Survivor Response

by Patrick J. Harris

  Hidden, she peered to see the source.

  “Got it, I got it,” a man in flannel sleeves said, reaching through the shattered glass window to open the door from the inside.

  When she first arrived, she had locked all the doors and checked them every night as part of a routine.

  The door flung back to backlit figures and the glare of the mid-morning sun. Her eyes adjusted, counting seven people coming through the door, but beyond them a small horde of zombies trailed. She frowned and silently tapped her brow against the door frame—her safe little bubble had been punctured.

  “Find a room!” the flannel shirted man shouted, attempting to pull the door closed. A curly haired brunette hesitated at his side. He squeezed her hand and pushed her shoulder as if to urge her away. “Barricade the door.”

  Six figures scrambled up the linoleum floors towards her and ducked into the first room they passed, an all glass window office with a thin wooden door.

  She raced to grab her backpack and shoved a freshly charged laptop into it before sprinting out of the lab and to the gym at the opposite end of the school. She looked over her shoulder, the bottle of water bouncing against her hip, and the door in which the group broke in was pulled open. A chorus of snarls and grunts entered the hall as the flannel-shirted man was pulled off his feet into a swarm of hands and teeth as more trampled through the foyer.

  He wailed. “Sophie—I love you. Sophie—.”

  The girl closed her eyes, ignoring the larger glass office windows shattering and the screams of six people trapped to their death as she shoved free the back door of the gymnasium and scrounged a little courage to run away again.

  Chapter 2

  Alan Crighton spun the fountain pen around his left thumb, listening to what he hoped to be the final minutes of the closed executive meeting. Thin lips, a thin buzz of grey hair, brown eyes and nimble hands, he’d perfected the pen twirling thanks to his years waiting for solutions to mix in his lab, and he’d spin glass stirring rods through his fingers. At forty-six, the former neuroscience materials researcher knew the importance of appearances, and giving a growing midwestern city of forty thousand the appearance of administrative bureaucracy was a small sacrifice for a real world lab made of streets and buildings and people.

  And as city manager he relished the position like a lab director with any option as a possibility to explore with unlimited funding. He adjusted the collar of his Oxford shirt, shifted in his seat, and worked to keep the wrinkles in his forehead from showing disinterest in Greenport’s symbolic observation to the end of the Plague.

  “The last item on the agenda is Containment Day,” Mayor Caroline Denning said. “Street closures all set, David?”

  The mayor wore excess makeup to cover her years of smoking, and her clothes a size too small to give shape to a figure she lost surviving among all the others who wandered. She was half black and half Hispanic and possessed a habit of widening her brown eyes whenever she asked a question. Alan didn’t care to ask where she found the false eyelashes.

  Public works commissioner David Lewis leaned in over his notebook. “Most areas are minimal, and traffic should go through without any delay.”

  “And we’ll have police and ZMTs parked throughout the city, if needed,” Police Chief Ed Collins said. “It’s usually a subdued event, with a few large gatherings.”

  Ed and David were middle-aged fathers who drank a little more beer than they had time to exercise off, and as Greenport natives, were intimately familiar with the streets and the history of the city. They differed in that David kept his family alive during the Plague years while Ed failed. Alan didn’t hold it against him. Stupid things happened, but he knew Ed kept a spare bedroom with his undead wife and son locked away. Regardless, they both desired nothing more than a paycheck and a sense of purpose, and they responded to Alan’s project requests without question and with results. Their most recent work would be put into effect tonight.

  “Plus, we’ve outlawed fireworks,” Alan said, staring at the ceiling. “And guns. And bonfires.”

  “Right, so things will be quiet,” Ed said. He turned to Karen. “The Call Center’ll let us know about anything.”

  Karen nodded.

  Alan appreciated her brevity. His last major hire, Karen managed the Call Center a little loose for his liking, letting the atmosphere grow to a casual party, but her team answered the calls within his performance tolerances. During the round of interviews, her short crop blonde hair full of turtle shell barrettes caught his attention, but he grew intrigued when her light blue eyes lit up detailing how she managed a twenty-million-dollar budget at an arts non-profit before turning twenty-six. Alan respected intelligence.

  “What about Nasher?” Caroline said.

  And he loathed vacuousness. Alan stopped spinning his pen and cocked his head at the mayor, his brown eyes staring her down. “What do you mean?”

  The others at the table turned and awaited her response. Her large eyelashes fluttered and she leaned back placing her hands in front of her. “I mean, would he do anything tonight? We’ve had problems with him recently down at the docks, and he could take advantage of our resources being stretched thin tonight. We still don’t know how he got that helicopter in the city two months ago.”

  Ed began to open his mouth and stopped. He looked to Alan.

  Alan smirked. “The helicopter’s just a nuisance that was flown here. And Ed said so himself, earlier in his report, that Clyde Nasher has turned away from the docks for the time being, and is focusing on beating the city’s currency system.”

  “But that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t—”

  Alan placed his pen down, letting it tap against the table. He had fed Collins his report earlier in the day, culled from his network of cameras and drone networks across the city. He did this for every city officer and council person. Except the mayor. He enjoyed watching her react to news.

  “No, he wouldn’t. He needs cash, and right now he’s working on either selling sex and drugs and shitty liquor that didn’t get stolen during the outbreak, or figuring out who in the city can hack our currency. Any action other than that is a distraction to him,” Alan said.

  Plus, Alan knew all the city’s computer experts. He employed them.

  Or jailed them.

  Caroline huffed, shuffled papers together and looked at her watch. Alan guessed she had a dinner reservation to make. “Okay then. Any other items?”

  A chorus of “Nos” sounded. She forced a smile. “Everyone have a good Containment Day. I’ll be down in Belleville. Say hello, if you’re down there.”

  Alan gathered his notebook and placed his pen in his shirt pocket. The room emptied and Caroline grabbed his elbow while he followed Ed out.

  Her eyes narrowed and her voice hushed. “Why do you treat me like that? In front of everyone?”

  “Like how?”

  “You’re so condescending. I’m the mayor. You need to respect me.”

  Alan eyed Caroline from her leather boots to her well-kept coif. “I respect all fine actresses. I merely directed the scene.”

  “I’m no longer some actress you found on the side of the road. I’m the mayor of this city.”

  “A role that I cast you in. Play the part, and it’s yours for as long as you like.”

  She pulled her designer purse close to her hip and marched away. “And you’re just like any cheap director—an asshole.”

  Alan exhaled, ignoring the comment, and strolled to his office, letting her go.

  Inside, on the far wall across his desk, an array of mounted computer monitors displayed gauges and bars measuring performance indicators across different zones of the city. Trend lines jumped up and down giving him a historical record to compare to judge any one of his multitude of projects, each detailed in binders stacked on his desk. The thinnest contained was an expansion of the traffic control system into the districts across the river. The thickest detailed geographic and census level data into the city
’s seven districts. A wall-size map of the city, covered with scrawled marginalia and push pins, plotted expansions of his surveillance network.

  Alan sat down as a double knock rapped against his door. Ed stood in the doorway, with David behind him. “We thought we’d check in with you before we went home for the night. Go over any last details for your test run of the new drones you’ve been telling us about.”

  Alan swiveled in his desk chair and waved them in. Tonight, he planned to launch a new prototype of drones, more versatile and durable than their current fleet of quad copter pieces of plastic.

  Ed and David both stood in front of the desk. Ed spoke first. “All your drivers should be set shortly. Got them all cleared from the prison a few hours ago.”

  While murder received an immediate death sentence, lesser criminals were forced to be productive in the city’s industrial zones, manufacturing or repairing the armored ambulances for the ZMTs, while others fabricated sensors, wire or computer equipment to run the city’s infrastructure. Offenders were fitted with an ankle bracelet that invoked paralysis if they fled their assignments. Initial bracelets shocked the wearer—one of his first escapees had drowned trying to cross the river. Alan modified it to stop them at the perimeter of their assignment location. A dead prisoner can’t produce the things he and the city needed, and recovering a now-active zombie in the water consumed resources. He believed his method superior, focusing on rehabilitation and social contribution, rather than imprisonment. After the Plague, prison would be a safe respite.

  “They’re all within the demographics I gave you?” Alan said.

  “Took time, but yes.”

  “And our guy will be able pick up his package and make the delivery?”

  “David briefed him on the routes so he should be able to pick up Julian without a problem, and the ZMTs shouldn’t interfere either.”

  David broke his silence. “I gave him a GPS tracker just in case.”

  Five months earlier, Alan had created the Zombie Medical Techs. An oxymoron of a name, but a phrasing he deemed identifiable to the city’s populace. The spate of attacks decreased to their level of today because of the ZMTs and because of his awareness campaign to educate people to be more responsible. Caroline gave speeches, made appearances, and recorded video and radio public services announcements: Only engage zombies if you own a city-issued weapon, otherwise call in for a ZMT for assistance.

  The issued weapon appeared like a day glo orange flare gun, but held four rounds of ammunition. When successfully fired and hit, the bullets would spiral through the body like a normal bullet, but if the bullet detected the skin temperature to be significantly lower than a living person, it would explode. Even if they didn’t manage a head shot, they’d deliver serious damage to the zombie.

  As a former research scientist, he thought his design to be clever, appealing to an average citizen’s need for self-defense while including a complex synthesis of technical wizardry. If the gun were used in a crime, the individual would face immediate jail time. In fact, these weapons were the only legal guns allowed in the city, genetically coded to only be fired by the issuer. As a condition to live within the walls of Greenport, citizens surrendered all firearms. While homemade hammers, maces, axes were not endorsed by him or his team, he advised the police and ZMTs to let people have basic tools.

  “I’m counting on tonight’s operation to find and flush Nasher out of Foxer for good, as I’m sure you are too, Ed,” Alan said of Greenport’s most wanted criminal on the East side of the river.

  “Certainly, his illegal activities pose a threat to Greenport’s safety.”

  “Which reminds me. Your recent work tracking down the bad meth source was impressive.”

  Illegal drugs and guns still trafficked through the city’s network of crime syndicates, an activity Alan detested. It fed underground gambling parlors, drug dens, and theft. His police force focused their arrests on blatant criminals, those who acted without discretion and visibly disturbed the order of Greenport. Vices and minor crimes were expected of human nature, and Alan could not expect to remove them all.

  “We lucked out having a few detectives settle here. They did the hard work.”

  It was order and safety Alan promised to those who arrived to his city. He knew people tired of the uncertainty and chaos of the Plague, and once it was over he sought to turn the city into a model of rebuilding. He expounded his technological solutions, built around sensors, networked intelligence and predictive statistics. He believed an innovative combination delivered the controls needed to provide the order that he and his citizens craved.

  Outside the walls of Greenport, video cameras watched the surrounding fields and roads for traffic, people on foot or zombies approaching. Software analyzed the movement, determining the level of threat and classifying it. If the software, which Alan named Hayley, determined the entity to be a zombie, it alerted an individual working the wall to launch a drone helicopter to further scout the situation. He saw this as a way to prevent false positives. Severely dehydrated people staggered similarly to a moderately healthy zombie. Killing live people would reflect poorly on Greenport’s reputation. Staggering people rarely occurred now that they lived in a post-Plague world.

  David coughed. “Roads from the depot to the drop sites you ordered throughout Foxer are clear, and traffic signals will be set to let the trucks through.”

  One of seven districts, Foxer was the city’s poorer residential district on the east side of the river. It shared walls with Millers, the industrial prison, while three residential districts, Creedy, Belleville, and Northside spread across west of the river. Sandwiched between those as a hub, Central housed all the city’s commercial and financial businesses. On the far western edge, the last zone consisted of only three buildings and stood as a fortified compound, called the Command Center, where Alan now watched the monitors.

  “Perfect,” Alan said, noticing a monitor flashing with an alert of a ZMT dispatch in Creedy. “Gentlemen, thank you for your help. Head home, and I’ll be in touch if I need you.”

  The two men left, and Alan returned his attention to the monitor of Creedy, the residential zone by the water where the city’s richest lived. He found it fascinating that certain housing trends remained in a post Plague world—riverfront property commanded a premium. The border of the screen flashed red, indicating a ZMT dispatch in progress. He scanned the zone’s metrics, reading the city’s lowest of zombie incidents. Income and zombie attacks were inversely proportional. Foxer, the residential zone across the river reported the opposite, poor and a high number of hostile incidents.

  He walked across the hall to Sophie’s large office, a space he granted her to be his eyes to everything.

  “Sophie, please put the current incident up on the large screen.”

  He only knew Sophie by her first name. When Alan met her in a refugee camp not too far from Greenport, he asked her name. Her auburn hair had yet to grow the white streak flowing from the left side of her forehead, and her eyes quaked as they looked down. She responded in a voice barely louder than a whisper, “Sophie.” Alan brought home a seventeen-year-old survivor in weather-worn clothes with hollow green eyes. She reminded him of a niece, he’d chase around his brother’s backyard picnics.

  In a one-way conversation, he had offered food, water, clothes, but it wasn’t until his phone chimed that her eyes rose from the dirt to his hands. With the promise of the electronic device, she entered the back of his car with trepidation.

  As a man with no children, he welcomed her into his life as a daughter and adjusted living with someone else, let alone addressing the needs of a shellshocked young woman. He placed his hand on her head and stroked along the white hair that streaked through the red. She leaned into his side as she sat at the keyboard and watched the stream appear.

  Two ZMTs walked about in front of a dumpster in what appeared to be an alley. Despite Alan’s ability to network the city to sense any action, video stream
ing still proved a challenge. Washed out greys blended with over saturated colors. The blue and orange ZMT uniforms orbited a glowing green dumpster in contrast to the flat concrete surface. He noted to study video compression technology in the future. A female ZMT with short hair zipped a body bag while one of her partners hunched over a portable computer entering the beginnings of a report. The female looked up and said something. Sophie had pulled up the feed and forgot to plug in the audio. He ignored the mistake, a trivial one.

  Alan hummed, resting his hand on her shoulder. “It appears we missed the action.”

  “Would you like me to rewind the feed?”

  “No, that won’t be necessary. We already know the outcome.”

  “Was that one of our truck drivers? It looked like a suit they wear,” she said referring to the blue and white trim jumpsuit.

  “Maybe. It’s hard to tell with the video. When the ZMT files the report, make sure it gets sent to me before going to the police department. Pull the video of the previous twenty-four hours, too. I’ll see if I can save them the trouble of an investigation.”

  Sophie clicked the keys. “Done.”

  “Good.”

  “I received a message a few minutes ago that the last of the trucks for tonight’s test run have arrived. The drivers are eating dinner as you requested.”

  Alan’s hand caressed Sophie’s neck, tracing her delicate silver necklace.

  “Perfect.”

  Chapter 3

  Across from the Command Center, Karen Myer entered Greenport’s Call Center, which buzzed with chatter and keyboard clicks. Compared to her previous life managing a private east coast arts endowment, running a call center now for a small, still recovering city like Greenport, Karen enjoyed the freedom that came with a job that didn’t arrive bundled with suffocating strings. Donors and patrons had cared about sensitivities that bordered on inane, while Alan only desired results. And pushing thirty-one, she came out of the Plague not giving a damn about the veneer of clothes with designer names.