach, and disinfectants soared. It wouldn’t help. Tony Parsoni could’ve told them, but he died in the same hospital bed as his mother-in-law less than seventy-two hours after her. Plastic barriers, latex gloves, surgical masks? The Doom...