Revenence: Dead Silence, A Zombie Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

yet. That old man back at the campground, he could've already been walkin' around with a bite for all I know, doin' like a lot of people and cleanin' it then not thinkin' too much about it.  Maybe not even tell no one about it.  Or could it be he died of a heart attack, no bite involved, then got back up?  We won't know the answer to that question 'til we see someone die of natural causes...or at least not anythin' zombie-related...and see if they get back up or not."  She shook her head.  "Not knowin' the answers to these questions is real troublesome.  But how many people are sittin' around at the CDC, or some lab somewhere, tryin' to figure this shit out?  Probably not a lot.  And at any rate, even if someone finds a cure, I doubt there's any infrastructure left of the government, or society in general.  Who's gonna take charge and clean this up, and go door to door distributin' a cure?  Anyone higher up in the government is doubtless hidin' their sorry asses in a bunker somewhere.  Can hardly blame 'em, really.  Hell, for all any of us know, they could be on a spaceship headed for some other planet untouched by any of this.  Nothin' would surprise me at this point."  She rubbed her face vigorously, as if to snap herself out of a particularly gripping daydream.  "There's no point even speculatin' about any of that.  The point is, even once people can begin to come out of hidin' again, it's gonna be a  lawless world.  Too much has gone to shit way too fast for it to be any other way.  It's gonna be the Wild West everywhere you go.  Ain't nobody comin' out to make the world right."
    "Maybe it's local, or at least just regional," Shari offered hopefully.
    "Let's think about this for a second, darlin'.  How many planes do you think leave every day just from our little regional airport?  Now, they couldn't have known in the earliest stages of this to inspect every damn person gettin' onto the plane, see if they've been bit, not when it was before most of us had any inklin' that this shit was even happenin'.  And not everyone who was bit is gonna go flappin' their jaw to every stranger they come across, talkin' 'bout, 'Some crazy fuckin' chucklehead bit me!'  If it's not a gushin' wound, most of them might go to the ER, get disinfected, maybe get some bloodwork sent in to make sure they didn't contract HIV, and go about their business, even if that business includes gettin' on a plane.  Now, I'm sure once the ER has had enough cases of people bein' bit by other people, they probably started to admit some of those people, tell 'em they weren't allowed to go home yet.  At some point, they got some realization that it's an epidemic, or at least some kind of mass hysteria, and they wanted to contain it.  But that point, evidently, came too late.  Even if a handful of people got on those planes, who knows what corners of the country, or the world, they wound up on?  Now take that little dinky airport, and imagine it's O'Hare, La Guardia, LAX, DeGaulle?  It just gets more dire the more you think about it.  And these ain't no Night of the Living Dead , 'I'm gonna lumber up to you real slow'-types zombies, these some  'I'm gonna run like I don't care if I rip every tendon and ligament and muscle in my body'-type zombies."  She sighed.  "And you're assumin' it's an outbreak.  You're forgettin' one very important detail I remember mentionin' yesterday...that they were reportin' it the world over.  Don't get me wrong, this shit is bound to spread like wildfire...wildfire that seemed to pop up around the globe all at once." 
    Shari snickered.  "And there have been all those fake zombie invasions lately."
    "Beg your pardon?"
    "Have you seen that on the news?  People have been getting professional makeup artists, the kind they have for the movies, and having people go out into the streets in major cities, pretending to be zombies.  They go up to people trying to scare them for fun, you know, make a video