Zombie Castle (Book 1) Read Free Page A

action. Having come to a decision, they returned to the laboratory to continue fabricating test data.
    As the ageing Russian jet heaved itself into the sky, Vladimir smiled to himself. He had only just made the flight in time and had been forced to abandon his car in the passenger drop off area and sprint to the check in desk. He didn’t care; he wasn’t going to need that clapped out car again anyway.
    He was feeling slightly hot and flushed, but attributed it to the dash through the airport to get to the gate. The flight had left on time so he would have plenty of time to catch his next flight when he arrived in Moscow. Hopefully he wouldn’t have to rush anywhere again for the rest of his life.
    An hour into the short two and a half hour flight, Vladimir was still feeling slightly feverish. He dismissed it, putting it down to a night without sleep and over excitement. He sneezed again. Tiny droplets of fluid sprayed from his mouth and nose and spread out in an invisible cloud, covering anyone in close proximity with a microscopic layer of virus-filled moisture. The air-conditioning system did the rest, sucking up the droplets and distributing them efficiently around the packed plane. Not everyone was infected, it was purely a matter of chance. But by the time the plane had reached its destination, over eighty five percent of the passengers were playing host to the mutated virus. It continued its silent journey inside their bodies, still developing but not yet ready to reveal itself to an unsuspecting world. Not just yet.
    More than half the passengers on the flight, Vladimir included, were transiting through Moscow Airport and would shortly be scattering to all points of the globe. They all made straight for their relevant departure lounges to await their next flights. The rest collected their luggage, left the airport and made their way to their final destinations. They were picked up by friends or relatives, collected their own cars or made use of the highly efficient public transport system Moscow was so famous for. More than eighty five percent of them had unknowingly become carriers for the deadly virus, spreading it with every breath, cough or touch.
    Vladimir and the seventy other passengers who were waiting for their next flights were heading for twenty different airports in thirteen different countries. Some of them, like Vladimir, would be continuing their journey on a third flight.
    By now the virus was spreading from Vladimir and his fellow carriers to many of the other passengers waiting for flights in the departure lounge.
    If anyone had realised at the time, all the passengers could have been isolated and the virus might have been stopped in its tracks. The threat of infection from the people who had left the airport might also have been contained, or at least controlled.
    But once all the passengers had dispersed and continued on their respective journeys the damage was done: the virus would now multiply exponentially, which is the reason why experts on infectious diseases break into a cold sweat at the thought of international air travel.
    Prediction models have been produced by those same experts, showing how one single infected subject could, given the right conditions, infect the majority of the world’s population in a very short space of time. The problem was, it was not just one subject now. With almost single minded efficiency, the virus had infected almost everyone who had come into contact with it.
    A few hours later, Vladimir boarded a British Airways flight to London. Having been the first person infected, he was showing more signs that the others and was starting to feel lousy. Over the course of the four hour flight his condition deteriorated, developing rapidly into full blown flu-like symptoms. His body ached all over and he fluctuated between burning up and experiencing uncontrollable shivering fits. The flight attendants could see that he was ill, but accepted his explanation that it