Rotter World by Scott R. Baker Read Free Book Online

and worried that the living dead might wipe out the covens’ food supply, much like Mad Cow Disease culled out entire herds of cattle. Back then, Elena had viewed humans with the same emotional detachment as a rancher has for his livestock.
    If she had the courage and the strength of her convictions, maybe she could have prevented this apocalypse when the Vampire Council, the supreme decision-making body of the vampires, had met sixteen months ago in Prague to debate stealing and releasing the R Virus. As master of the New York City coven, the largest in the United States and the fifth largest in the world, her opinion usually carried considerable weight on the Council. On that day, however, the dissenters had been outnumbered eight to two. The only other voice protesting such insanity had come from Hu Yi, the master of the Beijing coven, who fully understood what such an outbreak could do to a country with a billion and a half people. Unfortunately, the older covens from Rumania, Moscow, and London had carried the day, their centuries-long struggle to stave off human hunters swaying the masters from Tokyo, Manila, Mexico City, Cairo, and Abidjan. Had they known what the results would be, maybe they would have listened to her and Hu Yi.
    What no one on the Council had foreseen was that the zombies needed to sustain their reanimation through the nutrients found in living tissue, and to the living dead the flesh and organs of vampires was just as nourishing as humans. Because the covens had to find refuge from the sunlight, they had found themselves in imminent danger as zombie outbreaks erupted in the world’s major cities. A few covens had been smart enough to move by night, staying ahead of the outbreak, but that merely delayed the inevitable. Most of the covens had been trapped indoors when the zombies swarmed over them. Within weeks of the initial outbreak, vampires had nearly become extinct.
    Because of New York City’s massive population, the infection had spread rapidly. Only one of the three scouts she had sent out that first night to survey the carnage returned, the single terrified vampire describing how he watched the city be overrun by zombies. Elena had prepared the coven to evacuate at nightfall and seek refuge in the country. She had planned various escape routes and safe havens to hole up in during daylight, ran through her mind all the contingencies they might encounter, and felt confident she had counted for every possibility. Except for the possibility that the zombies would find them first. On the morning before their departure, a dozen rotters had stumbled across the coven and attacked, excited by the prospects of food. Half the coven had been wiped out within minutes. The survivors had escaped to the sewers, only to find their underground world also infested with the living dead. Even worse, they now faced their recently-butchered comrades reanimated as super zombies, with all the speed and agility of a swarmer and the strength and voracious appetite of a vampire. The sewers had turned into a charnel house.
    Only sixteen vampires had escaped New York City. Once outside the city limits, five of her coven had disappeared into the night, no longer trusting her judgment or respecting her authority. Elena hoped they had found safe refuge somewhere, but doubted that they still existed. The remaining members were slowly whittled away during the next few months. Once the largest in the States, her coven now numbered only four vampires besides herself. As far as she knew, all the other covens had been wiped out and every vampire destroyed, including the members of the Council who had initiated the holocaust.
    Elena would have laughed at the irony, except she no longer found humor in anything.
    Of all the coven members, she trusted Dravko most. After herself, he was the second oldest, having been turned in the 14th century when vampires took advantage of the Black Death to ravage their way across Europe, hiding