EX-MERCENARY AND PIRATE INTERDICTION SPECIALIST Dante Bogart knows he's the one who handed his shady employers the virus that makes the dead rise to devour the living while laughing their asses off. Whether they were using it to create super-soldiers, build biological weapons, or live forever, he hasn't got the foggiest. But he knows the virus escaped. Dante even tried to blow the whistle on the nightmare via a tell-all video that "went viral"—but that was back before the black ops boys deep-sixed him at a secret interrogation site on the Panama-Colombia border. So he wakes up in the jungle with the five intervening years missing from his memory and his hippie ex-girlfriend married—to his best friend, no less. Dante knows he's got to do what he can to cure the laughing sickness that's slaughtering the world. Doing that will require a trip in a hijacked nuclear warship through the nightmare that was the Panama Canal, then around Cape Horn to San Francisco, where survivalist hackers have holed up in the Moorish castle known as the Armory to resist laughing corpses and corporate stooges alike, taking Dante's whistle-blowing viral video as their underground Gospel.
