Read The Last Town (Book 1): Rise of the Dead for Free Online

torn clothing, and shredded flesh. And walking amidst the carnage were men, women, and children, faces blackened with crusted gore as they hunched over human remains, stuffing them into their mouths.
    As a movie producer, Norton was used to dealing with fantasy on a daily basis. In fact, he had once made a zombie movie that had gone on to earn him millions—the practical effects alone had cost two million to produce, and that bought him a lot of mangled prosthetic appliances, animatronic bodies, and gallons of fake blood. But what he saw on the Arabic sites left him sickened.
    Is this what Walid was calling about?
    There was little doubt. Norton found that more cities in the Middle East were falling victim to the same cycle of events. Israel had closed its doors, just as Saudi Arabia had done, and the entire IDF had been put on high alert and mobilized to several key areas inside the small country. There was intense fighting in Lebanon, which was blamed on Israel, but there was no evidence documenting Israeli forces were conducting any offensive operations. Things seemed static in Syria, with rebel forces continuing to duke it out with the national military, but that meant nothing—Norton knew that Syrian forces wouldn’t comment on anything other than the rebels and their attacks. The United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Bahrain seemed to be one long swath of destruction. Amman had released a public statement, indicating that its military was involved in several “sustainment operations” throughout the nation, whatever that meant. There was some activity in Iraq as well, and Iran had released statements regarding American and Zionist actions directed against the Islamic Republic of Iran were doomed to fail. Norton shook his head at that. Those whacky Iranians, always giving the rest of the world the middle finger.
    Searching wider, he found more unrest in southern Europe. Greece had gone dark, as had Turkey and parts of Russia. China was reporting civil unrest in its Xinjiang province, and any number of the “stans” in the former USSR were also embroiled in turbulence.
    In the US, the mayors of New York, Chicago, Washington, DC, and Atlanta were considering declaring states of emergency. Throughout the northeastern part of the nation, things were starting to fall apart. Hospitals were overrun with emergencies, and first responders were being driven into the ground. The governor of Massachusetts had called all National Guard units to state active duty, and for good reason: Boston was on fire after an Airbus 340 airliner had crashed on approach to Logan International Airport, only not everyone had been killed. People emerged from the flaming morass, horribly burned, and they attacked the firemen responding to the crash.
    Norton felt a stab of fear in his heart. How could people survive a fiery airliner crash, and then go on to attack their rescuers?
    In the distance, he heard a siren wail. While his home was only a little more than five hundred feet from the Pacific Coast Highway, it was a rare occurrence for him to hear anything other than the occasional helicopter or the rumble of a delivery truck cruising up his driveway. He pushed back in his chair and got up, stepping onto the balcony outside his office that overlooked the back portion of his property. The Pacific continued to slam into the rocky beach at the foot of the hillside, and a couple of surfers cavorted in the cold waters, waiting for a decent-sized wave to ride. Another siren wailed, growing louder as it passed his property, then diminishing as it raced away.
    Norton ran a hand over his short brown hair, and was surprised to discover he was sweating, despite the cool ocean breeze that rolled over him. He didn’t know what was going on, but the world seemed to be suddenly sliding off the rails.
    But one thing stuck out. In many of the reports he had read and videos he had watched, it had been made plain that air travel was being severely disrupted. Los