Rotter World Read Online Free Page B

decay set in, the zombies had slowed down, their attacks becoming more rambling and less deadly. By that time, though, the damage had already been done and the zombies had overwhelmed humanity.
    Air travel had been banned on the third day when an outbreak occurred on a trans-Atlantic flight from London to New York. A passenger had snuck past security, concealing that he had been bitten on the thigh, and turned half-way across the Atlantic. Every terrifying moment had been captured on video cell phones and transmitted to the BBC until the amateur cameramen became food. The following day, most countries had closed their borders to all types of international travel. Mass evacuations had jammed the roadways out of most cities, making travel around urban centers virtually impossible. The situation had grown so bad that FOX Business News had dedicated its entire coverage to reporting on traffic and road conditions around the country.
    The virus had spread most rapidly in dense urban populations. Within a week, the world’s largest cities had succumbed to the rotter holocaust, carried live by around-the-clock cable news. The images would remain scarred into Robson’s memory forever. Tokyo in flames. Military units in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square gunning down living and living dead alike. Moscow’s Red Square filled with tens of thousands of swarmers. Zombies crowding the base of the Eiffel Tower trying to get to the handful of survivors left on the structure. New Yorkers trapped and slaughtered along the Hudson River by hordes of swarmers, the river turning crimson with blood and body parts. Marine One lifting off the White House lawn, carrying the First Family to safety as Washington crumbled around them.
    Then cable news had begun going off the air. Most of the correspondents had fallen victim to the swarmers, or to the gangs and thugs that took advantage of the downfall. A few had died on camera while filming, which would have been fantastic for ratings if anyone cared about such shit anymore. Slowly, one by one, as the world’s cities fell to the living dead, the cable news shows had gone silent, followed shortly thereafter by the local channels. An involuntary news blackout had descended across the world. By the third week, the main source of information came from short wave radio, which the survivors used to keep in touch.
    The ones who had survived had been those smart enough to choose the right location to hold out in and who had the courage to cull the infected from their ranks. For the most part these had consisted of secure military facilities, although some civilian enclaves made it through the initial holocaust. The walled, medieval island city of Mont St. Michel off the coast of France. The underground bunker complex built beneath Moscow to withstand nuclear war. The Crimea, until the rotters had learned how to walk under water and had waded ashore near Sebastopol.
    Less populated areas had come through relatively unscathed, at least in the beginning. Thousands who had made it to mountain regions found themselves safe from the living dead, but died en masse from exposure during that first winter. Other areas had fared much better. Most of the smaller Pacific islands. Siberia. The Australian outback. Africa, although by last accounts the continent faced an imminent invasion from millions of rotters wandering south from the Arabian Peninsula.
    And the American Midwest. After abandoning Washington, the President had set up a government-in-exile at Northern Command Headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska. Needing to face the reality that zombies had overrun most of the nation, the President had made the necessary but unpopular decision to write off the two coasts and the urban centers along the borders, and had established a defensive perimeter in the relatively untouched center of the country. The Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River formed natural barriers, although the latter had to be fortified with hundreds of miles