From the author of the bestselling Contagion comes a new novel in the Living Dead series. When deadly earthquakes devastate the Caribbean, an ancient disease of almost unimaginable destructive force engulfs the globe. As the earth continues to convulse and the seas encroach, the dead rise with an appetite for human flesh. Survivors must learn to navigate a world in which they are now the hunted. A world where the hunters never sleep.
The origins of the outbreak were never in dispute although at first almost no one believed the dead were actually rising. When the island nation of Haiti was struck by wave after wave of violent earthquakes killing thousands, the Z-virus lurched spectacularly to life. Early reports of cannibalism from inside the country were disregarded until shocking live video splashed across the world's television and computer screens. Suddenly everyone was a believer. Nevertheless, in many ways it still didn't seem real. Anything could happen out there, in the barbarous realm of the third world, beyond the pale of civilization. There were myriad reasons that it could never happen here. Health and security protocols, a literate, well-informed public, etc., were all on our side. In truth, the virus was already here and spreading like the viral videos sent out from Haiti during the first days after the quake. News anchors and subject-matter experts (yes, there were subject-matter experts on the living dead) speculated and conjectured until theory gave way to the infected, pus-filled reality breaking down doors and smashing through windows with flailing, rotten hands.
A small mountain town is isolated by a snowstorm as an ancient evil, gone pandemic, turns the residents into the living dead. Almost overnight the town becomes a snowy tomb of the roaming, hungry infected. Stranded by the weather, hiding, a small group of survivors follows the progress of the disease as society around them and around the world begins to break down. Determined to escape, they find that the normal rules of civilization don't apply anymore. Will they be able to adapt to this strange, hungry new world?
Fleeing a troubled past, Sarah Faust has found the perfect place to begin a new life. Tucked away on a charming side street and surrounded by lush grounds, the neglected three-hundred-year-old townhouse in the port city of Charleston offers a refuge and a place to start over. But all is not as it seems at 5 Rue Lane, and she soon finds that her new house harbors something that has been there for a very long time. Something that refuses to stay buried. In A Haunting, L. I. Albemont brings us parallel tales of old and modern horror, weaving colonial era events into a modern ghost story you won't soon forget.
