The Coalition: Part 1 The State of Extinction (Zombie Series) Read Free

typed the numbers onto the screens. Well, at least Linden would be happy.
    The last call had been the only sane conversation he had with any of the accounts. Someone picked the phone up on the eighth ring. Cutter had been about to hang up.
    “Hello? Is this the police?” Cutter recognized the voice. It was Dan Stallings at Charlotte Digital. They were a mid-list client, but generally reliable for a decent purchase if you hit them at the right time.
    “This is Ron Cutter,” he told him. A few seconds of silence was his initial reply.
    “What the fuck?” Stallings said. “What are you calling for? They’ve broken in here. They’re breaking in everywhere. What the fuck are you calling about? I can’t help you. I need help.” His voice had started as almost a roar, but had suddenly cranked down several notches to barely a hiss.
    “What’s happening there?” Cutter asked. “Things…things are okay here at Briggs . We’re…we’re all at work today. We’re holding the line,” he said, repeating something the governor had mentioned in one of her recent speeches.
    “Holding the f…” Stalling choked. “Let me tell you something, Cutter. I’m on the 15 th floor of the Union Tower . I can see the entire north half of town from up here. And if I’m not mistaken, I can see the Briggs Stationers ’ warehouse…wait…” Cutter could hear sounds as if Stallings were moving across a room. “Yeah. I can see you guys fine. Only ten blocks north. The streets all around you are packed with what looks like crowds. You guys ain’t having any parades, are you?
    “No, I’ll bet there aren’t any parades due anywhere in town today. So what I think is that all of those people ain’t quite people. And also what I think is that you and yours over there at Briggs are about to be as fucked as we are here at Digital.”
    “Dan? What can you see?” Cutter asked. But there was a crash from Stallings’ end. It sounded as if a door had been thrown open. Stallings obviously had dropped the phone, but Ron heard a voice, a series of curses, followed by screams.
    Then , of course, the phone lines went down.
    Cutter’s office was windowless. He had one of the interior rooms, which had a little more space, but were in the center of the building. Hanging up the now useless phone, he opened his office door and stepped out into the hallway. The silence of the place stunned him . There wasn’t another voice. Nothing at all. Not even the muffled sounds of conversation coming from the break room where there were almost always a couple of people engaged in some kind of talk.
    He went from office to office. Most of the doors were standing open and no one was in any of the rooms he checked. He called out.
    “Ms. Penland?” No answer. “Anyone here?” They had all fled, he realized. While he had been sitting in his interior office making calls to people who were either clueless or insane, the entire population of his workplace had taken their leave. They had obviously gotten out while the getting was good , and not a one of them had bothered to warn him.
    “Shit,” he said. But he’d whispered it. Because he had realized that, he could hear something new. A noise had arisen so slowly and so gradually that it had crept up on him, like a very nasty surprise.
    Even through the windows and walls of the building, he could hear the tramping of feet from outside. As if thousands of people were, as Stallings had said, marching down the streets. But instead of looking out the nearest window, Ron went into one of the smaller cubicles near the break room. He knew that Stacy Drake usually had her computer linked to the Internet, chatting with her Facebook friends whenever she figured no supervisor was hovering around. He would check her computer screen and see what the news feeds were saying. She had been there that morning. Ron had specifically noticed her sitting at her desk when he had gone to his office.
    As he had hoped, her computer