World War Moo Read Online Free

the virus turned animals into killing machines had sold a hundred thousand copies in the first week. The advance had swollen her bank account to bursting with money she couldn’t bring herself to touch. Her dream of eclipsing her famous war correspondent father had come true, much to his chagrin: on the rare occasion they spoke he dropped snide comments about how her efforts didn’t compare to his former exploits. He had no idea how right he was. As if to demonstrate her ubiquity, one of the screens flipped to a promo for the interview with Jay Leno she’d recorded the previous evening. Her fingers tightened round the glass, which she wanted to hurl at the screen. Instead, she put her head down and let her hair hide her face.
    The book portrayed her as a sparky journalist who—with grit, determination, and a firmly starched upper lip—had uncovered a moronic secret government weapons program aimed at decimating enemy nations’ food chains. In reality, she’d chanced on the story and made a big hairy dog’s cock of the ensuing investigation. Only blind luck allowed her to escape with the world’s biggest scoop. The sole thing she’d done right was to shoot dead the pursuing Alastair Brown, the government security operative who’d been the first recorded case of the virus crossing to humans and a glistening purple bell end to boot. In the first draft of her book, she’d stuck closer to the truth, only glossing over her more idiotic moments—such as allowing herself to be lured to an out-of-the-way location, on a flimsy pretext any decent journalist would have seen through, and kidnapped. Her editor, unimpressed by the fecklessness of the “lead character,” had given the facts the kind of brutal massaging normally only dealt out by a heavyset, moustachioed woman in an East European bathhouse. Once the fiction of Woodward in high heels had been created, Lesley couldn’t back out of it.
    Worst of all, her success had been bought with death. For the hundredth time she ticked off the victims: Gregory Strong and Constance Jones, the scientists who gave her the information about the viral program—dead because she hadn’t got the story out in time; Fanny Peters—dead because she had to go on a food run when Lesley turned up at her house with extra mouths to feed; James Peters, David Alexander, and his twin sons—killed by Brown because they were in her company; Bernard the helicopter pilot—dead in a crash because they’d hijacked his aircraft. She tried to pay homage to these people by talking about them in interviews, but the host always turned the subject back to her. They wanted to celebrate the heroic tale of a survivor, not dwell on the grim topic of the dead.
    The kiss of death had even followed her to New York. She’d witnessed—probably caused—two fatal car crashes, a pedestrian squashed by falling scaffolding, and a woman struck dead by lightning. Animals were not immune either. She and fellow escapee Terry Borders had bought three rounds of goldfish as they tried to build a cozy domestic life. Each of them had quickly floated belly-up in the murky water for no discernible reason other than Lesley’s malicious proximity. She was a jinx to every living thing in her vicinity, the rose that grew strong and bright as its roots burrowed into the fertile depths of a mass grave.
    It had gotten so bad that she suffered a recurring nightmare in which she stood alone in the middle of a desolate landscape. Off in the distance, the crumbling buildings of a ruined city clawed at a sky blackened by storm clouds. As she stepped across the desiccated soil, her foot crunched on something. This was the only variable in the dream: sometimes the animal she’d stepped on was a cockroach, sometimes a mouse, once an unbearably cute chinchilla. Always, though, as the creature expired she was seized with the certainty she’d killed the