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Chapters (51)
  2. Book 2 of The Newsflesh Trilogy
  3. MIRA GRANT
  4. BOOK I
  5. Point of Infection
  6. One
  7. Two
  8. Three
  9. Four
  10. Five
  11. BOOK II
  12. Vectors and Victims
  13. Six
  14. Seven
  15. Eight
  16. Nine
  17. Ten
  18. BOOK III
  19. The Mourning Edition
  20. Eleven
  21. Twelve
  22. Thirteen
  23. Fourteen
  24. Fifteen
  25. Sixteen
  26. Seventeen
  27. BOOK IV
  28. Immunological Memory
  29. Nineteen
  30. Twenty
  31. Twenty-one
  32. Twenty-two
  33. BOOK V
  34. The Rising
  35. Twenty-three
  36. Twenty-four
  37. Twenty-five
  38. Twenty-six
  39. Coda: Living for You
  40. Twenty-seven
  41. Acknowledgments
  42. extras
  43. meet the author
  44. introducing
  45. BOOK I
  46. From the Dead
  47. One
  48. Contents
  49. BY MIRA GRANT
  50. Praise for Feed
  51. Copyright

My line of work, combined with George’s virological martyrdom and my ongoing, if somewhat amateur, attempts to locate the people behind the conspiracy that killed her, has brought me into contact with a lot of people from the CDC. But there’s only one “she” who has my contact information and would even dare to bring up George around me.

Dave was waiting outside the office apartment door, looking agitated. I stopped long enough to grab his shoulders, shake briskly, and demand, “Why haven’t I been seeing her e-mail?”

“The new spam filters must have been stopping her,” he said, looking a little green around the edges. It appeared that I was scaring him. I was having trouble getting worked up about that when I was already so worked up about more important matters. “If she was using the wrong keywords—”

“Fix them!” I shoved him backward, hard enough that he smacked his shoulders against the wall. Turning, I opened the apartment door.

Alaric was in the process of handing my “company” a cup of coffee, making polite apologies about my absence. He stopped when I entered, turning to face me, and she half rose, a small, almost tim smile on her face.

“Hi, Shaun,” said Kelly. “I hope this isn’t a bad time.”

There were many would-be saviors during the Rising, but some stand above the rest. One such is Dr. William Matras, a virologist working out of the Centers for Disease Control’s Atlanta office. With a governmental decree forbidding any discussion of what they called “the Walking Plague,” the CDC was unable to warn the populace of the coming crisis. Dr. Matras co-opted the one channel of communication he knew to be unmonitored: the blog of his daughter, Wendy. He posted everything he knew about the epidemiology of the Walking Plague, and he armed a world against the disease.

Dr. Matras was tried for treason, acquitted on all counts, and given a posthumous commendation for valorous service. His son, Ian Matras, is the current director of the WHO. His eldest daughter, Marianne Matras-Connolly, is an instructor at Georgetown University. Of his five grandchildren, three are in the family business, with the youngest, Kelly Connolly, currently studying under Dr. J. Wynne of the Memphis CDC.

We owe this family a great debt for everything that they have done. Without men like Dr. Matras, the future of the human race would be much bleaker.

—From Epidemiology of the Wall, authored by Mahir Gowda, January 11, 2041

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