Operation Honshu Wolf Read Online Free Page A

of Queens. Then he’d sold out, joined the dirty hippies who’d been protesting capitalism’s rise, and spent his considerable fortune feeding the city’s Infected.
    Good for some, but Miller remembered watching overfilled grocery carts trundling down the streets towards the communes while everyone else starved, courtesy Swift’s fortune. Then, when Schaeffer-Yeager began its humanitarian campaign distributing anti-parasitic drugs and food, the communes had sent mobs to break up soup kitchens, burning trucks with the wrong logo no matter what they were carrying. It had been ugly then, but now...
    While Swift spat fire on the screen, his words autocaptioned below, baying for the company’s blood, the mobs were out on the streets rioting. Was it purely a social phenomenon, or was the parasite somehow defending itself, making the Infected attack those trying to cure them?
    Then again, Miller mused, if they were treated, cured, they’d lose their communes, wouldn’t they? It made sense if they were fighting to protect what they thought of as their families, didn’t it?
    On the screen, Swift called on the Army and the government and the police, what was left of them all, to strike Schaeffer-Yeager down in furious justice.
    He was right. Why the hell weren’t Miller and the rest in chains, with a summary execution for Robert Harris on the cards for calling down the helicopter strike?
    When enough had finally dripped into the coffee pot, Miller got up and filled two mugs, then put the pot back to catch the rest.
    “Shouldn’t do that. The first stuff’s the best, you’re stealing it,” du Trieux muttered from the narrow card table behind the break room couch.
    Miller shrugged. “At least you’re not complaining about how Americans make their coffee anymore.”
    She grunted something guttural and French.
    Coffee was hard to come by. They were scraping out old filters and adding a meagre amount from their dwindling supply of fresh coffee, mockingly calling it ‘half-and-half.’
    At one point, the Archaeobiome’s ‘novel’ South American crop pests were considered someone else’s problem—fairy-armadillo type creatures, though the pink-shelled little beasts weren’t armadillos at all—but coffee drinkers, serious coffee drinkers, knew they were trouble long before the threat of the famines loomed.
    The locust armadillos, Pseudodasypus , were little cynodonts—early precursors to mammals—which showed every sign of being straight out of the Triassic period, other than showing up out of nowhere in Colombian plantations around two years before. They’d arrived on his parents’ ranch a year later, shortly before gnawing a swathe through the Midwest’s cornfields. The biggest were three inches long, and to Miller they looked a lot like lizards with an armadillo shell. They even laid eggs, leathery little packets that shrank up like prunes in the sun.
    The first hatching anyone witnessed had been out in Mexico, locust armadillo young crawling up out of the ground like tiny maggots, maybe two or three millimetres long—much smaller than later hatchlings from fresh eggs, something to do with how the Archaeobiome worked. Apparently the locust armadillos, along with most of the new wildlife, had been hiding out deep underground for close to thirty thousand years. Then they’d hatched tiny, grown up, and started reproducing. Fast .
    That was if you believed the scientists who’d carbon dated the ancient eggs that hadn’t hatched, anyway. A lot of people didn’t, but a lot of people thought man-made global warming was a load of horse-shit because it still got cold in the winter.
    The locust armadillo swarms had eaten every stalk of wheat within a hundred miles of his parents’ ranch, but his dad hadn’t been the one who told Miller about them. He hadn’t learned about coffee and the locust armadillos from Brandon Lewis, either—the old man accepting the second cup of coffee when Miller joined him in the