Read The Fall (Book 2): Dead Will Rise for Free Online Page A

walking through an area as strewn with garbage as this.”
    “But still,” Kate said. “We should say something--”
    Laura cut her off. “It happened. We can't go back and change it. We'll warn them what to look out for, but you can't blame them for not knowing.”
    Kate scowled, which she was good enough at it was almost a talent.
    Laura only raised an eyebrow in return, stepping from the RV and slapping Kate on the shoulder. “Come on, grumpy. Let's take care of business.” She turned to Kell. “You're going into the RV. Sit in the lab, don't leave, and let us handle this. We may have to camp here. If so, you'll have plenty of time to work today.”
    Kell tried a scowl of his own, but Laura pointed to the door of their vehicle with a look that bore zero bullshit. A foot and a half taller, a hundred pounds heavier, and armed to the teeth, Kell bowed his head and went inside.
    “Good boy,” he heard Laura say as she locked the door behind him.
    He wanted to bristle at being hidden away, but there wasn't any room for it in his head. Logic overruled emotion. By the time the tire was fixed, it would be his turn to drive anyway. There were dozens of people working to clear and secure the area. He wasn't needed out there. As he entered the heavily modified bedroom of the RV, with its books and equipment carefully strapped in place, he was reminded sharply that his value was best measured not in combat or leadership, but in this.
    He was the best—and possibly only—person in the world equipped to handle the plague. Kate and Laura were still the only people who knew of his role in the outbreak, and the two of them knew any cure would almost certainly be his creation.
    The sounds of the vehicles and people outside faded. Seeing the notebooks full of data he'd recalled and written down, mounds of information to be reviewed in an effort to strike the spark that would give him the answer, Kell began to relax.
    Not the careless relaxation of someone without concerns. Kell felt his focus slide, mind reorienting, until it found the comfortable middle gear where his best work had always happened. Two years of thinking about the problem made it easy; his brain craved the academic challenge of trying to figure out a cure with nothing but his mental blackboard to work with.
    For a long time he simply organized the facts. A timeline of Chimera, with every change and mutation he could recall added in. The overall picture was fascinating, from a detached point of view. Months after the outbreak, Chimera mutated to protect itself and its hosts from cold. Another variation also showed up well after the initial outbreak, which were the smart zombies he'd heard some people call Smarties. It was a stupid name, but at least accurate. It made him think of candy for some reason.
    Long after that, the New Breed appeared. Smarter, stronger, faster, more coordinated, and with physical abnormalities making them more resistant to damage. The bone density loss—likely through malnourishment—wasn't present in the New Breed as it was in other zombies. The bands of thick, fibrous material beneath the skin in vital areas were invisible if you didn't know what to look for, but made attackers work to pierce them. Where survivors had been able to pierce the skulls of the undead with relative ease previously, thanks to weak bones and wasted skin, now they had to put tremendous effort into each strike.
    In the weeks since learning about the New Breed, he'd worked the facts over in his mind. Based on the state of the smart zombies he'd seen, Chimera was either becoming geometrically more efficient at preserving the tissues it fed, or those smart zombies were fresher. Made much later after The Fall. The New Breed appeared much later still, though he'd been unaware of both until recently. The New Breed were as well preserved as the Smarties .
    The simplest and most likely explanation meant both variations reanimated from people who died recently.
    It wasn't