Dawn of the Dead Read Online Free Page A

mind was a blank. She aimed the camera at Foster and managed to stare through the viewfinder, not believing what she was seeing.
    Foster was on the table, his shirt hanging out of his pants, his eyes like those of a wild man. His voice screeched out. He seemed like a prophet of old, foretelling of doom to an unbelieving population of barbarians:
    “The bodies of the dead will be delivered over to specially equipped squads of the National Guard for organized disposition . . .”
    Suddenly, a man darted out of the charging crowd and came running quickly up to Fran. She jumped as the figure flashed into her view.
    “Frannie,” the man, whom she recognized as Steve, cried, “at nine o’clock meet me on the roof. We’re getting out.” The force of his words caused Fran to let the camera slip slightly. “Stephen . . . I don’t believe this . . . What—”
    “We’re getting out. In the chopper.”
    Another technician stepped over to take the camera from Fran. Steve pulled her over, away from the man’s hearing, and spoke more quietly.
    “Nine p.m. All right?”
    “Steve, we can’t . . . we’ve got to—” she protested.
    But Steve was forceful. “We’ve got to nothing, Fran. We’ve got to survive.”
    She looked into the soft brown eyes of the man she now loved. His dark hair was a mess, his clothes in disarray. His slight body, barely taller than hers, shook with a combination of nerves, fatigue and astonishment at what he was about to do.
    “Somebody’s got to survive,” he tried to convince her. “Now you be up there at nine. Don’t make me come lookin’ for ya.”
    Just as swiftly as he had surprised her, he was gone. Fran looked nervously back at the cameraman, feeling guilty that he might have heard their plotting. As the room emptied, the sound of Foster and Berman’s senseless argument grew louder and louder.
    “Go ahead,” the cameraman said to Fran, without taking his eye from the viewfinder, speaking quietly and slowly. “We’ll be off the air by midnight anyway. Emergency networks are taking over. Our responsibility . . . is finished, I’m afraid.”
    Trancelike once again, Fran walked to the corner of the room where she had left her pocketbook and coat. All she had to do now was wait the forty minutes until nine o’clock. And what then? What next? The thought made her shudder.

2
    Compared to the frenzied excitement of the newsroom, the rest of the dusk-laden city of Philadelphia was calm. The buildings of the sprawling low-income housing project, interconnected by walkways and playground areas, stood like tombstones as the first stars tried valiantly to appear in the murky, pollution-filled, dark blue sky.
    Suddenly, the glint of a grappling hook was noticeable against the lip surrounding the roof. Silent figures, as graceful as ballet dancers, climbed to the top of the building. Men in the armored vests of the S.W.A.T. police, clutching the latest in special weapons to their breasts, took position on the roofs and in the dark corners of the development.
    In the shadows, squatting alongside the entrance to one of the building’s fire stairs, Roger DeMarco felt a sharp shooting pain in his thigh. Still in a squatting position, he tried to stretch out the aching leg to relieve the charley horse. Three other team members were poised silently beside him.
    The stillness was deceptive: it didn’t seem that this was the national disaster that the politicians had been crying about for months. The population really felt that the government was putting one over on them. No one, particularly the uneducated, the superstitious and the very religious, really believed the government’s explanations of why the dead were returning to life. No one wanted to believe that the husband, the wife, the child or the parent that they had just lost would return to terrorize and devour human flesh. Even Roger, who wasn’t particularly politically astute, realized that the administration in power