The Last Town (Book 1): Rise of the Dead Read Online Free Page A

Raoul’s place was within walking distance.
    Danielle grunted and turned back to the TV. One of the network talking heads was repeating the guidance from the CDC, adding that the president would be addressing the nation within the hour. In the news scrawl that crept across the bottom of the screen, one of the factoids sent a brief chill up her spine: RIOTERS ATTACK CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL IN JERSEY CITY, NJ—ALL NEWBORNS BELIEVED TO BE DEAD.
    They killed all the babies? Why would they want to do that?
    “Zombies,” Jason Donner said again, as if reading her mind. “They love tender little babies.”
     
     
    LOS ANGELES, CA
     
    “What’ve you got for me, Rog?” Reese said into his phone.
    “The guy’s dead,” Whittaker said immediately.
    “What guy?”
    “The neighbor,” Detective Roger Whittaker said. In the background, Reese could hear Renee talking to someone, probably one of the hospital staff. “He went into some sort of cardiac or respiratory arrest right after he got here. They pronounced him about ten minutes ago.”
    Reese frowned. He had just had a very stressful meeting with the mother of the dead baby, who had arrived at the house in a shiny blue Range Rover. The rest of the cops had faded back when she made her appearance, hovering in the background, making their presence known but more than happy to let Reese handle the bullshit duty of telling her that her baby had been killed by her husband, who had suddenly gone on an inexplicable murderous rampage. She had taken it stoically enough, though her eyes filled with unshed tears when Reese grew evasive about describing exactly how her child had been killed.
    “I’ll have to wait for the lab results before I can make any declarations regarding the cause of death,” he had told her, which was an outright lie. He knew an autopsy of the husband would show that about sixty to seventy percent of the child’s body tissue was inside the man’s stomach, but there was no way he was going to tell that to the suddenly family-less woman from Warner Brothers.
    “My husband came back from Saudi Arabia the day before yesterday,” she said, in a soft voice, eyes bright and shiny in the light of the California day. “He wasn’t feeling well, complained of stomach problems and headaches. Other people on the flight felt the same way, and with everything that’s going on in the news ... could it be the virus they’re talking about? Is that what made him ... do what he did?”
    Reese felt out of the loop. He didn’t pay much attention to the news, not unless it pertained directly to his job, and his job rarely had anything to do with Saudi Arabia. “I’m sorry?”
    “The virus from the Middle East. Did he have it?”
    Reese felt suddenly vulnerable and exposed. While he’d had no contact with the dead perp beyond the cursory examination, he had been all over the man’s house. He had noted the pile of Tumi luggage in the master bedroom, and the copious laundry that needed to be done, so he’d already presumed the man had been on some sort of trip, but he hadn’t begun looking into it yet. And while he knew nothing about a virus or the goings-on in the Middle East, if there was some sort of event happening there, he was not thrilled to discover he might have been standing in a hot zone for the past three hours. He’d been wearing his gloves the entire time, and he avoided contact with any biological contaminants during that time, but what if there really was some sort of virus in the house? How was it transmitted—airborne?
    Could I be infected? he asked himself.
    “Ma’am, we’ll be looking into that,” Reese had told her finally, before offering his condolences and motioning one of the uniformed cops over. He instructed the uni to call for an ambulance to take the woman to a medical facility that had some skills dealing the infectious diseases. While she looked fine to him, Reese was no doctor, and he wanted to ensure that if she was in fact