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

indeed was logged onto the Internet. She had left it on, set at her Facebook page. Ron hadn’t meant to pry, but the last message from her mother was just…there. He couldn’t avoid it.
    Stacy. Come home. Someone has killed your father.
    Ron had peered down at his feet. His left foot kept hitting something. It was Stacy’s pocketbook. She had obviously just grabbed her car keys and fled. Sitting there, looking down at that pocketbook, containing everything that a woman of Drake’s station needed to move around—her ID, her charge cards, her license, her cash—he felt his stomach drop.
    He had been an idiot. A total fool . He had allowed Linden to manipulate him. He had allowed the governor to convince him that he was holding the fucking line . The government had said they were going to handle this.
    They were all a bunch of goddamned liars and he had fallen for it.
    He went back to the screen and hit the bookmarks, hoping Stacy-the-office-clerk had at least one or two news site set up. CNN was on her favorites and he clicked the tab.
    Ron stared at the screen. It was a still shot at Times Square. Dozens…no it was hundreds; hundreds of people were lying in pools of blood and entrails as an army of the dead were devouring them . Men, women and children were killing and eating men, women and children. Beneath the photo were the words: THE DEAD KILL
    At that instant, the Internet crashed. The lights in the office flickered twice, three times, and then went dark.
    Standing, Cutter had plucked his cell phone from his pocket. It was also dead. “Goddamn.” He just muttered it to himself and wandered out of his office into the hallway.
    As soon as he walked out, he saw Lacy Morgan coming toward him. She was the best-looking woman in the building, and it was always assumed that Linden was nailing her. Of course, no one knew for sure, but the signs seemed to point that way. Immediately , Cutter could tell that she was dazed.
    “Lacy? Are you okay?” he asked. He could see no one else , and it was definite by this time that , they had all fled. His fellow employees had left him alone with the main squeeze of his boss . Not even the laborers who loaded the trucks were making their usual noise from the warehouse.
    “It’s Mr. Linden,” she said. “Vickie Penland told me that Mr. Linden was acting strange this morning. Out of sorts. I told her that I’d go speak to him. Mr. Linden always listens to me when he’s cranky, you know.” By this time, Lacy had come much closer, splitting the distance between them. She was wearing a short ocean-blue dress, showing off her great legs and a good bit of ample cleavage. Cutter could also see that her right hand was covering a wound on her left upper arm.
    “Lacy?” Cutter stopped, seeing the blood seeping between her fingers.
    Before he could say another word or move at all, Mr. Linden suddenly surged around the corner of the hallway, looming behind Lacy Morgan like the wall of animated flesh he had become. His own shirt was stained with blood. You could see that he had been injured at some point and had put a crude bandage over the wound, and now that crude bandage of gauze and tape had peeled away, blood soaking through his neatly starched white shirt. He’d come into work all the same, trying to pretend he would be just fine as soon as he dabbed on a little antibiotic .
    With hardly a sound , Linden put his huge, bluish paws on his confused mistress. Before either, she or Cutter could say or do anything at all; dead Linden leaned forward and took a hideously huge bite out of Lacy’s long and flawless neck. Finally, realizing what pain truly was, she screamed. Cutter screamed, too, knowing now that everyone else had either run, or were perhaps bleeding and lying quite dead in some corner of the place, and perhaps about to get back up.
    At that moment, he knew that he was on his own.
    **
    The first thing he did was flee that scene of horror. There was nothing that could be