TIME SCENE INVESTIGATORS
An ancient disease, a modern pandemic, and the one person who offers hope for a cure has been dead for 350 yearsIn 1666, a horrible disease took the lives of almost every person in Eyam (pronouncedEem), England. Helping the sick and the dying was the mysterious and ghostlike Blue Monk, whose strange appearance terrified even those who were comforted by him.
More than three centuries later the disease has returned, more virulent than before. Every day more people are infected; every hour more die.
The lives of millions rest in the hands of a bio-team -- the Time Scene Investigators -- that studies history to find cures for modern diseases. But the newest member of the team, Dr. Mark Carlson, has suffered a heartbreaking loss.
With every tick of the clock the world approaches a global pandemic. A race against time becomes a race across continents -- to find a frightened boy who is carrying and spreading the disease wherever he goes, to thwart the machinations of corporate greed and fanatical sabotage, and to find the connection between a great tragedy of the past and a potential catastrophe of the present.Ourpresent.
This book may become tomorrow's headline."I was on the edge of my seat from the very first page of
The Gabon Virusand didn't breathe again until I turned the last page. Fast-paced and gripping, this book will make us all think,
This could happen." -- Debbie Macomber,
New York Timesbestselling novelist
CHAPTER ONE
July 15, 1666Rebekah Smythe loo ked down at her brother's lifeless body, his eyes staring vacantly toward the heaven he had hoped and prayed to inhabit. With a pale and trembling hand, she reached down and closed his eyelids.
She had done the same for her father and three of her sisters -- all lying still now in their shallow graves not far from their home; so silent after their days of suffering and anguish. She could not weep for them. Her tears were spent long ago.
She looked at the makeshift cots on which her mother and youngest sister slept fitfully. They had come down with the symptoms just two days earlier. She dared not hold out hope for their survival. In another day or two, if all went as it had for the rest of her family, they'd be gone and she'd be alone.Alone.
By the grace of God, she had resisted the illness. Yet the outcome of her survival would be loneliness. In her darker moments, she wondered how far God's grace could carry her.
Agnes Hull, who lived in the next cottage down, had also survived the Black Plague and claimed that the warm bacon fat she drank was the reason. She left bottles of the wretched liquid at the doors of afflicted families, but unfortunately, it didn't work for Rebekah's family.
John Dicken, who worked in the local mines, was also a survivor. Believing himself immune, he had established himself as Eyam's village grave digger. He would offer his services the instant he heard of another victim. After burying the body away from town, he would return to claim the burial fee -- reportedly taking whatever he fancied. Most were too sick to stop him. Besides, what use was their money if they were dead? Few of the men were well enough to take the job from Dicken, and it wasn't as if anyone new would arrive to challenge him. After all, the village was under strict quarantine.
Rebekah sat on a stool, staring at the fire. Pushing a lock of hair away from her face, she was overcome by a feeling of selfpity.How had it come to this?Who could have foreseen last September that something as unassuming as a box of cloth from London would start such an epidemic? Mr. George Viccars, a traveling tailor, certainly couldn't have. As he opened the box -- wet from a rainstorm -- and laid the cloth out to dry, he could not have imagined what he was unleashi
<< less
MY CART | item(s)
U.S. Standard
Free U.S. Standard
U.S. Expedited
International
