The Hollow Men (Book 1): Crave Read Online Free Page A

little angel.
    Tom’s military background made him perfectly suited to work as a security and risk-management consultant for the private security company Constellis Group. He continued to travel the world despite the multiple illnesses springing up in different countries. Since he was one of the few in his company willing to do it, Constellis was willing to pay him a premium to take on extra work.
    He never wore masks when interacting with the public, including in airports. Lately his nose and mouth were the only visible ones in a sea of faces covered in the white masks his dental hygienist wore when cleaning his teeth. He understood the psychology of people wearing them when facing a pandemic but he knew the level of filtration of these masks would never prevent a virus from passing through them.
    Personally, he never worried about succumbing to infectious diseases. He passed unscathed through epicenters of avian flu and the H1N1 virus. His immune system seemed to be super-charged. Upon returning to the U.S. and again just before returning to his house, he was fastidious in keeping his hands clean, scrubbing his arms up to his elbows in scalding water with a fervor that would impress even someone with obsessive-compulsive disorder.
    His most recent trip to Southeast Asia carried him through Cambodia, close to where a particularly virulent sickness had suddenly appeared and was rapidly bouncing across the planet. The virus was named Thappraya after one of the main access roads to Pattaya, Thailand.
    Epidemiologists had traced the origin of the disease to a half-mile area close to the famous Walking Street, where a modest amount of money could buy sex in any imaginable form. That frequent intimate contact across multiple partners meant that the Thapp virus spread widely, and since many who visited Pattaya kept their exploits secret even before the outbreak, it was now nearly impossible to anticipate its spread to different parts of the world.
    The media reported it to be 100% lethal. Stage one began with seizures. In stage two, patients became violent.
    The city of Pattaya was quickly put under a quarantine enforced by the Royal Thai Army (RTA). The World Health Organization dispatched two agents to gather a sample of the Thappraya virus to study and develop an inoculation. While they were en route, the infection jumped to Bangkok. They landed in the Suvarnabhumi Airport, checked in with their coordinator, and hadn’t been in contact since.
    Thailand fell into chaos. The 200,000 strong RTA weren’t enough to guard Thailand’s borders. Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia and Myanmar deployed their militaries, and China and Vietnam were mobilizing to join them.
    The CDC confirmed three isolated cases of the disease had been discovered in the U.S. in the last twenty-four hours. They escalated their warnings. Most people entirely tuned them out. Thapp was lost in the noise of multiple other infectious diseases.
    He arrived home three days ago. Yesterday, Katie got sick. Very sick. The nasty illness that attacked Katie devoured the energy of the usually vibrant little eight-year-old, dampening her broad smile and snuffing out the sparkle in her brown eyes. She whimpered as her fever surged to 104 degrees and her skin turned sickly white.
    It wasn’t that Tom regularly and purposely kept the details of his travels secret from Ridley; he simply traveled so much that neither of them had much interest in talking about the specifics of experiences in airlines and airports. Katie got sicker and the pandemic that originated in Thailand began to spread quickly. Tom suspected that he’d brought Thapp home to his little girl.
    When he told Ridley about where he’d been and what was happening there, it felt as though he were confessing to an extramarital affair, like he’d severely broken trust with her and with his family.
    Ridley was self-programmed to take charge when crisis hit her family. Part of feeling in control meant she needed to be the