Zombie Castle (Book 1) Read Online Free Page A

caravan.
    As I was distributing them, the father of one of the children saw what I was doing and walked over to thank us both. We stood and chatted for a while and then I remembered my manners and offered him a drink and a seat.
    He sat down with a glass of wine and introduced himself. His name was Chris and he was on holiday with his wife and ten year old son. They had a nice looking motorhome on the other side of the field so we spent the first few minutes chatting about the pros and cons of caravans versus motorhomes. A little snigger from Becky stopped us.
    ‘Just listen to you two! Tom, you sound like an old man; you must be boring poor Chris to death because I’m certainly losing the will to live!’
    Chris laughed and of course, denied any such thing. The conversation moved on to the kind of topics you tend to discuss with people you’re passing the time with on holiday but know full well you probably won’t be seeing again. In typical British fashion the weather was commented on. Then abruptly, Chris changed the subject.
    ‘Did you see the news tonight?’ he asked.
    ‘No, we were out. Anything interesting?’ I asked.
    He shook his head. ‘Not much. It must have been a slow news day because they reported a cannibal attack at an airport hotel!’ he replied with a grin. ‘It sounded as if two blokes had a fight and one bit the other to me. I guess as there wasn’t much else going on, they felt they had to make it sound more dramatic.’
    Chris’s wife came over to see where her husband had disappeared to and naturally we invited her to join us. We spent a further pleasant hour, drinking and chatting, and then it was time to get the children to bed as we were in danger of losing them in the rapidly descending darkness.
    Once the children were settled into their cosy bunk beds, we went back outside and finished our drinks. As Wi-Fi was available on the campsite, I reached for my phone and began checking my emails, deleting any junk messages. Remembering what Chris had said about the cannibal attack, I did a quick search out of idle curiosity.
    I navigated my way to the main news websites and tapped in the word ‘cannibal’. This brought up a few reports about an incident at a Heathrow Airport hotel in which a number of people, including two paramedics who had been attending at an emergency, had been treated for severe bite injuries.
    On one of the websites I found a link to some video footage of the event. The footage was shaky and unclear as it had been taken on a mobile phone; in fact it didn’t show anything much apart from screaming people pushing and shoving each other in a bid to escape from something.
    Not giving it another thought, I put my phone on charge and we both went to bed.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    Starting with Vladimir Petrov and his colleagues, the infection rate had doubled at every stage of the virus’s rapid progress. From the initial one hundred and fifteen infected on Vladimir’s first flight from the Ukraine to Moscow, the number was now in the tens of thousands, and growing by the second. It would shortly be affecting millions, as it spread outwards like an unstoppable tide from most major airports. In spite of being the first place affected, the isolated outbreak at a small Black Sea coastal town went largely unnoticed. It was a small town, separated by the marshes and miles of road from its nearest neighbour.
    Few people visited the resort now that the base had closed down, so the fact that within twelve hours of Vladimir leaving, the entire town had become a mass graveyard and was crawling with zombies would never be known. Had Vladimir not left, the virus might not have spread far. The government might have discovered the outbreak and although more people would have been infected from bites, a quarantine zone could have been established and under conditions of strict secrecy and a complete media blackout, the problem could have been quietly eradicated, leaving the government scientists