No Safety in Numbers
Read No Safety in Numbers Online
Authors: Dayna Lorentz
DAYNA LORENTZ
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Copyright © 2012 by Dayna Lorentz
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lorentz, Dayna.
No safety in numbers/by Dayna Lorentz.
p. cm.
Summary: Teens Shay, Marco, Lexi, and Ryan, quarantined in a shopping mall when a biological bomb goes off in an air duct, learn that in an emergency people change, and not always for the better, as many become sick and supplies run low.
ISBN: 978-1-101-58559-7 [1. Interpersonal relations—Fiction.
2. Survival—Fiction. 3. Quarantine—Fiction. 4. Biological warfare—Fiction.
5. Shopping malls—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.L8814No 2012
[Fic]—dc23 2011051630
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any
responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Designed by Jason Henry * Text set in Melior
Printed in the U.S.A.
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
ALWAYS LEARNING
PEARSON
For Evelyn
Table of Contents
SATURDAY
A
R
C
O
Y
ou know it’s a bad day when you pull into the parking garage at work and someone tries to run you over. The car swerved toward Marco as he pedaled down the entrance ramp. He wheeled into the bumper of a parked car to avoid getting hit.
What kind of jerk is drunk and tooling around the mall’s underground lot at ten o’clock in the morning?
Then Marco recognized the car.
The driver was definitely a jerk, but most likely not drunk. It was Mike Richter’s BMW.
Marco had clipped the door of Mike’s Beamer with his bike pedal on Tuesday. He’d left a tiny scratch—a scratch you would hardly notice if you were looking for it. Mike had noticed. And had somehow, through the hissed rumors of that nest of vipers called West Nyack High School, figured out who did it.
The Beamer squealed to a stop, then Mike gunned it in reverse, barreling down the aisle back toward Marco.
Was Mike trying to scare him or really run him over? From the relative speed of the car and the slightly weaving pattern of its course, there was a distinct possibility that in the process of driving like an asshole Mike might just accomplish both.
Marco hefted his bike and tried to squeeze between the nearest two cars, but Mike was thirty feet away and closing. Marco dropped the bike and ran for cover.
As he crossed to the next aisle, Marco heard his bike clatter to the ground. The Beamer’s engine roared behind him. Then the crunch and scream of metal being crushed and dragged across the pavement echoed off the concrete walls.
Crap.
It had taken Marco an entire summer of wiping down tables at the Grill’n’Shake to save enough for that bike—not that rich asshats like Mike understood such things. Now he’d be back riding the bus with the drunks and the bag ladies.