Pandora: A Novel of the Zombie Apocalypse Read Online Free PDF Page A

“Oh, I hear Emily calling me from upstairs now.” Still smiling she turned back to Michael and said, “I have to go. I have a patient to take care of, you know.” She gave Michael a pleasant smile and a little wave then closed the front door with finality.
    “But…” started Mike belatedly, as he stood staring at the closed door. He reached up to knock but quickly brought his hand down.
A waste oftime
, he thought. As he turned and walked back down Edith’s front steps, he decided to take matters into his own hands. He figured she would thank him later if what he was worried about turned out to be true. As he strode along the lawn back to his house, he took his cell phone from his pocket and punched in 911. Putting the phone to his ear, he waited. After a few rings, there came three electronic tones and a female voice saying, “The number you have reached is busy. Please hang up and call back later.” Michael took the phone away from his ear and stared at it incredulously.
    “What the hell?” he said aloud. “How can 911 be busy?”
    He tried again with the same result.
Oh, fuck this
, he thought. Shoving the phone back into his pocket, he continued to his house. As he placed a foot on the first step, he stopped and turned around. This quaint, quiet neighborhood he loved suddenly seemed menacing. As a cloud passed in front of the sun, the vista ominously darkened. Mike shivered; the widening shadows seemed to now hold evil, skulking things with sharp claws and needlelike fangs, ready to pounce and feed with wanton abandon. His once-beloved home was now a tortured Hieronymus Bosch painting.
    He turned and hurriedly bounded up the steps, striding through the door, not looking back lest he see something skittering up the stairs after him.
    Sean and Jack were sitting in front of the television when Mike walked in. They glanced at him as he walked over to them, then immediately went back to staring at the screen.
    “Everything okay?” asked Sean.
    “Uh, yeah,” said Mike, plopping down on the sofa next to him. “Emily is there. She, uh…she’s sick, and Edith is taking care of her.”
    “Huh,” said Sean absently. He was too engrossed in the broadcast to pay attention to what his friend was actually saying.
    As the three men sat there, staring at the screen, they felt they were watching a horror movie, not a news program. The pictures kept changing on the screen, showing images from all over the world. There were videos of riots in the streets, with police in riot gear with shields, beating civilians who sometimes acted crazed. And there were even clips of themilitary mobilizing and actually firing at individuals from behind tanks or barricades. They saw shots of dead bodies either sprawled limply in vacant streets or surrounded by several kneeling people who, seemingly, were pulling at the bloody corpses and stuffing pieces of them into their snarling mouths. The three young men kept flipping channels, all of which showed the same types of scenes.
    On one of the cable news channels, a reporter from Paris showed a video clip of a dead man lying on his back on a wooden table, with his neck savaged and bite marks down his arms. For about thirty seconds, the man just lay there, the camera sometimes moving slightly as if being jostled or shifting position. Then, unnervingly, the man’s left arm twitched. It twitched again. And so did the right arm. His fingers slowly curled and uncurled. Then his head moved as if he were stretching a kink in his neck. As he groaned loudly, his eyes popped open. The camera crew moved back a little as the background noise of babbling voices increased. The dead man turned his head toward the camera. For a second he just looked at it. Then, as if realizing people were standing by, he tightened his face into a snarl and, with difficulty at first, sat up. Sitting on the edge of the table, his eyes milky white and pink drool forming at the ends of his lips, he growled at the camera. He