The Sixth Extinction (Book 4): The Ark by Glen Johnson

Part One: Outbreak
     
    P art One followed three people as they struggled to come to terms, and survive in the changing world. The outbreak started in a remote part of the Madagascan jungle. Within three weeks, it had spread across the globe, affecting people on every continent, and killing hundreds of millions of people, and in the process turning them into a spore filled delivery device to help spread the infection.
    Noah Morgan was just an ordinary twenty-one-year-old. He had no girlfriend, few friends, and a dead-end job. He was forced from his flat when a gang of yobs set light to the building next door. He took what he could carry and fled. He ended up hiding in a mortgage company’s breakroom, where he ran into Red.
    Red recognized Noah from school, and they came to an agreement to share the building.
    Noah left Red to go and locate some kind of masked filter in a paint store next door to protect her from the spores. While there, he ran into some stage three, infected eaters. As he tried to escape he made it out onto a fire escape, only to realize the alleyway was full of stage four bloated bodies, which were about to explode, releasing spores into the air.
    Red is a nineteen-year-old who ran away from home, using the outbreak as the excuse she needed to escape. However, she harbors a disturbing secret. She remained in the breakroom while Noah went scavenging. In his absence, some unknown person had just broken the door down.
    Doctor Melanie Lazaro is a biomedical scientist, who was drafted in by the military to work in Exeter University’s Biomedical Sciences Department, to try to find a cure. She identified the strain of the disease on the host’s genetic code that was turning humans into animalistic predators.
    The General in command of the South West of England arranged for Doctor Lazaro to be transported to the military medical research compound on Dartmoor. While waiting for the helicopter the doctor was shown around the bio-pods, where infected people with the four stages of the strain were being held. The university came under a coordinated attack by a horde of over a hundred stage three eaters, and Doctor Lazaro was caught in the middle.
    While unconscious the transportation arrived, and twenty soldiers fought their way through the mutated humans to find the doctor and a file containing her findings. During the fighting, the helicopter was damaged. While en route to the military research facility, located in Dartmoor prison, the helicopter crash-landed in Newton Abbot, about a quarter of a mile away from Noah and Red’s position.
    The sound of the crash brought eaters running to the site’s location.
     
    Part Two: Ruin
     
    P art Two finds Doctor Melanie Lazaro, and a group of nine soldiers barricaded inside a dentist’s surgery on the fringe of Courtney Park.
    The Squad, who w ere sent to collect the Doc and take her to the military base on Dartmoor, fights off a mass of eaters who attack the clinic after hearing three guns shots.
    Echo, a female soldier, (and daughter of General Philips) sets off a controlled explosion to defend their position, while they retreat to the top floor of the clinic.
    The soldiers gain entry to the house next door, where they climb out of a first-floor window onto the roof of a lorry, driven by Coco, another soldier, along with Franco and Trev.
    An eater knocks Spice and Rogers off the roof; the Captain had to shoot them to put them out of their misery.
    The lorry cuts across the park, while being chased by an animalistic horde of turned humans, it crashes into the large pond, sending everyone flying, and killing Franco and Trev. Jimmy was knocked unconscious and given CPR by Melanie.
    An old woman called Betty, and her special needs – giant of a grandson – Lennie, joins forces with Red and Noah.
    Together the four of them run away from two eaters, which Lennie turns and fights off with a shopping trolley that he uses as a weapon. The four run into an empty house.
    Noah