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CHAPTER ONE
Little Rock, Arkansas:
The EMTs wheeled the man on the stretcher through the emergency room doors at a fast trot. A waiting doctor called out for them to put him in room two before giving orders to the staff nearby to prep the injured man. The two paramedics wasted no time in transferring the patient onto the examination table and then faded back along the curtain wall to watch the E.R. workers in action.
In seconds, the nurses had the patients clothing cut off, an airway inserted and an IV started in the back of his hand. The doctor came through an opening in the drapes that closed off the examination room and grimaced at the sight of the man lying on the table.
“Car accident,” One of the EMT’s offered as the doctor called for X-rays and blood work before starting his visual examination.
“No seat belt,” The other EMT chimed in. “We were the first on the scene. Car he was in rolled maybe three or four times before ending up nose down in a ditch.” He stopped talking as he moved out of the way of an X-ray technician wheeling in his equipment.
The doctor waved one hand in an impatient ‘come on’ gesture as he used the other to open the eyelid of the victim to check the dilation of his pupils. Doctor Wendover was a firm believer in the practice of Impact Injury Identification and felt that a physician could better ascertain a victim’s injuries if he knew more about the accident that caused them.
The EMT who had been speaking cleared his throat and continued, “Two passengers in the front seats were DOTS.”
Doctor Wendover nodded at the acronym for Dead On The Spot as the paramedic motioned to his partner and said, “Jim here started doing a walk around with a Sheriff’s deputy who showed up and they found the victim, identified by I.D. on his person as one Darryl Turp, about twenty feet from where the car first hit when it rolled.”
At this point, Jim, the other EMT, took over the narrative. “He’d been thrown clear from a position we estimated as being in the rear seat directly behind the driver. Appears he went out the back window headfirst but that isn’t what did all the cranial damage. He impacted a stone wall.”
The doctor’s face winced slightly as he compared the damage to his patient with the account.
To further clarify the accident, Jim said, “You know those sound barriers that they put up along Cedar Road?”
The doctor nodded.
“He went straight into one. We stabilized his head, neck and spine before transporting him here.”
A nurse called out the patient’s vital signs as the X-ray technician took over. Starting with the man’s head, he worked his way down to the victims’ lower back taking twenty-seven shots in all. Twelve of them being head X-rays.
The technician had seen a lot of damage inflicted on the human body in his eight years at the hospital, and this was hardly one of the worst injuries he had ever seen, but it was definitely one of the oddest. The patients’ skull had been literally flattened at the top from its collision with the stone wall. Not crushed, or dented, as he had seen with other head wounds, but flattened so that the man looked like Herman Munster from the old television show.
“I want those stat.” The doctor told the X-ray tech and then called out again for his patients’ vital signs. As a matter of treatment, he ordered steroids be injected into the IV to combat the brain swelling going on inside the victim’s skull. As the nurse called out blood pressure and pulse, Doctor Wendover nodded. The good news was that despite the head trauma, the victim of the crash was doing surprisingly well. There appeared to be no signs of bleeding inside the cranium and, despite the obvious crushed skull, the man appeared stable. The bad news was that in the long run it wouldn’t matter.
Doctor Wendover had worked as a surgeon at a forward base in Iraq during the invasion and had seen numerous head trauma cases brought in. He had learned from his experience in that desert war that the human brain could not sustain this much damage and go on functioning at anything but a completely diminished capacity. If at all.
As if to prove this point, the EEG monitor came to life, showing a bare minimum of activity. Wendover knew there was little he could do for his patient but decided not to let his suffering be in vain. A case like this would have to be worked up anyway, and since it was somewhat unique in that the man was even alive at all, the injuries would need to be documented. While there would be no reprieve for Mister Turp, what they learned from him might help others. With these noble thoughts going through his mind, Doctor Wendover gave the orders that would have consequences felt around the world.
“Have him cleaned up and send him over for another run of X-rays and then send him over to Neurology. Have them run him through the new deep scan MRI over there so we can get a clear picture of the damage. When they’re done, pass everything on to the neurologist.”
One of the E.R. nurses, who had worked with speed and efficiency up until the EEG came back flat, acknowledged the order with the barest of nods as she went about the business of moving the brain dead lump of flesh from point A to point B.
The doctor told his staff to call him if there was any change in the man’s condition, and followed by the EMT’s, went out to have a quick smoke. As they exited the hospital, Jim, the Paramedic who had found the victim spoke up. “Did I ever tell you guys about Jimmy and Suzy Carrot?”
The two other men shook their heads as they lit up cigarettes.
“Well Jimmy and Suzy Carrot were walking down the road one day when a truck comes along and BAM! Runs right over Jimmy Carrot. They rush him to the hospital where the surgeon works on him for six hours straight. When he’s done, the doctor walks out into the waiting room where he finds Suzy Carrot crying her eyes out. She sees the doctor and rushes over to him asking how Jimmy is.”
“The doc says, ‘I’ve got good news and bad news.’ So Suzy says, ‘Give me the good news first.’ The doc says, ‘The good news is that Jimmy Carrot will live.’ Relieved by this, Suzy Carrot asks, ‘What’s the bad news?’ and the doc says, ‘The bad news is that he’ll be a vegetable for the rest of his life.”
The three men laughed as they stood in the cooling Arkansas night.
***
Darryl Turp was hungry but then again he was always hungry. One of those rare people who suffer from Prader-Willi syndrome, a condition caused by bacteria attacking his hypothalamus, he had an insatiable appetite. Even now, with his head crushed and his mind dwelling in the twilight area of a coma between life and death, the basic instincts in what was left of his ruined brain called out for food.
Normally, Turp’s medication alleviated his compulsion to eat to some degree but on the night of the accident he had purposely neglected to take it. He knew he was playing with fire but sometimes he just couldn’t resist. He loved to eat.
Although the consequences of his disease could be harsh, cases had been reported of people eating so much that their esophagus burst, Darryl was willing to play around with his medication dosage when certain opportunities presented themselves. Like that evening for instance. It was all you can eat night at Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Finger lickin’ good.
Now lying on a hospital gurney, Darryl has no recollection of the accident. In fact he had no recollection of living the past twenty-eight years of his life, but he did recognize that he was starved. Although most of his brain had ceased to function, his disease still sent the signals to his body telling it that it needed nourishment. It was this compulsion that led to the car wreck in the first place.
He had been riding in the rear of his friends’ car, urging him to go faster as he pounded on the back of the driver’s seat in rhythm to his chant of ‘speed for feed’, when his fist went past the edge of the seat and hit his friend on the arm. The car swerved onto the soft shoulder of the road at seventy miles per hour, and when the driver overcorrected while trying to regain the asphalt, struck a discarded tire and started to roll. The front end came down first, causing all the windows to burst outward and the impact to push Darryl down in his seat before the counter force ejected him neatly out the missing rear window without his body even touching the molding around it. He was aware of the car rolling away from him as he sailed through the air, and looking down, saw deep soft grass and thought he was going to make it. Until he looked up and saw the wall rushing toward him.
What had once been Darryl Turp felt movement as the gurney he was laid out on started its trip down the long brightly lit halls of the hospital? Too many times to count, his body was transferred onto hard sterile surfaces where his head was subjected to multiple X-rays, CAT scans, MRI’s, and finally a full work up by the resident Neurologist.
If Doctor Wendover had waited for Darryl’s blood work and chart before ordering this series of tests, he would never have subjected his patient to a bombardment of steroids, radiation, and magnetic resonance. He would have noted that the man suffered from Prader-Willi syndrome, and after consulting with various neurosurgeons and radiologists, would decide it was best to leave Darryl a vegetable to wither slowly on life support. Just another Jimmy Carrot. Instead, he created a monster.
The steroids mutated the Prader-Willi bacteria that infected Darryl, while the diagnostic scans and radiation then caused the disease to become more active in seeking out and opening long dormant areas of the brain while shutting others down in its quest to evolve. This new strain multiplied at a rapid rate and quickly crossed the biological barriers to infect all the body’s living tissue and nervous system. Like any bacteria, this new strain was then vulnerable to infection and was attacked by a variety of the H1N1 flu that Darryl had been fighting for the past few days. This further distorted the bacteria, creating an entire new strain. Now it had become a communicable virus, one that had never been seen before on the face of the earth.
By the time Darryl was halfway back to the ICU unit where he would be kept for future study; his body had given over completely to the new disease, which then started shutting down all functions that sustained life so that it could complete its biological takeover. Shortly after being moved onto his new bed in intensive care, the virus caused Darryl to have a seizure and go into cardiac arrest. Within seconds his heart failed.
Since he had been the admitting physician, Doctor Wendover was called and arrived just in time to watch the ICU doctor pronounce Darryl dead. The two doctors then went to fill out the resulting paperwork, leaving an attendant to cover the deceased and move the late mister Turp to the morgue.
The attendant, a man by the name of Jodi, removed the airway and medical monitors, tightened down a strap around the body’s chest, and arranged its hands in a reverent manner before covering the dead man’s face with a sheet. He unlocked the wheels on the bed and had just started out of the room when Darryl’s body gave a spastic jerk. From past experience, Jodi was used to different reactions from the dead so he wasn’t too concerned. Some burped, farted, and he even had one sit up when he had forgotten to secure the chest strap.
He remembered that particular instance with good and bad memories. He had been wheeling the deceased past a crowd of nurses at shift change and there was about eight of them clustered in the hallway going over charts. With a blast of intestinal gas, the dead body he was transporting lurched into a sitting position as the sheet dropped away from its face. The nurses stopped what they were doing and looked at the scene with a variety of expressions ranging from disgust to amusement.
Seeing he had an audience, Jodi stepped back, raised his hands to the heavens, and in his best mad doctor voice said, “It’s alive. Alive I say.”
Two of the nurses laughed, one of them being a cute redhead he later talked into going out with him, and that was the upside.
The downside was that one of the other nurses present, who happened to be the head floor nurse, did not find him amusing and filled a complaint against him for unprofessional behavior. Got to take the good with the bad, Jodi thought. At least I ended up doing the redhead so it wasn’t a complete loss.
As Jodi wheeled the cadaver down the hall past the nurses’ station, it jerked again and then suddenly began thrashing from side to side and its hands began moving under the sheet. Stopping abruptly as he watched what was supposed to be a corpse do the herky-jerk, Jodi thought, holy shit this guy’s moving too much to be dead. I think the doc screwed up and he’s alive.
It was true that Darryl Turp was moving, but Jodi was wrong in thinking that he was alive. The bacteria had shut down his cardiovascular activity and brought all of his bodily functions to a halt while the new mutant parasite that infected Darryl only reactivated the lower functioning sections of his brain. The heart did not pump, nor did the lungs take in oxygen and put out carbon dioxide, but the brain’s base instincts had been awakened and the body’s nervous system was now operating. The hypothalamus had taken over command of the part of the brain that drove humans to seek sustenance and it now sent an urgent message to the body.
Feed.
Jodi looked around wildly for help, only to see the last person in the world he wanted nearby at that moment. It was the same bitchy nurse with no sense of humor who had written him up for doing his mad doctor imitation. And she was watching him.
The nurse glanced at the writhing body and a scowl darkened her features before she pinned Jodi with a sharp look. She was about to open her mouth and tell him to quit fooling around or she would have him fired, when she noticed the shocked expression on his face.
Just then, the body jerked again, and this time a hand came out from under the sheet to grope around on its chest to try and find what was restraining it.
“He’s-he’s-he’s-alive,” Jodi stammered out.
The nurse flew into action. Calling on reinforcements, she ran around the desk and elbowed Jodi out of the way as she grabbed the front of the wheeled bed and started pushing the body back into the room it had come out of. When she had it inside, she pulled the sheet off the dead man. Seeing he was gnashing his teeth and whipping his head back and forth, she grabbed one of his flailing arms so she could try and get a pulse.
“Call the doctors back,” she yelled to no one in particular as she finally managed to get a finger on where the patient’s radial pulse should be. Feeling nothing and assuming it might be too weak to detect, she grabbed the blood pressure cuff and wrapped it around the late Darryl Turp’s arm as another nurse tried to place a respirator over his face. Darryl’s whole body had turned grayish-blue, showing signs of what she thought was cyanosis, but what was really just the color of the dead.
Jodi was standing nearby, watching all this with amazement, when the head nurse turned to him and yelled harshly, “I told you to get those doctors back in here. Now move.”
“I don’t know where they went,” Jodi replied helplessly.
A page came over the public address system, calling for Doctor’s Rahjib and Wendover to come to the ICU on the double. Another voice called out from down the hall that the crash cart was on the way. Jodi pointed up at the ceiling from where the announcement had come over the speaker mounted there, as if in answer to the nurse’s order, and stood his ground. He didn’t want to miss any of this.
She shook her head and replied, “You have to go down to the doctor’s lounge on three and check. The speaker in there is busted so they won’t hear the summons.”
Reluctantly, Jodi trudged down the hall and went through the door that led to the stairs. He was disappointed that he would miss all the action and paused for a moment, saying, “Shit,” before continuing on. He knew that any time a page went out for one of the doctors that the nurses on three sent a candy striper to the lounge with the broken P.A. system to check if the doc being paged was there. As he made his way down the stairs to the third floor, he cursed the head nurse who had sent him on this fool’s errand. Not understanding that she had just saved his life.
Even as Jodi was halfway down the first flight of stairs, Doctor Wendover and Doctor Rahjib raced down the hall toward Darryl’s room from the other direction. Entering it, they took in the situation at a glance and moved forward to look at the now struggling patient whom they had pronounced dead only minutes before.
“Vitals,” Doctor Rahjib called out.
The nurse looked down and said, “Blood pressure’s-,” then stopped with a confused look on her face.
“Yes, yes, the blood pressure it is?” Rahjib demanded.
“Zero over zero.” She replied.
All eyes broke away from their various tasks to stare at the moving body on the bed. Doctor Wendover broke their trance by gently easing the nurse out of the way and inflating the blood pressure cuff himself.
Looking at the reading he said, “It must be broke. Someone go get another machine from the room next door.”
A nurse hurriedly left as Rahjib asked Wendover, “What is it reading?”
“Zero over zero,” he answered, “it’s got to be broke.” Turning toward the door, he yelled after the vanished nurse, “We need that machine now, on the double. Chop, chop.”
The room now held six medical staff and the patient, but it wasn’t crowded. The rooms in the ICU had been designed with twice the space of those in the rest of the hospital to accommodate situations where the patient needed multiple hands on them to keep them alive. The nurse came back in with a blood pressure monitor and strapped the cuff around Darryl’s arm. The machine whirred as the cuff inflated and deflated. Looking at the readout she said dumbfounded, “Zero over zero.”
Frustrated that nothing seemed to be working right, and worried at his liability in this situation, Doctor Rahjib let loose his anger on the nurse.
“Why isn’t that heart monitor hooked up?” He demanded, as he pointed to the wire leads hanging loose over the side of the bed. “Do it now,” He barked.
The nurse hurried to reconnect them to the monitor. When she was done, she jumped back quickly from the slowly writhing, teeth gnashing body on the bed. She had only worked in the medical field for two years, and didn’t have as much experience as some of the others in the room, but she had a strong feeling that something was wrong here. The grotesque head injury could explain the way the patient kept biting down as if trying to chew but she had been in the room when the man had died and she knew he was dead. She had been amazed upon first seeing him as he was wheeled onto the floor that he had even lived through his initial accident and had prayed that he went peacefully instead of suffering.
The heart monitor came to life, showing a flat-line and the digital readout showed a steady pulse of zero, but the gauge monitoring the patient’s body temperature did give a reading of 94 degrees.
“You incompetent,” Rahjib burst out. “You need to make sure that the leads are connected correctly to the patient.”
Pointing at where two of the round discs had been removed so that the attendant could get the chest strap around the body, he said angrily, “Reconnect them now, you idiot.”
The young nurse, tired of the arrogant way Doctor Rahjib ordered the staff around and generally freaked out and scared by the present circumstances, snapped back, “Do it yourself you Pakistani goat fucker,” and stormed from the room, grateful to be gone even if the outburst had cost her job.
Rahjib considered going after the insolent nurse and firing her on the spot but decided to deal with it later. Right now he had to clean up, and cover up, the mess he had made when he pronounced an obviously living patient as dead.
After removing the cervical collar and failing to find a pulse at his patient’s throat, Rahjib leaned over to loosen the chest strap so he could reconnect the leads for the heart monitor. This was when he noticed the patients’ eyelids fluttering. The man had been keeping them tightly clenched up until now and the doctor took this new development to be a good sign.
As Rahjib loosened the clasp, letting the restraining belt fall to either side, the thing that had been Darryl Turp rolled its eyelids wide and let out a whine. Slowly it opened its mouth in what Rahjib took to be a smile so the doctor leaned over and smiled back saying, “You’re going to be all right now, sir. You have the best medical staff in the world working on you. Just relax.”
***
It opened its eyes to a red blur that slowly began to clear. It had no conscious thought of who or what it was, or who or what it had been, as it had no memory to call upon. To It, Darryl Turp did not now or ever exist. The red tint remained as its vision cleared and it struggled to focus on the object in front of it. Moving felt awkward and sluggish, and if it had a memory, it would equate the sluggish motor responses to the time Darryl Turp had drank a bottle of tequila and then ate the worm. Although its reactions were slow, its senses were tuned to a fine edge. It realized quickly by the rich, salty smell that in front of it was its one purpose for being, the one thing it craved above all else.
Food.
Reaching up with a tentative hand, it suddenly knew that if it didn’t move faster its prey was going to back away and escape to leave it hungry. With a sudden lunge, it grabbed the object in front of it and dragged it down to its mouth.
Doctor Wendover let out a scream like a little girl watching her pet dog getting run over in the street when he saw the patient grab Rahjib by the hair at the back of his head. His eyes bulged as it pulled the doctor’s face down to his mouth and tore a chunk out his lower left cheek with its teeth. Blood gushed, but even through the torrent of red Wendover could see Rahjib’s jawbone glaring white through the gaping wound as a huge flap of skin and meat were ripped away.
The room broke into pandemonium with cries of revulsion and calls to restrain the patient coming from all sides. Two nurses struggled to pull Doctor Rahjib from the grip of his attacker but only succeeded in being bitten themselves. One on the arm and the other on the little finger. Both fled the room trailing blood. Rahjib straightened up as he tried to back away, dragging his assailant into a sitting position as he beat helplessly against its back.
Still holding onto Rahjib, it chewed quickly and swallowed the small chunk of flesh it had bitten off the nurses’ arm before plunging its teeth into the soft neck of its original food source, this time severing Rahjib’s carotid artery and sending a fountain of blood into the air.
Chewing vigorously on a wad of neck muscle before swallowing it and then tearing loose another, it seemed unaware of the people running around the room screaming until it realized that the food in its grip was dead. Although it would eat dead meat when none other was available, it preferred fresh. Dropping the body of Rahjib onto the floor, it looked around the room until its eyes locked on Doctor Wendover, standing frozen in shock a few feet away. A surge of saliva rushed out of its mouth, mingling with the blood on its face and tingeing it pink as it dropped its feet to the floor and advanced the Doctor in three quick steps.
***
When the two security guards arrived on the floor, they were greeted by confused shouts and orders coming at them from all directions. They finally made out enough of the story that the frightened nurses and interns babbled at them to figure out that a patient had gone berserk and was attacking the hospital staff.
Although the two men carried tasers, they were hesitant to draw them from their holsters. They knew that even tasing a crazy person attacking someone could leave them liable to a lawsuit. After a quick conference, they decided to check out the situation and then move in to overpower the patient from two directions. Both men were over six foot tall and weighed over two hundred pounds, so they were confident that they could subdue even the most violent of suspects.
Cautiously, they approached the room where they had been told the attacker was hiding. Reaching the door, the first guard peeked around the corner and then quickly withdrew. Turning, he moved past his partner and started vomiting onto the floor. The sight he had just witnessed burned into his brain for the rest of his short life.
Seeing this reaction from his partner, the second security guard moved forward and hesitantly looked into the room, fearful of what he might see. The thing that caught his eye was the blood. At first glance it appeared as if someone had filled a super soaker squirt gun with the stuff, pumped it up to full pressure, and then let loose on the walls, floor and even the ceiling. The guard then noticed a body lying crumpled next to the bed and a nude figure bent over another body in a red lab coat stretched out on the floor near the back of the room. It appeared that the naked man was giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to the supine man but the guard dismissed this as he focused on the body in the lab coat. Something was wrong with this picture. The guard’s shocked mind tried to register why the man lying on the floor was wearing a red lab coat instead of a white one but came up blank. Then in a flash, he realized that the coat, like most other surfaces in the room, was soaked in blood.
Seeing no one else in the room waiting to attack, the guard thought to move forward and assist the man trying to revive the doctor on the floor. As he opened his mouth to say something reassuring, the nude man looked up at him and whined.
The second guard now realized why his partner had lost it and started vomiting. He wasn’t sure what exactly his associate had seen, but if it were anything like what he was watching, it would be a wonder if either one of them kept their sanity.
Hanging from the mouth of the nude man were the freshly bitten off lips of Doctor Wendover. Looking closer at the body on the floor, the security man could see that half of the doctor’s face had been chewed away. Switching his attention back to the nude man, he watched as the blood covered thing that had once been Darryl Turp reached up and pushed the dangling lips into its mouth before chewing and swallowing.
The other guard returned from emptying his stomach contents onto the hallway tiles and joined his co-worker. The two exchanged a look of resolution as they moved into place in the wide doorway leading into the slaughterhouse. They entered in one quick motion while talking soothingly to the man who had gone back to cannibalizing Doctor Wendover’s face. Splitting up to circle in from different directions, they used hand signs to alert each other as to their future moves as they quickly wove their way around the medical equipment now littering the floor.
As the two guards closed in on it, it noticed them and got jerkily to its feet to meet their attack. At this point it had no intention of feeding off the intruders. It was simply wanted to defend its food. If by chance it ripped off a piece of flesh in the process of doing this it certainly wouldn’t spit it out, but the sooner the interruption was over, the sooner it could return to feeding on Doctor Wendover.
The security man on the right moved first, lunging for the assailant. At the same time the guard moved, the late Darryl Turp attacked, leaning forward to let its weight fall into the guard. The dead and the living grappled for only seconds before the guard jerked back with a bite on his forearm.
The second guard had moved in by this time and put it into a chokehold. The nude thing thrashed back and forth, trying to throw off its captor. In the long run, it would succeed for the simple reason that it would outlast the guard. It had no need of either air or blood flow and did not require rest.
The first guard recovered quickly from the shock of being bitten and had the presence of mind to see that they weren’t dealing with something they could subdue with ordinary methods. Drawing his taser, he yelled to his partner, “Let him go, I’m gonna zap his ass.”
The second guard realized this was easier said than done. If he let loose the chokehold, the madman would whirl around and attack him. The old saying about riding the tiger flashed through his mind.
Frantic now, it clawed at the arm around its neck, digging furrows in the skin with its nails as its saliva flowed into the fresh wounds on the guards arm. Still shaking back and forth, it suddenly stopped moving as it lost interest in the struggle. The need for food had once again taken over to dominate its entire being. Since it could not reach the arm that had grabbed onto it, it looked around for something to eat. Sensing that the one it had been feeding on earlier was still alive, it turned around to resume eating. Ignoring the security guard still hanging from it, it moved toward Doctor Wendover. Seeing his chance, the guard took this brief respite and pushed the nude man away with his free arm before jumping back. As the walking dead man bent over the barely breathing body of Doctor Wendover to continue its meal, there was a sharp popping noise as the guard with the taser pulled the trigger on his weapon. The prongs dug into its back as a half second later, 70,000 volts of electricity surged through its nervous system.
Although a charge of that strength would normally render its victim immobile or unconscious, when it struck the dead man it did much more than that. With its primitive nervous system functioning in fits and starts as it propelled the corpse in its search of food, the charge from the taser instantly disrupted this erratic series of electrical pulses and caused the late Darryl Turp’s nervous system to shut down completely. This time permanently.
Shaken, the two guards surveyed the room, unable to do anything but stare at the carnage.
Hearing silence after the screaming and crashing of the fight between the madman and the guards, a nurse tentatively looked into the room. Seeing the patient immobile on the ground, she called for help. The room quickly filled with medical staff that turned to the task of tending to the dead and wounded.
The two security guards were ushered into another room where their injuries were treated. The intern who cared for the men, who had himself been bitten on the forearm a few years previously while trying to subdue an out of control crack head, warned them to keep the wounds clean. Using the scar on his own arm as an example, he went on to explain that a bite from a human being was more likely to get infected than a bite from any other animal because the human mouth carried so many germs. Both men took this advice and sincerely promised to wash their injuries three times a day and to use the antibiotic ointment provided them.
The intern, though correct in his concern that germs could contaminate the bites, was too late with his warning. An infection was already coursing through the two men he was treating and everyone else who had been bitten.
Book title book blurb:When a man suffering from a rare disease receives a debilitating head injury, the treatment given him mutates his affliction into a highly contagious virus. As the disease spreads, it first kills its victims and then reanimates them into beings that are compelled to eat ravenously and crave human flesh.
In Clearwater, Florida, Steve Wendell is following the stories of people attacking each other, but is unaware of the severity of the situation. When Heather Johansen, a Sheriff’s Deputy who is interested in Steve as more than a friend, tells him the real story of cities being overrun by the dead, Steve makes plans to barricade himself in the fifteen story bank building where the radio station he manages has its suite of offices.
After locking himself in with Heather and eight others, the group continues to broadcast live as the dead surround their redoubt and search for a way in. Coming across a ten year-old girl that is immune to the disease, the group tries to find a way to transport her across a land filled with the flesh-eating dead to a government facility where she can be studied and a cure found.
Author bio:
Jon Schafer (One of the top 100 horror authors on Amazon) is an artist, a writer and used to design amusement parks, casinos and family entertainment centers as well as owning his own architectural design firm.
He loves to write and has traveled around the world so he uses a lot of his life’s experience in the background of his books.
He served in the Marine Corps and, while he would never do it again in a million years, cherishes every minute and memory of that time.
His first book, Dead Air, is number one of a four book Zombie apocalypse series, with book two, Dead Calm, also on sale. Dead Weight, book three of The Dead Series, is in production and will be out soon. His other book, Immigrant Song, takes a hard look at illegal immigration but with a twist. All his books are Indie written, edited, promoted and produced.
He is a Master Diver and Dive Master through PADI, so to be near some of the best diving in the world he currently resides in St. Petersburg, Florida. He still uses a Zippo lighter.
When you finish one of his books, please rate and review it. He relies on his readers to tell him how they liked his work and doesn’t have family and friends flesh out his reviews.
Connect with the author:
FACEBOOK Jonscatbooks
