Fall of Night (Dead of Night Series) Read Online Free PDF

spoke with Oscar Price, his CIA handler. He put everything on a set of flash drives and gave them to Trout.”
    “Jesus,” said Ruddy.
    “As protocol blunders go,” said Blair, “it boggles the mind. Naturally we are looking for Dr. Volker. Forensics teams are tearing apart his office at the prison where he worked and his home.”
    “Where is he?” asked the president. “Can’t we find the man?”
    “We are looking, Mr. President. Every possible resource is in play.”
    “Will we find him?”
    “I have no doubt we’ll find him,” said Blair. “However, we should consider the obvious alternative.”
    “Which is?”
    “Getting those drives from Billy Trout,” said Blair. “By any means necessary.”

 
    CHAPTER ELEVEN
    BORDENTOWN STARBUCKS ON ROUTE 653
    BORDENTOWN, PENNSYLVANIA
    Goat looked through the windows at the storm. The night sky was still black but the rain had slowed to a gentle drizzle. From where he sat he could see the lines of red taillights and white headlights on the highway. He wondered how many of those travelers knew what was happening?
    Probably all of them by now.
    The story was everywhere. It was the only story on the news right now, and Goat suspected that half of those oncoming headlights were reporters trying to get to Stebbins while the story was still breaking. He had already seen ABC, CBS, and CNN vans come through.
    He trolled the online real-time news. FOX was the first to pull the word “zombie” out of the info dump of the Volker interview.
    Zombie Plague in Pennsylvania.
    Goat snorted. It sounded like an SNL skit.
    Wasn’t funny at all.
    He looked down at the clock on his laptop. Ten minutes to one in the morning. It wasn’t even twenty-four hours since this thing started. It felt like a year. The night had been so goddamn long.
    As soon he’d gotten to the Starbucks, the first thing Goat did was to download the files from the flash drives Volker had given Billy and emailed the contents to himself at several accounts. He copied the email to Trout and their editor, Murray Klein. He wanted to send the stuff directly to the other media. Huffington Post, Daily Beast, Rolling Stone, all the others. But Billy had suggested holding off on that. It was their only hole card in case the feds tried something.
    Which they would inevitably do, mused Goat. He wondered what he would do if he was in their place. Would he kill to make the situation go away, to hide the blame. Would that protect the public and prevent a panic? Goat wasn’t sure. Ethical issues like that seemed clear until you were standing up close, then all perspective became skewed. He hoped he would have the moral courage to do the right thing, but that opened a door to concepts of “greater good” and what that might actually mean.
    It was so hard to think it through and come up with a workable plan.
    The president was scheduled to speak soon. Originally the word was that POTUS would address the nation at three thirty in the morning, but the speech was moved up to one thirty. On any other day that alone would be highly weird for a presidential address. A lot of people here on the East Coast would be asleep; the West Coast would be in the last hour of prime time. However Goat didn’t think anyone but the most abjectly stupid, indifferent, or uninformed would be sleeping or watching sitcoms. And it wasn’t just the nation watching this story. The Net proved that the whole world was watching.
    A couple of hours ago most of the world—hell, most of the state—had never heard of Stebbins. Now Goat knew that it would become a part of the common language. You’d be able to say “Stebbins” the way you said “the Towers” or the “Boston Marathon” and everyone would know what you meant.
    Stories like this changed the world. If not in fact then in perception, by gouging a marker into a page of history. Days like this, events like this, were hinge-points on which history turned.
    This story was about to blow up