Pandemic Book 1: Party Balloons

Volume 3 in the Adventures of V series

A chic vampire, a glamorous black US president, a loony Bible-thumping vice president, a diabolical terrorist, a randy lawyer, a handsome captain, a gorgeous assistant, a beautiful Synthetic Individual, a recklessly brave girl reporter, a grizzled cameraman, a Bollywood princess, a bitter TV producer, a pompous anchorman, a kidnapped heiress, a stunning actress, an orphaned boy, all are swept up in a desperate epic struggle for survival against a spreading zombie pandemic.

The year is 2046. V is on the hunt for a mysterious renegade mass-murder hybrid, a steel-gray reptilian creature that has left a trail of blood from Texas to Vermont. Then V's attention is drawn to an even more pressing crisis - a probable terrorist attack against the president of the United States, to be carried out on the world's latest greatest luxury liner, the Eden of the Seas.

The president, a charismatic black TV star, Katherine du Bois Hughes, is scheduled to speak to the annual meeting of the American Bar Association during the maiden voyage of the Eden.

During her speech, Katherine announces special legislation to defend human species purity.

She denounces alien-human hybrids, V's people. And she condemns, bioengineering creations, Synthetic Individuals, or SINs. She announces she will shortly propose laws to label, isolate, and eliminate them.

Just after Katherine's speech, a deadly biological weapon is released - via colorful party balloons launched from a passing yacht, A Flight of Fancy.

The balloons, caught up in Eden's ventilation system, burst, releasing a virus, which instantly turns 2000 lawyers and 4000 other passengers and crew into cannibalistic zombies or vine-like, tentacular, voracious, semi-conscious plants.

V and a few survivors, including several hybrids, two twin teenage Chinese acrobats, Wang Fei and Wang Fang, and Marie-Jos Duval, a beautiful Parisian Synthetic Individual, or SIN, must save the president, and get her off the Eden before she too turns into a zombie.

Then, V must spirit the president to a safe refuge from which Katherine can take back control of America, because, in Washington, there has been a coup d' tat.

The US vice president - tall, handsome, eloquent, Bible-thumping Joseph Humility Ebenezer Jackson - who was behind the biological attack and who has staged the coup d' tat in Washington, intends to kill the president - she is "too soft on hybrids and SINs" - and destroy the Eden, and all those in it, using nuclear weapons if need be; he also plans to obliterate, with missiles, Sabrina Jacob's elegant research ship, Andromeda II, a symbol of the most advanced science - "diabolical Darwinian meddling with the Divine Order" - sailing near The Bahamas, and which, with its wealth of scientific expertise, has become the center of the anti-pandemic struggle.

But ...

The vice president is double-crossed by the creator of the zombie virus, a mysterious creature called the Puppet Master.

The zombie pandemic does not stay confined to the Eden - but the Eden - piloted by zombies controlled by the Puppet Master - crashes into Miami. The zombie virus spreads throughout Florida. It sweeps up, in its deadly onslaught, Samantha Andrews, a feisty TV reporter for the Volpe News Network, her cameraman, grizzled veteran of many wars, Charlie Parr, and Virginia Lily, a stunning star of B-movies, and Jake, an orphaned 11-year-old, and many others, all caught up in an onrushing turmoil of suffering and death.

Author: Gilbert Reid
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Twin Rivers Productions
Published: 12/15/2020
Series: The Adventures of V #3
Pages: 526
Weight: 1.68lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 1.17d
ISBN: 9781999479053

About the Author
Reid, Gilbert: - "Gilbert Reid is a writer of fiction, and television and radio documentaries. He has written and broadcast widely on many subjects - including warfare, weapons technology, religion and mythology, eroticism and sexuality, and the life and death of nations. Creator of V and the Adventures of V, Gilbert is also the author - with the late Jacqueline Park - of Son of Two Fathers, a historical novel set in the Italian Renaissance, and of two acclaimed short story collections: So This is Love: Lollipop and Other stories, and Lava and Other Stories. For thirty years, Gilbert lived, studied, and worked in Europe. For six years, he taught English and 19th and early 20th century English Literature - from Jane Austen to James Joyce - at the University of Messina in Sicily, to wonderful groups of students from Sicily and Calabria. For two years, Gilbert was press attaché at the Canadian Embassy to Italy. For eleven years, he was Director of the Canadian Cultural Center in Rome, working with the infinitely talented Elena Solari. As a journalist and book reviewer, Reid has written for The Times Literary Supplement, The Globe and Mail, Il Tempo, and many other publications. As an informal script doctor and script developer, he worked in Rome with personalities such as the inventor of the spaghetti western, Sergio Leone, the Italian star Marcello Mastroianni, and, in Toronto, with Canada's eccentric virtuoso filmmaker Don Owen. For almost a decade, Reid worked in public relations in Italy with numerous cultural and film festivals - in Taormina, Sorrento-Naples, Spoleto, Venice, and others. He served as a diplomat in Ottawa, London, and Rome. He worked as an economist - focusing on international economic policy coordination - at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris. He worked briefly as an adventure travel guide for the French company Nouvelles Frontières in Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. He worked as a Canadian press attaché for two Group of Seven Economic Summits held in Venice in 1980 and 1987. He was on the International Administrative Committee of the Biennale of Venice for many years. And - with an Italian virtuoso of public relations, Simona Barabesi - he created, edited, and wrote for a glossy, high-quality Italian-language promotional magazine, Canada Contemporaneo. Since returning to Canada in 1994, Gilbert has written fiction and produced and written for television and radio. He is fluent in English, French, and Italian, and has written and broadcast in those languages. He can get by in German and, to a limited extent, in Spanish. Gilbert Reid has a B.A. in Economics and Political Science from the University of Toronto, a M.Sc. (Econ) in monetary economics from the London School of Economics, and a B.A. in English literature from the University of Cambridge. He studied for two years at Birkbeck College, University of London (an unfinished Ph.D. on the French novels of Samuel Beckett). And he attended the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) as an auditeur libre, specializing in international economic and diplomatic relations."