Replica The Plague Trilogy Rewind

one In the Parkside Middle School media center, Amy kept her voice low as she read aloud from the encyclopedia. " 'No one knows exactly why the dinosaurs disappeared completely from the face of the earth, but evidence indicates that dinosaurs died out approximately sixty-five million years ago.' " She looked up. "Did you get that, Linda? Sixty-five million years ago." Linda turned the page of her Seventeen. "Linda?" Amy realized the girl couldn't hear her. The flaps on her weird headgear had slipped down and were completely covering her ears. Amy leaned across the table and poked her. Linda jumped and shrieked. This caused practically every student in the media center to do the same. The librarian, Ms. Marino, glared at them all. Amy pointed to the flaps over Linda's ears, and Linda lifted them. "Don't scare me like that!" she said. "Sorry." Amy couldn't blame her for overreacting. Everyone was jumpy these days. "I was just telling you that dinosaurs disappeared sixty-five million years ago." "Okay," Linda said. "Write it down," Amy insisted. Linda obliged. Amy leaned over the table to watch. Muffling a sigh of exasperation, she added three zeros to the number Linda had written. "Sixty-five million, Linda. Not thousand." "Yeah, whatever." Linda returned to her magazine. Amy leaned back in her chair and mentally harangued the social studies teacher who had assigned the partners for this project. Could Amy possibly have been given a worse partner than Linda Riviera? Was there a lazier person in the entire eighth grade at Parkside Middle School? From the second the teacher had announced the partners in class, Amy had known she would end up doing all the work. Of course, it wasn't going to be all that difficult for her, not with her special abilities. She could read faster, absorb information more quickly, and whip up a decent report more easily than anyone in the class. Still, it wasn't fair that Linda would reap the rewards of Amy's superior intelligence. She went back to the encyclopedia article. "'The first humanlike beings appeared on earth about three point six million years ago,' " she reported. But those flaps on Linda's helmet had fallen back over her ears, and she didn't hear. Amy risked another little poke. At least this time Linda didn't scream. "Could you please take that stupid thing off your head?" Amy begged. "Are you crazy?" Linda snapped. "My father spent a fortune on this helmet. It's the best protection money can buy. Maybe you don't care if you drop dead, but I do." "I care," Amy muttered. "But you're not even wearing a mask," Linda pointed out. Amy looked around at the other students in the media center. Some were working quietly in small groups, others were reading, a few were at the computer terminals. Almost all of them wore surgical masks covering their nose and mouth. "My mother says those masks can't protect anyone from the Plague," Amy told her. "How does she know?" "She just happens to be a scientist. And she told me whatever this disease is, it's not a virus. It's not like the cold or the flu. You can't catch it from being around someone who's coughing or sneezing." Linda didn't buy this. "I heard on the news that nobody knowsKaye, Marilyn is the author of 'Replica The Plague Trilogy Rewind' with ISBN 9780553487633 and ISBN 0553487639.