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Cuba (2020)

by Saul W. Tanpepper
(#4 in The Flense)

A cargo ship smuggling refugees is lost to calm seas off the Libyan coast. Entire villages in Ghana are abandoned overnight. Contracted by an apocalypse prepper group to investigate a series of seemingly disconnected global tragedies, a young freelance medical reporter, Angelique de l'Enfantine, uncovers a disturbing pattern: each event is preceded by the sudden spread of a mysterious ailment and is followed by the appearance of a man dressed in black and silver who witnesses claim is the devil himself. Are the tragedies harbingers of an impending biblical catastrophe or practice runs of a fanatical organization bent on global annihilation? With each event more grisly than the last and the risk to her life growing, Angel must ask herself if her sponsors are using her to advance their own paranoid agenda.Requiring no more than the slightest skin-to-skin contact, the Flense spread across the globe with ruthless speed and stealth, decimating mankind before it was barely even aware of it. The infected were turned into soulless creatures, Wraiths, which wrought destruction upon anyone and anything in their path.Built in the middle of Long Island’s abandoned industrial wasteland is a hundred-square-mile virtual reality arcade where the rich and privileged compete in a high-stakes game and the undead are their real-life avatars. There are only two ways to get into this horrifying yet wildly addictive game. The first is by paid invitation. The second is by volunteering to become an Undead Player.