Survivor Response Read online

  Contents

  Title

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Alone

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Flee

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Caught

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Found

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About

  SURVIVOR RESPONSE

  Patrick J. Harris

  To Sean and Colleen.

  Chapter 1

  Like a moth homing on the glow of a light, the dead always found their next food source, even if it trapped them. It made Paul Summers city government job killing them more predictable.

  He followed the faint grunts to the corner of the alley where an industrial dumpster stood. With the winter sun setting, the day’s last light warmed the surrounding brick to a blood red, and black shadows hung from the grocery store’s roofline. Rotting meat and vegetables fouled the fall air.

  A dull thud nudged the dumpster forward, grating against the slick concrete. Paul raised his right arm and motioned to his partner, Bobby, standing several paces behind him, to move to the right. Bobby would cover the other side of the dumpster if Paul didn’t shoot the zombie from the left.

  Radioing from their ZMT rig, Jane’s voice crackled in his ear. “P and B, what’s the situation?” Jane had black hair, a bob with the fringes dyed purple. She was a petite coil of energy. “You’re a little quiet.”

  The dumpster jostled forward again. Paul assessed the dumpster, drew his gun, and whispered, “Guessing one a hostile, not very active. Could be looking for rats.”

  He stepped closer, his breathing slower than his feet. Paul never knew what sounds would distract a zombie’s attention from whatever meat it currently devoured. Some ignored deafening gunfire a few feet away, while others screeched at footsteps rustling dry grass. Doctors guessed that the state of someone’s hearing, or how recently they had eaten when they turned factored into a zombie’s alertness. Before he arrived at the city of Greenport, during the height of the outbreak, Paul had tripped on a patchwork of mossy rocks in a shallow river bed. The splash soaked his wool jacket as a swarm of the dead erupted along the tree line. He escaped down a dry gully, cursing under his breath as how to dry the waterlogged clothes that hung from his shaggy, gaunt frame.

  That was during the Plague, a period of five years where an influenza variant eroded human population to a patchwork surface of survivors. Today, Paul strafed the alley clean shaven and ten pounds heavier than he’d like. More than likely, he would have walked across the stage at his high school graduation in the middle to bottom half of his class, intent on community college. The outbreak snatched his diploma and rushed him to graduate school with no professors to teach knife wielding or skinning a deer. As a hardened twenty-three-year-old without a formal education, he worked the best job self-taught survival skills could get him—killing the occasional zombie as a ZMT.

  “Who called this in, Jane?” Bobby asked, covering his mouth. Bobby’s dark brown beard blended into a camouflage deer hunter hat emblazoned with the southern pride of a Confederate flag. Despite a stocky thirty-six-year-old frame, he had kept a workout routine from his days as a tight end at Ole Miss.

  “The manager of the store,” Jane said, from their unit’s truck parked on the street. “Had an employee take out the trash, and said he saw a hostile crawl behind the dumpster.”

  “If it’s still moving slow, it hasn’t found any critters to eat,” Bobby said. “If it had, it’d be coming at us right now energized for a fight.”

  ZMTs, or Zombie Medical Technicians, served as a title unique to Greenport, but a job common among cities where government and technological infrastructure resumed once the outbreak was contained. The nature of the flu variant evolved to where those who survived lived with a dormant form of the disease. Upon death, the virus would activate and reanimate its host. Death still occurred. Husbands would die in their sleep and come back to life and eat their families. Homeless turned into walking rags feasting on anyone still naive to sleep outside. Homicides that didn’t end with a headshot left bodies to wander like violent pieces of debris in the wind. Paul heard stories of mafia gangs keeping zombies caged as pets that would break free.

  For over a year, Paul had led their team of three, responding to calls for help to dispatch and kill zombies. Between them, all three could render first aid, and if a bite was fresh or not immediately fatal, they could perform amputations on site, mindful of tainted blood and possible infections. Primarily, they were charged to eliminate zombies with minimal adverse damage to Greenport’s residents or property. ZMTs understood this as an unspoken rule to not break too much shit in the process, where these calls were now routine.

  Paul nodded back to Bobby. “I’m going to the left. Hope to get a head shot from behind so we can bag it and go home. Jane, get the bag ready in the truck. I’m going in.”

  “Sounds good. Go get ’em,” Jane said.

  Bobby gave a thumbs up.

  Paul inched to the left of the dumpster. He learned while surviving, every zombie looked and acted different, still maintaining a sense of uniqueness that they had while they live. They had been a person, and even though they became deadly shell of themselves, he still viewed them as people after he killed them for good. Clad in a blue jumpsuit, he could only make out the back of its head full of damp grey hair. The legs of the zombie scratched at the pavement to push itself forward. Its head and shoulders banged against the metal and bounced against the brick wall as a pair of arms sought to grasp at an imaginary rat beneath the dumpster. If it kept hitting its head like that it might eventually kill itself. Maybe.

  At a safe distance of ten feet, Paul lined the back of the zombie’s head in his sight with care and pulled the trigger, sending the gun’s pop echoing through the alley. The zombie’s skull caved inward. Blood splattered between the two walls. Its legs and arms stopped moving. Silence.

  The silence after a kill during a call always shot adrenaline through his body. But the next hidden danger always stalked him in the woods or gas stations. Silence didn’t mean safety.

  Paul holstered the gun and bent down to pull the stretched body from the crevasse of the wall and dumpster and turned it over.

  Jane broke the silence. “Bobby, it’s your turn to do the paperwork when we get back.”

  “Janey, tell me why we have to do paperwork for zombie kills again? And bag the fuckers, too?”

  “Boss says so. Says it helps manage resources and measure zombie and human populations.”

  “Sounds like some bean counter bullshit from an accountant,” Bobby said.

  “I think Alan was something like that years ago.”

  “Karen says he was a researcher before all this, running labs,” Paul said.

  Bobby grumbled. “I don’t care what your girlfriend said, most cities are run by mayors, guys. Instead, we have a control freak who’s a little too intense, bossing her around.”

  “And I’m a nurse with a silencer and a nine millimeter on my hip,” Jane said. “Rumors about Alan does his job make me uneasy, but the mayor does a good job keeping people informed.”

  “Caroline’s just a puppet, and she ain’t the o
ne I’m talking about,” Bobby said. “Anyways, what do we got?” Bobby’s southern drawl reeled his words. His stocky frame cast a shadow over the body.

  Paul broke from his inspection of the body, not hearing Bobby approach. “White male, possibly in his fifties, a blue collar worker of some sort. Janitor, maybe. Name on jumpsuit says ‘Alex.’”

  “Probably a homeless guy,” said Bobby.

  “I don’t think so. He’s too clean,” Paul said, rubbing the back of his neck with his hand.

  “Probably a recently homeless guy who had a chance to take a shower.” Paul furrowed his brow and eyed the body while Bobby continued. “Paul, we don’t know who the guy was or what caused him to end up looking for rats in an alley. We’ll swab him and put it in the database with the report.”

  “It feels odd.”

  “Whatever. No need to make a life story for the guy.”

  Paul hunched down and reached into the dead zombie’s jacket pockets.

  “Suit yourself. I’ll go get the bag from Jane and let her know we’re done.”

  Paul waved him off. Bobby’s footsteps receded to the ambulance. It still felt weird asserting himself as a leader to Bobby, a thirty-six-year-old former construction worker, or even Jane, who was five years his senior. Somehow, after answering all the questions about surviving three years on his own during the outbreak, the city assigned him a team.

  He finished patting down the jumpsuit, searching for identification, and made a note to talk to Bobby about catching details. All the pockets were empty. He rolled up the sleeves to see the same ashen skin but covered in grey hair. A gold band with three small inset diamonds wrapped around the zombie’s left ring finger. Jewelry transformed during the Plague into a hopeless form of currency, buying water, gasoline, ammunition. Life. Thieves believed that after the contagion ended, a wealth of gold or diamonds would purchase everything they never had before. At first, they picked off the bodies of zombies for watches, rings, and other shiny trinkets. It progressed to bands of gun-wielding men robbing people passing by and then finally to outright murder.

  Paul surmised, for this guy, Alex, to still wear this ring, he lived through the Plague. Careless and stupid did not survive, and this man had to be neither. And judging by the dirt free fingernails, nor did he appear homeless.

  Alex’s eyes stared up at the darkening sky. Paul leaned back against the dumpster and did the same, drifting to thoughts of meeting Karen for drinks after his shift. A burger, a beer and corner booth. That’s how he and his fiancée would refer to their gatherings with friends and trade stories of their day. The person with the least interesting story would buy the last round.

  A hand smacked Paul’s chest and clutched the shoulder of his flak vest, pulling him sideways. A zombie hung out of the front opening of the dumpster and hissed through jowled cheeks. Cold spittle flecked across Paul’s head, and he gasped when the thick shoulder of his vest dug into his neck. Judging by its strength, this one found the rats. Paul twisted, pulled his gun and fired. The bullet ricocheted inside the dumpster.

  “Paul! What’s going on?” Jane yelled in his earpiece.

  Paul’s legs bent and strained to lean away and break free. The zombie’s other arm came through the opening, twisting Paul’s shooting hand, and slapped the gun to the ground. He grunted and fought to move his left arm, pinned against the dumpster. Its bloodshot eyes and cracked lips came close to Paul’s face, exhaled a stench like rotten eggs from its lungs.

  A gunshot cracked from the opening of the alley, and the zombie’s left temple exploded, spraying blood and brain matter over Paul’s face. Dangling out the opening, its grip released and Paul slumped to the ground. Bobby stood backlit to the alley’s entryway. He lowered his gun.

  Jane rushed past him and knelt at Paul’s side, squeezing his disheveled vest.

  “Paul? Paul. Were you bit?”

  He grimaced. “No. It grabbed me. Jumped out and grabbed me. Pinned me and then pulled me up.”

  She pulled a sterile cloth from a pouch in her vest and wiped his face. “That was too close, you know that?”

  Paul held his breath while the damp cloth wiped his face. When Jane finished he said, “Yeah, been a while since we had one of those. Last time it was Bobby.”

  “Geez, that was months ago,” Bobby said. “And I saved myself with the hammer on my belt.”

  “It doesn’t make it any better,” Jane said. “Still, I’ll need to test you when we get back.”

  Paul sighed. “I know. Hostile fluid contact. Just don’t tell Karen, okay?”

  Jane wiped the last of the blood from his ear and pinched it. “I won’t, but you will.”

  Paul winced.

  “And how’re you going to make him do that, Janey?” Bobby said.

  Jane turned, her face serious. “Because it’s the right thing to do. You nearly killed him, and still might kill him, if he’s infected.”

  “I had a shot, and he’s still alive,” said Bobby. “He’d certainly be dead if I hadn’t aced the fucker upside the head.”

  “He’s right. It knocked the gun out of my hand, and I couldn’t reach for the hammer on my belt.” Paul stood, adjusting his vest, taking deep breaths, and picked up his gun. He rubbed at the fabric-burned skin on his neck to massage out the sting and paused. The slumped over zombie wore the same blue jumpsuit with white reflective trim as Alex. “Bobby, when you write the report, note both were wearing the same uniforms.”

  Bobby glanced at both bodies. “Okay... You still think this is more than two homeless guys?”

  “Two recently turned guys in jumpsuits near the same dumpster seems unusual, doesn’t it?” Paul said.

  “Wait, how do you know they turned recently?”

  Jane spoke: “Bobby, look at their skin. It’s not dirty and they don’t even look like some greaser from Foxer or Millers, aside from the dirt picked up here, and it still has a little color left in it. I’d guess less than a day. With nothing to eat they’d be slow, which is why the one that grabbed Paul only stirred after we made enough noise with the first one.”

  “Okay, whatever. I’ll write it up.”

  “And add that the one named Alex has a ring on his left hand with three diamonds,” Paul said. “Maybe someone will come looking for him. Seems like something someone would know about.”

  “Diamond ring. Got it.”

  “Help Jane with the bodies, and I’ll get another bag.”

  Jane flung open a black vinyl body bag. “Hey, do these uniforms look like city uniforms to you?”

  Bobby stared down at his tablet computer, checking boxes on an incident report form, tapping different locations of the screen.

  “Bobby?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I said, don’t these uniforms look like city uniforms?”

  “I guess so. I don’t really pay attention to clothes.”

  “Aside people not wearing them?”

  “Janey, you know we like the same things,” he said with wink.

  She didn’t look up from prepping the bag. “At least I have a woman to go home to.”

  Paul ignored their banter, left behind the rotting garbage and tread back to the ambulance with his hands behind his head, his breathing steady but his legs still light with shock. His closest contact during the outbreak was an arm’s-length swing of a baseball bat, never inches from his face. Survival brought relief, and he made a mental note to thank Bobby with a beer when they had that talk about details, but how long would that last, if his body teemed with an infection? He searched for the first stars to break through the twilight, and with a deep exhale the question hit him. How would he tell Karen?

  At least he would not be buying the last round tonight.

  Alone

  Even inside the safety of the middle school, the girl hid in the shadows, not wanting to be found by the alive or the dead.

  She had finished a breakfast of dry macaroni noodles and canned carrots and sat with her knees pulled up, tucked under a sc
ience lab station, holding one of the last laptops with enough power to play solitaire. When she first found the cache of laptops and tablets, she had burned through the batteries of three in the first day playing the installed mini games. But remembering electricity didn’t flow freely through outlets like it had, she rationed her playtime to a few hours a day. The games were a comforting distraction.

  She had no one but herself to care for, and in case she needed to escape, she kept a half dozen cans of vegetables and fruit in a charcoal backpack along with a full, hard plastic Nalgene water bottle. It had been two weeks since she last washed her clothes: a pair of black jeans, a camisole, and a three quarters sleeve tee, which was slowly turning a murky brown, accumulating dirt from sleeping on the classroom floors. She lacked the courage to venture out and find a sleeping bag, and settled for a collection of coats left behind in the teachers’ lounge.

  The school, Wyatt Middle, was a flat one-story box with two dozen classrooms, a cafeteria, a gym, and a few administrative offices. Despite the occasional creak and rattle in the walls and ductwork, she occupied the building alone, tucked away in the back of a suburban, wooded neighborhood. The cafeteria held a bounty of dry and canned goods along with juices and water.

  For now, she was comfortable and safe and didn’t need courage.

  She’d depleted whatever courage she’d built up in her seventeen-year-old life, fleeing with no family to turn to. They were dead, murdered, or insane.

  She’d lay awake at night and stare at a map of constellations, as if counting stars on a paper chart would bring order to the swirl of anger that burned in her chest and sadness that stung her eyes. Memories couldn’t be rocketed to galaxies far away.

  Faint and distant, a pounding against metal came from down the main corridor. She turned her head to discern if a zombie bumbled at a doorway or if it was more purposeful.

  It stopped.

  The pounding resumed again, with a higher pitch and ceased with clinking glass and shouting voices.

  She took a sharp breath and bolted to behind the lab’s doorway.