So as promised, I got four more of these in the mail--and again, the covers are so bad. Really the cover of the Washington DC one with zombie Sarah Palin the worst objectively--and I'm not sure if it's because I have now easily surpassed the 1,000+ pages of this series, but these awful covers are growing on me. As are all these books! For such dull names and cheesiest cover of all time, these books are among the cleverest horror I’ve read. This one not as strong as the larger three part trilogy/anthology/whatever-the-hell these are, but still so neatly tied into the universe as whole, my enthusiasm is rewarded. This is actually special since it has a straight up narrative of some characters we've seen before--the first book had snippets of what happened inside the hospital--the doctor doing the autopsy, the nurse that they try to save by amputating her arm, so I read this knowing what happened to most of the characters, but really with the force they're up against--evil Elizabethan warlock, his Well of 7 Super Followers, and the End of Times Flea Monster God, Anarchron they've brought back in their quest to take over world--you know it's not going to really end well.
Sir Thomas, the busiest evil man in horror, makes an appearance in this one--and you actually see how he winds up in government hands to begin with after his escape from the vault. You find out more poor nurse with arm backstory, the deal a bit with the New World Pharmaceutical people, and cameo by the evil shadow dwarf that is living in the hospital basement/creepy museum of historical horrors. I would not start on this one--I think this book's enjoyability level would go down without knowing the full backstory of The Festival and how the plague pit got opened, and how it all started in the 1800s, with all the hints of prior badness, but it makes a nice standalone. I liked the nurse, the gangster, and the ambulance driver who team up to try and get out of the hospital alive. In this world they are familiar with the concept of zombie, so there's actually not much of the "oh I'll just give this snapping person CPR because no heart beat" that most zombie books/shows have and it transitions into survival mode pretty fast.
Even with the smart acquire weapons, try to distract zombies, lock doors behind you, get outside help, GTFO out of there when outside help gets slaughtered, the fact that the zombies come with TONS of fleas and there are literally clouds of them chasing you, makes getting out alive rather difficult. But I like how these books have done the Mad Zombie King and his followers (some of whom we've seen are able to get their free will back and try to help survivors). Now that I'm on the 5th book of these, I can see how these authors can keep this going almost indefinitely--would make good video game or movie too.