The Last Outbreak (Book 3): Desperation by Jeff Olah

stride began to break down. He blinked slowly as his eyes drifted from Cora’s face, over her shoulder, and swept across the street leading to the gated community. He knew why the man had stopped in the middle of the street, and why he hadn’t come racing toward the SUV.
    Back to Cora, a tear formed at the corner of his eye. There was nothing he could do; they were here. The horde from inside the gated community had had found their way out, and he was five seconds too late.
    As she was grabbed from behind by the first Feeder, Frank mouthed, “I’m sorry.”

13
     
    California Coastline - Day Seven…
     
    The building was quiet. The only sounds came from the light tapping of rain on the outside of the massive window she sat behind. Staring out into the darkened world, Emma had a hard time imagining exactly how she’d gotten here and just how lucky she and the other four people currently residing in this building really were.
    Just ball parking by what she’d encountered over the last several days, Emma estimated that seventy to ninety percent of the area, if not the entire country, were either dead or infected. She’d come across fewer survivors with each passing day, and although her perception was limited to the city below, she imagined the possibility that they were all alone. It was a bleak view of the future and one that, because her family was a thousand miles away, she was unwilling to accept.
    Sliding her phone to the middle of the table, Emma gazed at the blacked out screen. She begged for it to come to life, for the ping of an incoming message, for a sign that her family was okay, for a hint of something other than what she’d dreamt about for the last several days, for anything at all. But mostly just for some hope.
    Pulling it back, she powered on her phone, stared at the icon, and then moved to the messaging app. Nothing. No new messages, no indication that her mother, father, or brother had made it out of Colorado. She didn’t have much to hold on to, but just the possibility that she may one day see them again would assure that she continued fighting.
    Closing the messaging app and moving her eyes to the upper right corner of the screen, Emma let out a slow breath and waited for the screen to go dark.
    “Thirty-three percent.” Even though she was alone in the spacious third-floor lobby, she spoke quietly, attempting to calculate what that meant. How many times could she climb to the sixteenth floor and send another message before the nearby cell tower finally gave up? How long would she have the ability to charge her phone before that was no longer an option? She knew that one day soon her luck would run dry… she only prayed that she’d hear something from her family before that day arrived.
    Holding her thumb down on the power button, she waited for her phone to shut down, before again laying it on the table. Sliding down into the leather-backed office chair, Emma placed her sock covered feet atop an oddly shaped end table and turned back to the floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the northern side of the city.
    Her eyes traced the rooftops from one end of the ravaged city to the other. She quietly counted the random areas of illumination as she crisscrossed the bleak landscape from top to bottom and back again. Twenty-three. Nearly two dozen opportunities. Two dozen chances that there were others out there. That others were surviving. That somehow there was still hope for this world.
    Closing her eyes and leaning her head back, Emma again pictured the forgotten city. This time, she imagined it as it had been two weeks ago. Midday, the sun sitting at its highest point in the sky, cascading down through the sparse cloud cover, and warming those who had no idea of what was coming.
    She watched through her mind’s eye as men in three-piece suits, left the comfort of their air-conditioned offices, and marched to whatever emergency came next on their overcrowded schedules. The looks on their