Here We Stand (Book 1): Infected (Surviving The Evacuation) by Frank Tayell Page B

decided to take advantage of it. They would let the virus spread and… what? Try to seize power?
    He looked around, made sure he was alone, and then took out the tablet and plugged in the sat-phone. He stared at the screen and hesitated, unsure what to do first. Find out whether the infection was spreading unchecked, he decided. That was done quickly, and with depressing results. He found the recording of a man calling home. He’d been on a sales trip to New York, and visited a mall to pick up some gifts for his kids. It was the same mall that had been featured in the news. The man had been bitten, but he’d reached his car, and been able to drive away. Somehow, it had taken five hours before he’d died. All that time, he’d been speaking to his wife on the phone. The conversation ended in a choking cough. The traffic cameras told the rest of the story. He’d reached Hagerstown in Maryland, crashing at an intersection. He died. As the first responders arrived to help, he came back. The zombie attacked and…
    “And so it spreads.”
    Who the man was, and why his calls were being monitored, didn’t matter. The key detail was five hours. Tom had seen footage of people who’d been bitten and then turned almost immediately. But five hours? He glanced at the jagged cut running down his arm.
    “There’s enough to worry about without that ,” he muttered, and that footage didn’t confirm how far the virus had spread. The algorithm trawling through social media was proving unreliable. Everyone in the world was talking about zombies, and a lot were claiming to have seen them in places it surely wasn’t possible. Germany, Korea, India, France… and then he saw the video and knew that the algorithm was reliable. A gendarme had been attacked on the Champs-Élysées. From the look of it, the whole world had seen. The virus was everywhere.
    “How did it spread so far and so fast?” The answer was obvious, and took only a few minutes to confirm. The airports had remained open until mid-afternoon. It looked like any plane with fuel had departed. He suspected it was the diplomatic flights that were to blame. Dozens of them had taken off around the time those images of the zombies attacking people were spreading across social media. Two had been heading to Britain.
    “Bill…”
    Tom tapped out a message to Bill Wright. There was no response from him, nor had there been any reply to the messages he’d sent the previous day.
    “Find those passengers. Isolate the planes,” he muttered as he tapped in a number he knew by heart. His finger hovered over the dial-button, but he hesitated in pressing it. The only times he’d ever spoken to Bill, he’d disguised his voice. It wasn’t that there was any way the man might recognize it, but Tom had needed that artificial separation as a barrier against saying something he knew he’d regret. The time for subterfuge had long since passed, and he had to know that Bill was alive. He pressed the screen. The number dialed. The phone rang. And rang.
    “Yes?” a woman finally answered.
    “Hi,” Tom said. “I’m trying to reach Bill Wright.”
    “I… I’m sorry, who is this?”
    “It’s an old friend. To whom am I speaking?”
    “This is Jenny Knight. I’m a nurse at St Thomas’s Hospital.”
    “Is Bill okay?” Tom asked, unable to keep the concern from his voice.
    “He’s broken his leg. It’s a compound fracture. He’s sedated, but he’ll be fine. You’re American, aren’t you? Are you calling from the States? What’s going on over there?”
    “It’s on the news, is it?”
    “A terrorist attack, that’s what they’re saying. It doesn’t look—” The woman stopped. “Who shall I say called?”
    Tom hung up, frustrated. If Bill was sedated, then there was no way of getting a warning to the British prime minister. Nor did he have someone who had access to the computing power needed to sort through all the information being gathered. There was another reason