Volume 4 in the Adventures of V series
A fearless sheriff, a pregnant art historian, a mad scientist, a shackled prisoner, a zombie reporter, an orphaned boy, a zombie film star, a gung-ho colonel, an ancient goddess, a reptilian secret service agent, a gorgeous Synthetic Individual, a stubborn ship's captain, an adoring zombie, are all caught up - with V - in a tsunami of chaos when the zombie virus overwhelms Miami, and spreads, like wildfire, through Florida and beyond.
The great luxury liner, the Eden of the Seas, steered by zombies - directed by an invisible central mind, the Puppet Master - has crashed into the Miami seafront, unleashing the zombie pandemic which now rages out of control on the mainland, overwhelming Miami, Fort Lauderdale, much of Florida, and heading for New York City and Houston, Texas.
Leaping from the Eden before it crashed, V had kidnapped the US president, Katherine du Bois Hughes, and had gotten her to safety on the research ship, Andromeda II.
On Andromeda II, Andromeda Corp CEO Sabrina Jacobs and V arrange to get the president back to Washington so Katherine can reverse a coup d état, carried out by the fundamentalist vice president, Joseph Humility Ebenezer Jackson, and seize back control of the government.
While the president heads for Washington, V plunges deep into the Florida Everglades to rescue from lobotomy by a mad scientist a kidnapped young woman, Monica Fabritz, who, manacled down in a secret government installation, is about to give birth to a human-alien hybrid, perhaps the prophesized zombie anti-Christ.
Just as V arrives, US Marines storm into the installation with instructions to kill everybody, a horde of zombies converges on the site, and Freddy, the lethal hybrid that kidnapped and raped Monica smashes his way into the building to kidnap his alien-hybrid son.
Returning to Andromeda II with Monica and her baby, V, accompanied by a beautiful Marine sergeant and a handsome Navy captain, sets off to meet the Puppet Master. On the terrorist yacht, A Flight of Fancy, she travels through a shimmering space-time gateway into an alternative universe. There V and her fellow castaways - and their guide, a teenage goddess, Isis - find themselves on a lush, primitive, paradise-like island. Here, in this strange alternate world, the natives worship V as a long-absent goddess who has returned to them. V must perform endless ceremonies, accepting one human sacrifice after another, emptying her victims of their blood. Getting spoiled, the worshippers clamor for more spectacular performances.
Finally, one day, V, helped by young Isis, travels deep underground, into the bowels of the earth, under a volcano, and confronts the source of the pandemic, the Puppet Master. He is none other than a grotesque reincarnation of the handsome sadistic Russian oligarch, Dmitry Pavlov, himself an emanation of the eternal Evil Force, V's constant foe and nemesis.
Meanwhile, other refugees from the virus, Alex Wolf, chief scientist of Andromeda Corporation, Marie-José, the beautiful French SIN, the two Chinese acrobats, Fei and Fang, actress Virginia Lily - who has become a charming zombie - and Virginia's sidekick, 11-year-old Jake, struggle to survive, to contain the virus, and to discover an antidote and a vaccine, while holed up in a laboratory just outside Miami, besieged by rampaging zombies and by murderous anti-science militias inspired by the fundamentalist anti-science vice president.
In the alternative universe, under the volcano, V faces the ultimate test, risking her soul - and her body - to save the world from eternal enslavement to the Puppet Master.
Author Biography:
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.
