Em Garner - Contaminated

Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «Em Garner - Contaminated» весь текст электронной книги совершенно бесплатно (целиком полную версию без сокращений). В некоторых случаях можно слушать аудио, скачать через торрент в формате fb2 и присутствует краткое содержание. Город: New York, Год выпуска: 2013, ISBN: 2013, Издательство: Egmont USA, Жанр: sf_postapocalyptic, Ужасы и Мистика, ya, на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале библиотеки ЛибКат.

Contaminated: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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After the Contamination—an epidemic caused by the super-trendy diet drink SlimPro that turned ordinary citizens into shambling creatures unable to control their violent impulses—the government rounded up the “Connies” to protect the remaining population. But now, two years later, the government’s started sending the rehabilitated back home, complete with shock collars that will either stop the Connies from committing violent acts or kill them before they do any further harm.
Since her parents were taken in the roundup, Velvet Ellis has struggled to care for her ten-year-old sister and maintain a sense of normalcy, despite brutal government rations and curfews. She goes to the “Kennels” every day searching for her parents, and when she finds her mother, she’s eager to bring her home. Maybe, eventually, they’ll be able to get back to the way things were before. But even though it seems that her mother is getting better (something that the government says is impossible), there will be no happy transition. Anti-Connie sentiment is high, and rumor has it that an even worse wave of the Contamination is imminent. And then the government declares that the Connies will be rounded up and neutralized, once and for all.
Sacrificing everything—her boyfriend, her home, and her job—Velvet will do anything to protect her mother. Velvet has to get the collar off her mother before the military comes to take her away. Even if it means risking all of their lives.
Gritty and grabbing, Velvet is a harrowing, emotionally charged dystopic venture into YA from a well-known and respected writer of women’s fiction.
Releases simultaneously in electronic book format (ISBN 978-1-60684-355-0)
Review

,
will leave you reeling.”
—Jennifer L. Armentrout, USA Today best-selling Author “Confession: This book had me crying in public. It’s
,
—and best of all, real.
.”
—Jeri Smith-Ready, award-winning author of the Shade trilogy “Echoing the reality millions of young adults worldwide face daily,
.”
—Kirkus

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My mom was lucky. By the time she fell sick, they’d figured out what was causing the disease. They weren’t automatically killing all the Connies, just capturing them to deal with them the best they could.

We never saw my dad again.

SEVEN

NOW THAT I’M GOING TO GET MY MOM, I SEE them everywhere. Neutralized Connies, with their collars. Regular lobotomies make people calm, but the collars do more than that. Blank faces, slack jaws, dead eyes. There’s one in the grocery store, shuffling along behind a grim-faced woman who must be his wife, their cart stacked high with jars of baby food and adult diapers. One at the post office where I go to pick up the assistance check, standing in front of the display of free shipping boxes and waiting patiently while the man with her buys stamps. It’s not that suddenly there are so many of them, but that I didn’t notice them before.

The worst is the little boy I pass on my way to work every day. The first time I see him, I think he’s hanging out in the backyard, maybe playing with the trucks I see stacked up around him. It’s cold outside, but he’s bundled up pretty warm. Hat, scarf, gloves, boots. It’s more than what I have, anyway. I wave when I pass by the yard, and he looks at me but doesn’t wave back.

The next day, he’s there again. Same place. I’d think he hadn’t moved at all, but that’s silly, because he had to have gone inside overnight, right? But on the third day, as time is spinning slowly closer to the day when I can pick up my mom and bring her home, I stop and look over the fence at him.

“Hi,” I say.

He’s smaller than Opal. Maybe six, or small for an eight-year-old. His nose and cheeks are red. He’s still staring, but he doesn’t react when I speak.

“Hi, what’s your name?” I don’t know why I’m asking. Why I care. I shouldn’t blame him for not answering; after all, I’m a stranger and any kid these days should know better than to talk to strangers. Even ones like me, who are hopefully not so creepy.

He gets up then. His first step kicks a truck out of the way like he doesn’t even notice. I hear the scrape of chain on concrete. The kid’s moving faster now, heading for the fence at not quite a run.

He doesn’t make it even halfway before he’s jerked off his feet. Flat onto his back. He sprawls, arms and legs out like he’s trying to make a snow angel, though so far, the winter’s been bitterly cold and snowless. The chain is stretched out behind him, attached to a ring set into the concrete.

Horrified, I gasp and cover my mouth with my cold fingers. Before I can say anything, the back door opens and a woman comes out, with a baby on her hip. She’s barely dressed, wearing only a pair of sagging pajama bottoms and an oversized T-shirt. Slippers. The baby starts to scream and, no wonder, brought out into the frigid air wearing only a diaper. I’d scream, too.

“Oh, God, Tyler. Get up. Get up, get up, get up,” she chants, leaning over the boy on the ground. “Please, get up.”

Her head whips around to stare at me. “What are you looking at? What did you do to him? Don’t you know any better?”

“I’m sorry—”

She ignores me. The little boy on the ground, Tyler, sits up slowly. He doesn’t look at his mom. He doesn’t look at me. He crawls on hands and knees back to the pile of frozen sand and his trucks, where he sits and stares at nothing.

His mother has snot running out of her nose, and it looks frozen, too. “It’s the only place he’s quiet! It’s the only place he’ll stay quiet!”

I hold up my hands and back away from the fence. I’m not judging her. She puts her hand over the baby’s face, kissing its head, and, watching me warily, ducks back into the house. I can see her through the glass even after she closes the door. She’s watching me, making sure I go away.

So I do.

* * *

“Okay, hon, I have to go over some paperwork with you first. And you’ll have to watch a training video, okay?” Jean’s as nice as ever. She smiles at me, and I know I should be smiling back but I can only manage a grimace. “Don’t you worry about anything. It’s real easy to take care of her. The new collars are wonderful, just wonderful. Really.”

“Really?” I shouldn’t be sarcastic. Fortunately, she doesn’t notice, or if she does, she’s too nice to show it.

Jean pats my shoulder. “Really.” She takes me to a small room with a flickering TV, which plays a DVD showing me how to take care of my mom. The narrator’s careful to refer to the Connies as patients and I realize this movie was made for hospitals, not civilians, to use.

At any rate, the movie shows me how my mom’s been fitted with a surgically implanted pair of electrodes, connected wirelessly to the collar she’ll always have to wear. The collar takes a dual battery-pack system that has to be recharged at regular intervals. Two batteries guarantees that one will always be working while the other recharges, or in case it needs to be replaced. There’s no information on how long the batteries last or how much they cost to replace. But you do get the charger included, “for free.”

The movie demonstrates with diagrams and close-ups of someone’s hand on how to replace the batteries. The explanation is painfully slow, and I’m sort of afraid to think what sorts of doctors and nurses were so stupid, they weren’t considered smart enough to get this. I’m only seventeen and I figured it out before they even got halfway through the explanation.

The narrator is something else, too. Perky, bubbly, entirely annoying. “Bathing the patient can be accomplished through the use of sponge baths or limited showering. Though the StayCalm collar is waterproof and water-resistant up to four feet, it’s not recommended it be submerged.”

Another diagram. I wonder if the collar will simply stop working underwater, no longer sending its electrical pulses to the parts of the brain they want to damage on purpose to counteract the ones ruined by the disease. The next diagram shows me what happens instead.

“If the collar is submerged in water for more than seven minutes, the unit will be sent into Mercy Mode.”

The diagram shows a Connie underwater with X’s for eyes and lightning bolts shooting out from the collar.

“Likewise,” the narrator says in soothing tones, “Mercy Mode will also be triggered if the collar is removed by anyone other than a licensed technician, if the battery power fails for longer than seven minutes, or if the unit is triggered to fire more than thirty-two times in a twenty-minute time span. Mercy Mode is announced by a single beep from the unit, followed by color-coded lights. Steady green means the unit is functioning appropriately. Flashing green indicates extraneous activity. Yellow indicates unexpected surging, while flashing red indicates the introduction of Mercy Mode.”

The movie demonstrates with a collar not attached to a human, just held in someone’s hand. The narrator’s voice turns from calm to menacing.

“Constant red indicates Mercy Mode has been fully activated.”

I press pause on the remote and go to the door. “Jean?”

“Yes?” She looks up from her desk. She’s put on reading glasses, and the light’s reflected on them so I can’t really see her eyes.

“Can you explain something to me?”

“Sure.” She gets up, comes over.

“Mercy Mode?”

Jean slips off her glasses as her face falls. She looks over her shoulder and then closes the door to the closet where she was showing me the training movie. “You won’t have to worry about it, hon. Your mom’s a good one. She’ll be fine.”

“What do you mean, a good one?”

“I mean she hasn’t given us any trouble, even before she was fitted with her collar. Well, not any more than I’d have expected. She’s a good one. It means she won’t need Mercy Mode.”

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