The Abandoned Trilogy (Book 1): Twice Dead (Contagion) Read Online Free PDF Page A

of those two, the other had gone home to see his family for the weekend, we never saw him again.
    The owners of the home had several other homes across the country of a similar ilk, they charged top dollar for a residential space at Thorncroft so everything in the home was set to a high standard.
    I dropped lucky being allocated a place at Thorncroft, any family who were being funded by the council who got their disabled offspring into the likes of Thorncroft kept them there until they were too old to live there anymore and were transferred to an older care facility within the same private care group.
    To get to the nearest town, also confusingly called Thorncroft, which is some 20 miles away you have to be driven. There is no public transport of any kind within a 30-mile radius. Most of the staff live in on a rotation system in the home.
    Adag lives permanently on site with her own two grace and favour accommodation, a perk of the job, whilst the live in staff have small self-contained studio flats near to the rooms of the residents they care for.
    Of the 26 rooms for residents in the home four are double rooms, and are used by those residents who need extra care at night with a PA staying in the room with them.
    When the pathogen struck it was without warning and people dropped like flies under a deluge of an ultra-toxic fly killer. It was a worldwide contagion that hit every country in the world. It then proceeded to decimate the whole planet of most of its human populations.
    In Europe it happened in the early hours of Saturday morning when most people were in bed or were out on the town. It was as sudden as a guillotine falling onto the neck of a French Aristocrat. One-minute people all over the world were alive, the next minute they ceased to be human.
    However, the residents still at the Thorncroft Residential Home for the Physically and Mentally Impaired survived the contagion. Moreover, they survived because of a quirk of Mother Nature.
    Twenty miles away in the town of Thorncroft, the majority of the residents had already succumbed to the contagion and though we didn’t know it then, for the moment everyone was dead.
    For the moment.
    Phoenix tapped on a link on his computer and frowned, “It’s an emergency message, it’s on all links,” Ignoring Phoenix’s dislike of people entering his space I entered his room, I looked over his shoulder. He flinched, I ignored him.
    Flashing on the computer screen in bright red were words I will never forget.
     
    IF YOU ARE READING THIS MESSAGE STAY WHERE YOU ARE. DO NOT LEAVE. WAIT FOR FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.
     
    That was all. I wondered if it was a joke, but Phoenix was not known for having a sense of humour and he rarely left his room unless he had too, he couldn’t have disabled the satellite dish and the digital radio in the dining room or my phone for that matter.
                  “Eat your lunch,” I said to Phoenix and I left his room. Minutes later, I returned to the dining room where Seb was having a row with the Gorilla.
                  “You need to check it again!” he was saying to the big man, “Because it’s not working!”
                  “I’ve checked it; all the cables are in place,” the Gorilla replied patiently, “You’re going to have to ring SKY.”
                  “I’ve tried ringing them!” Seb yelled, “No one is answering!” The Gorilla shrugged his big shoulders, unlike me and Phoenix no one else had an inkling that something was wrong. Really wrong.
                  At the lunch table, the others were eating their food, oblivious to everything, but their own small lives. Eden who had been deprived of getting Cassidy to have a meltdown was sniffing her soup and wrinkling her nose.
    Her Hyperosmia makes her a sensitive to odours and smells. She was lucky she didn’t have a really bad case of the disorder, which can reduce some people to being violently sick over