The Beginning of the End (Book 2): Toward the Brink II Read Online Free PDF Page A

haven’t—none of us have—but I’ve seen them retching at night when they’ve come, and some of the townspeople vomited like this before it took them over.”
    “We have foamer, all right, near the front steps,” the Tall Man warned in a hushed tone.
    “We need to get to the van,” Cindy whispered to Elliot.
    “If we keep quiet we’ll be all right,” he reassured her, or tried.
    “If they smell us, we’re in for it. They go into a frenzy when they get a whiff of the living,” David whispered.
    The Tall Man had taken note of the cloves of garlic spread over the front porch. Now he knew why they were there.
    It wasn’t to keep vampires away … but to keep the foamers at bay.
    “Shit, I’m a poet and I just don’t know it,” he chuckled to himself.
    “You say something, Chuck?”
    “Clearing my throat, Riley … clearing my throat.”
    “Wait, he’s stopped. Looks like he’s lost interest and the others have drifted off.” Roger gave an update.
    “Okay, good. But let’s keep the lights off, we don’t want them coming back.”
    “That was close.” David stood and peeked through the window.
    “They come around every night?” Elliot asked.
    “Yeah, we don’t always see them, but we hear them.”
    “Have you recognized any?” Mulhaven asked David.
    “I have.” He paused for a long moment. “My brother. He has the farm next to us. I always told him not to eat that fast food shit. I told him … I … I …” David covered his face.
    “Oh, honey, don’t do this to yourself!” Margaret said as she shuffled around in the dark to find her husband.
    While she did her best to soothe her husband, Mulhaven, Elliot, and the Tall Man gathered to plan their next move.
    “We can’t stay here much longer, they’ll eventually find us,” Elliot insisted.
    “Let’s ride this out to daylight. Remember your theory, that they aren’t active in the daylight. The Grigsby’s confirmed it, so we should be okay as long as we don’t attract attention.”
    “Chuck’s right. Those foamers outside have gone. We’ll give them another ten minutes, gather our weapons and then grab a few hours’ sleep. Then we’re out of here.”
    “And,” the Tall Man was firm, “no one goes outside alone, okay?”
    Elliot and Mulhaven both agreed and were glad to have this mysterious Tall Man with them.
    “The rock.”
    “What did you say, Riley?”
    “The Rock of Gibraltar … that’s our Chuck.”
    Elliot understood what Mulhaven meant. He also looked upon the Tall Man in such a fashion, though he hadn’t come up with a tag for him.
    “Yeah,” Elliot said. “Exactly!”

Eight
    While political leaders across the country received information as to the true nature of the crisis and planned their response, and the survivors in Shoshone at the Grigsby farm prepared for their flight to Canada, a long-forgotten piece of the nightmare returned.
    The mutant children.
    Stomach upsets and uncontrolled vomiting weren’t all that swept through the medical facilities of Idaho after the release of the miracle potato, as it was called by farmers and the press in the beginning. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of women across Idaho gave birth four or five months prematurely, to children who weighed three or four times what a normal full-term child did. Born with the black eyes of a shark and repulsive facial deformities, these “mutant babies” were otherwise healthy. It was the mothers who perished in most cases. There was no mention in any medical manual of an affliction like this.
    The upper echelons of the Chamber were shocked by these events. The thousands of affected patients could be explained—even the few deaths—but deformed children with a resemblance to the spawn of the devil were hard to accept. The Tall Man and his boss, Langlie, weren’t informed of the mutant children. Baer biochemist Paul Dennard knew different and wasn’t that surprised. He kept the grim details from Mr. Baer, however. The upper echelon