Fear the Survivors Read Online Free Page B

housing set up by the National Guard. They represented only a fraction of the millions who were being displaced by the disaster, but the sight was sobering even for Jason, and his laughter faded as he took it in.
    “Damn,” he said quietly, as the woman on the TV explained the extent of the evacuation.
    “This site, which is one of fifteen outside Atlanta, is estimated to house nearly ten thousand people, a number which has been growing every day in the week since the disaster. As you saw when I spoke with the camp’s coordinator, Colonel McAvoy, the biggest problem at this point has been security, keeping the belongings people have insisted on bringing with them safe, even though it is taking away from the space left for other refugees. But this camp is up and running now, and nearly full. And as they complete others like it from Alabama to Pennsylvania, the question has become not where will these people go, but how long they will have to stay here before they can return home?”
    The reporter went on with her explanation and Jason sat, enthralled by the sheer scale of the spectacle. Theresa emerged from the toilet, her Duck Dynasty sweatpants still down around her ankles, while she pulled up her sweatshirt so she could pull her pants up over her potbelly. But she paused with her hefty midriff and well-worn thong exposed when she noticed her husband’s intent expression. He sensed her scrutiny and said in an aside, “This shit is unreal, Terry. They’ve, like, totally evacuated the entire coast of Georgia and the Carolinas just like they said they would. I mean, this shit is really happening. I can’t believe it.”
    She turned to face the screen, her panties and belly still showing as her limited attention span was absorbed by the images. The view had shifted to a CGI map of the Eastern seaboard of the United States. Overlaying it was a large grey arrow moving north from the coastal border between Georgia and Florida, up the coast all the way to southern Virginia. Its root was the King’s Bay Naval Base, where a massive explosion a week beforehand had incinerated two Ohio class nuclear submarines, laying open their radioactive cores and warheads to the North Atlantic trade winds.
    In a massive evacuation, the coastal population that lived in the cloud’s path had been driven and cajoled out of their homes, assisted by school buses, military trucks, and the conversion of every highway in the area into one-way, six-lane floods of exodus. But many of them had not escaped its effects in time. Many were even now showing varying levels of radiation sickness: hair loss, lethargy, the many symptoms of overexposure to the weapons-grade plutonium dust that was irradiating everything in the cloud’s wake.
    The scale of the area it now covered combined with the half-life of the material was already diminishing the cloud’s effects to some degree as it came to southern Maryland and Delaware, but unseen tumors were already blossoming in thousands of innocent bodies as they sat in traffic or settled into tents, football stadiums, and school gymnasiums, unaware of the embryonic death starting take root inside them.
    Theresa eventually finished pulling up her sweatpants and sank slowly into the La-Z-Boy next to Jason, her eyes locked on the screen as the scale of the disaster hit her as well.
    “You know, Sara-Beth told me they’re setting up one of those refugee camps over at the Sharp’s Farm, right here, in Slocomb,” she said, an effort to seem open-minded not disguising the air of disgust in her voice. Jason and Theresa lived in a trailer. They had always lived in a trailer. Theresa’s sister and two cousins lived in another trailer in the same park. Heading to one of the camps might actually be a move up in the world for some of their neighbors. At least they would have running hot water.
    Jason picked up on her tone and reacted, “Terry, these folks have it real shitty. Surely you’re not gonna begrudge some of