Post-Apocalyptic/ Zombies series - Worldwide signal turns almost everyone into zombies instantaneously. Spoilers ahead.

[Jeremiah]

Hey,

I'm bad with names so I can't really remember them and I'm gonna get some details wrong, but the general story goes like this.

A guy (pretty standard middle aged father figure) working at a school suddenly sees students and people start going insane and attacking people around him. He starts to get out of the building and on the way gets really hurt after jumping out of a window while running from a zombie and I think then gets knocked out by an explosion of a nearby car. After that he is helped out by a really tough, scrappy older woman who then joins him on his journey

They then go into town trying to avoid the zombies. On the way there are these swarms of bees that start attacking them and they hide in the car, they way the bees are portrayed is pretty horrifying. The bees then swarm the car and try and get inside. Then they just stop along with the zombies and they're able to get away. Whenever the zombies stop they turn their heads towards the sky mouth open and almost like coordinate between themselves. After each time they do that they would seemingly have new information/orders and would move towards survivors in the city. Throughout the book the interval between these stops keeps gettting shorter. As one would the father wants to get his family and needs to get to the mall in the city and his companion agrees to help.

They then at one point get stuck on the roof of a building surrounded by zombies and they gotta do a desperate maneuver with a ladder to get to the freeway overpass above them and the guy gets pretty hurt. I think this is where they meet another survivor. A really big burly guy, with whom they find some shelter in a bank vault. The big burly guy at one point finds a cell phone that is giving out a certain signal and it almost makes go insane/suicidal.

I'm not sure if this part is in the second book or the first one, but at one point when they're in the mall when they go up they find a teenager. A trust fund kid whose father is a senator/congressman?, some kind of politician and the kid is hiding out in the mall. The kid has a bunch of explosives and has set booby traps all over the place and he helps them escape the zombie horde through the liberal use of explosives. The main character also loses a finger at this point as a pillar squishes his hand. They manage to escape to semi safety when they jump into a hole surrounded by rebar and debris keeping the zombies out.

At the end of the first book the group makes it to the mall and I think the first book ends just as they reach the elevator that would take them upstairs.

This is a series of books and the further they go in it is made clear that the zombies are controlled by an intelligence that has as one would has a nefarious purpose. It began being released at the start of the last decade, around 2010 I think.

Thx in advance to anyone that can help me out with this. Much appreciated.

Best,
Jerry

[Lynn]

When you said "The big burly guy at one point finds a cell phone that is giving out a certain signal and it almost makes go insane/suicidal. " it made me think of Cell by Stephen King but that's a stand alone novel.

[Jeremiah]

No it's not Stephen King, Stephen King is too much of a memorable/famous name to forget the name of the author.