Code Orange (novel)

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Code Orange (ISBN 0385732597, 2005) is a young adult novel by Caroline B. Cooney. It is about a teen boy who lives in New York City by the name of Mitchell "Mitty" Blake who is care-free and doesn't worry much about his grades or school. His biology teacher Mr. Lynch assigns a report on an infectious disease. Mitty has no idea what virus he should research, but when his parents take him to their "country home" in Connecticut and find old medical books from 1899, Boston, he discovers something that will change his life forever. He finds an old envelope containing scabs from Variola Major (a severe form of smallpox) from an epidemic in 1902. He inhales the scabs, without thinking about the consequences. Later, he begins to realize that he is starting to get the symptoms of small pox. He is kidnapped, after attempting suicide to make sure he doesn't start the small pox epidemic all over again, by terrorists who want the precious scabs to infect the U.S. but he then kills the terrorists. In the end, Mitty escapes, and finds out that he does not have small pox, but must be put in the hospital after the injuries he suffers from the assault his kidnappers placed upon him. But everything works out all right, and in the end of the book the author implies that Mitty and his close friend Olivia will get together and be a couple.