Survivor Response

by Patrick J. Harris

  In jeans, a comfortable blouse she thrifted, and ballet flats, Karen led a team of a dozen dispatchers. She cultivated a casual work environment, encouraging teams within each section to decorate their area to match the service they supported. Police and fire dispatchers tacked badges and patches from units across the country up on the cubicle walls. Siren lamps of different colors and shapes were mounted on the top edges. The fire dispatchers found a poster of a muscled and oiled shirtless fireman, and on the other side of the aisle hung a poster of a female police officer suggestively biting a night stick as she removed her aviator sunglasses, pre outbreak sexual harassment training be damned. A dartboard hung on the wall at the end of the ZMT row with a zombie caricature pinned behind three darts.

  Jess, a police dispatcher, approached the door. “Lively meeting?”

  Karen laughed and placed her notebook and phone on her desk. “Do I look that zoned out? The usual status updates and Alan picking on Caroline being out of it.”

  “No surprise there, right?”

  Karen bit her lip and raised an eyebrow. “Sadly.”

  Jess excused herself to the break room, and Karen surveyed her staff from behind her desk. Stationed at the back of the room, it was raised from the floor allowing her to see if anyone waved to her attention. She sipped her water bottle and watched an animated dispatcher in utilities. Wanda’s arms moved and pointed and her fingers expanded and closed into fists. Utilities handled the mundane tasks related to Greenport’s services: missed trash pick ups, broken water mains and everything else non-emergency. They kept a running joke that their calls were the most stressful. An insolent and shouting customer about bad plumbing received a nonchalant response, compared to the immediate crisis of someone scared shitless of a zombie.

  Karen put on her headset and tapped into Wanda’s line.

  “And it just kept driving. Didn’t stop for nothing, and now I got a fire hydrant spraying all over my building.”

  “Ma’am, ma’am, I have your complaint, filed in our system, and I have explained how and when a crew will be out to Foxer—”

  “And I’ve said this is my third call today about these trucks. They keep rolling out of Millers ignoring everything. People, traffic signs, anything.”

  Millers was one of the industrial zones across the river. Originally, the street of Millers lined with lumber yards that took shipments of logs off barges and sent out pallet loads of two-by-fours, four-by-fours and other wood byproducts. Today, factories shipped out goods across the rebuilding country after Alan realized a manufacturing hub post-contagion would revitalize Greenport’s economy.

  Karen respected her boss. He was effective, precise, creative, intolerant of errors, demanding and he commanded attention and praise for any minor achievement he accomplished. With a bitter silence, she accepted Alan’s method of imprisonment he implemented—forced servitude manufacturing goods in work conditions hardly better than a pre-Plague sweatshop. Cramped quarters, long hours, and only enough food to keep them alive. But Greenport kept people safe, and those manufactured electronics components brought in enough cash to buy a sense of security.

  She opened an email, drafted any inquiry to Alan about the trucks and clicked send.

  Everything in Greenport occurred in a considered and deliberate manner. Traffic flowed at optimal rates coordinated by sensors installed on traffic lights. Housing occupancies filled according to a zone’s density of people, and Karen suspected individuals received permits based on a hidden formula. The residential zones in western Greenport were ethnically and racially diverse, near as she could tell, but poor people didn’t exist. At least visibly. Paul described Foxer from his ZMT calls to the zone as worn, old, and gray, with a coat of permanent bleakness. Drugs and gambling filled smoky back rooms. Karen regularly stationed ambulances throughout the city and coordinated patrols with the police department, but in Foxer she increased her crews’ presence. Every conceivable measurement, or performance indicators as Alan referred to them in his daily email briefs, ticked and sparked and jumped and bled a rainbow of colors. If Greenport were alive, Alan would clinically deliver a rectal thermometer to confirm the temperature taken from the one in its mouth.

  All the data that Alan collected baffled Karen. She could tame a spreadsheet about an endowment forecast in the millions, but the scale of what she measured in her previous life was a small portrait compared to the ever-growing gallery of data Alan vaulted on a server farm. One of those servers stored radio frequency pings of city trucks. The RFID tags affixed to the windshields of all vehicles in Greenport, and Karen filtered through the system’s logs for heavy duty trucks leaving or arriving from any zone. She also checked the reports of activities scheduled for Millers that day. One truckload of network sensors and components already made its delivery to the docks at noon, and nothing more. In Alan’s micro-managed world, the trucks had to be something he would know about.

  A hand shot up and waved to Karen from the ZMT group. She removed her headset and walked to Thomas’ cubicle. Thomas Estebido was her youngest and most tenured employee. Scrawny with a shaved head, a boyish face, and a whisper thin mustache that she kept telling him to shave off, at eighteen he was hired on three weeks after Alan announced his first major municipal initiative, the Call Center. The Call Center, Alan and Caroline pitched in town halls across the city, would serve as its ears and brain, storing all that the citizens heard. Greenport, he claimed, would respond effectively to any call. Karen suspected this began Alan’s massive data collection about the city. If the Call Center housed the brain of Greenport, then the thousands of cameras and sensors he deployed functioned as its eyes and nerves.

  Thomas eyed Karen with an abnormal urgency. “Hurry, hurry. Paul just got attacked.”

  Her adrenaline surged, and her voice cracked. “What?” Her stomach tightened and her breath grew measured. Her fiancée was eight years her junior, and she while understood the pervasive danger of his job, she could never shake the feeling each time she kissed him goodbye when he left for a shift that one day she would plan his funeral. She didn’t do that for her first husband—he had disappeared scavenging for supplies on a sky blue afternoon during the outbreak.

  “He appears to be okay, and it looks like Jane’s wiping him down.”

  “What happened?” Even with her administrative privileges she couldn’t rewind live video. Alan didn’t want dispatchers or city workers viewing ZMT calls for entertainment.

  “He was pulling a hostile out from behind a dumpster, and Bobby went to go get a containment bag. He leaned back against the dumpster and a second hostile jumped out and grabbed him.”

  The other ZMT dispatchers turned to listen and to watch Karen, normally so calm under duress, and now shaken, clutching her shoulders with her arms crossed. “But he wasn’t bit?”

  “No, no. Off screen, I didn’t see who fired a kill shot. It let go, and Paul fell to the ground. Jane then came running in.”

  A sigh escaped Karen. “Thank God.”

  “He was...”

  “Paul was what?”

  “The— the kill shot made a mess and blood landed all over his head and face.”

  To Karen, the din of the room went silent and she stepped back and squeezed her shoulders.

  “But that doesn’t mean anything, right?” Thomas asked.

  She bowed her head and paced down the aisle to the dart board. A gift from Paul, she traced the wire frame with a finger and stood, breathing slow. The room had gone silent, and she could feel all eyes upon her. With each breath, she collected her composure and said, her voice was low. “We had a briefing a while back about fluid contact, but it was basically, ‘We don’t know.’”

  “So much for science getting back to normal,” Thomas said.

  “They are working it, though,” Karen said. “What the doctor from the hospital said was that we all have an inactive form of the virus, and while a bite somehow activates it, fluid alone might not, even though it has the virus. They,�
�� she took a breath, “showed us pictures of animals they tested fluid contact with.”

  Thomas turned away from his computer. “And?”

  Karen rubbed her face with both hands. “The animals bled out. ‘Hemorrhaged out of every orifice,’ the doctor said. They never had it in them, so when it hit their system, it consumed them.”

  “Jesus. But it didn’t make them come back?”

  She shook her head. “Seconds, maybe. Not long enough to wander for food.”

  “Damn,” Thomas said. “Well, for what it’s worth, Paul walked away, and we’ll get him tested when he gets back. Protocol requires it, and he’ll be watched for twenty-four hours.”

  The alleyway video played on the screen in real time. Karen recognized Bobby and Jane from their regular post-shift drink gatherings. Bobby hoisted the slumped zombie out of the dumpster and laid it in the black containment bag. Jane lifted the body Paul dragged into the other bag, zipping it halfway. Paul exited the camera’s frame, and disappeared with his hands held behind his neck and head looking skyward.

  She matched his pose and paced down the aisle of dispatchers. She’d seen the pose numerous times after a shift when a call, or the entire shift went to hell with a preventable death or some other clusterfuck she could read in a report. And she’d have to pull the report, as he never talked about what triggered the mood.

  “Just a bad day,” he’d say, or, “Something stupid,” and stare at the popcorn spackle on the ceiling of their apartment. She gave him his space to let him deal with the stupid day with whatever mixture of immaturity, PTSD, or male bravado he used to process his emotions. He lost years of relationship opportunities to develop his communication skills, wandering the Plague alone, while she lucked into traveling with a band of artist types. Plus, she had already been married—she knew what it took to stay together. Did he? Her friends cautioned her about falling for a younger guy, but on that night at the shrine in Belleville when they first met, she connected with his sense of purpose when he pinned a picture of his dead sister to the memorial wall.

  “Karen? Are you going to be okay?” Thomas said, leaning forward in his chair.

  She dropped her arms, and nodded. “He’s a ZMT. This is to be expected. I have to be.” And when they get home tonight, she reasoned, he wasn’t going to stare silently at the ceiling.

  Chapter 4

  Out the passenger window, Paul watched the city blocks scroll by. The drive from Creedy to the Command Center cut through Greenport’s Belleville arts district. Hand-lettered Containment Day banners ticked by as people lolled along the street to cafes and bistros.

  Paul met Karen during a Belleville arts festival two months after he arrived in Greenport. He found the city months after the original Containment Day declaration, along with a small troop of disheveled survivors, caked in dirt and grime of a long trek without showers, who ambled into the city’s checkpoints. He forced himself out of his assigned apartment to check out the neighborhood and strolled along the paper banners on streets full of families soaking in normalcy. She had stood at a booth handing out pamphlets about the district’s venues, dressed in jeans, a green flannel shirt and a matching green neckerchief tied in a do-rag to cover her blonde hair. An assortment of balloons seemed to assault her in the afternoon’s cool wind.

  Karen began to hand him a pamphlet.

  “Are those balloons banging you?” Paul said.

  She stopped her arm midway.

  “Excuse me?”

  Paul swallowed. “The balloons, are they banging on you?”

  She bowed her head, closed her eyes and laughed. “Why yes, they are banging me quite good at the moment.”

  Paul’s face flushed. He looked down. “I meant, are the balloons bothering you?”

  “They’re okay for the moment. They’re supposed to attract people to my booth. I guess they’re doing their job,” she said, and passed him a map to Belleville’s galleries and restaurants.

  “They looked pretty annoying in the wind.”

  “Mild compared to the undead even on a bright day.”

  “Very true,” he said. It had been years since he conversed with a woman when life or death didn’t matter. He attempted to recover his sense of dignity, unfolding the map. “What’s worth checking out?”

  Karen pointed two small galleries out on the map. “This one exhibits paintings exploring what it meant to survive the Plague, and the other, Saecula, is a living exhibit where Greenport’s citizens could bring snapshots, trinkets and reminders of those they lost,” she said, brushing tufts of hair under her do rag.

  Paul thanked her and walked down the street back into the crowd. While exploring Belleville, clarity kicked him upside the head, realizing she was flirting with him despite the inadvertent and unintended innuendo. As twilight fell, he returned to Karen’s information booth, where the balloons now stood still. She placed the remaining flyers in a canvas bag and greeted him with a smile as he stepped near.

  “The balloons have ceased delivering their affections for the day,” she said.

  Paul leaned on the booth, crossed his arms and laughed. “I can see that. Glad they left you alone so you could work.”

  “It was awfully nice of them.”

  “Look,” Paul said. “I’m sorry about earlier. I’m out of practice when it comes to conversations. Words come out of my mouth without thinking sometimes. My name is Paul.”

  “Paul. And to think I’d live my days in Greenport wondering about Balloon Banger. I’m Karen.”

  They shook hands. Karen’s hand cooled his as she firmly met his grip. “I can also be dense, but straight to the point, too,” he said. “Can I take you to that coffee shop a block over?”

  Karen let his warm hand clasp around hers. She narrowed her eyes, brushed the side of her do-rag with her other hand and smiled broadly. “Sure. That would be nice. I could use a hot cup of coffee.”

  Paul let go of her hand and let his chest exhale. “Great, cool. Do you need help picking up stuff?”

  “If you could get rid of the balloons, that’d be good.”

  He dug out a pocketknife from his jeans and pulled the twine strands close to his chest. Air rippled through a delicate slice at the base of each balloon knot. He cut the twine and tossed the refuse in a nearby trash can along the street.

  Karen clutched her bag at her hip and tilted her head. “Most people would have popped them.”

  He shrugged. “Didn’t want to scare anyone.”

  “How would popping balloons scare people at a street fair?”

  “Still sounds too much like a gunshot.”

  They walked to the coffee shop, Rembrandt’s, and Karen described Belleville’s storefronts, speaking of the owners as if she knew them personally, recounting their stories of surviving the Plague. When she detailed a demi-glace sauce on a restaurant’s premiere entree, Paul’s stomach yearned for the savory cuisine.

  “How do you know all these people?” he asked.

  He was a little taller than her and she needed to tilt her head up to make eye contact. “I love all things creative. Before, I worked in the non-profit sector, mostly in the arts. When everything went to Hell, I was running an endowment that gave out grants or made purchases for museums. After arriving here, still alive, it made me love them more, and I didn’t want them to be lost.”

  “It’s hard to believe we’d lose people’s ability to paint or draw or sing.”

  “True, but I feared we’d lose their value,” she said. She adjusted her bag along her hip while they continued to stroll down the street. “I wanted to make sure it could be shared and received and bring meaning. I guess, to answer your question, I just met these people and listened, and by luck, found a few endeavoring souls who were entrepreneurial about it.”

  “Meaning…” Paul said noticing the tufts of hair escaping her do-rag. “Kind of like when, during the height of the running, there’d be times while I’d search a house for a stereo or some kind of music player just to hea
r Robert Plant and Jimmy Page play “Fool in the Rain.” And I’d feel fearful and lonely when the batteries gave out.”

  “Exactly,” Karen said. “Music is as much a drug as any booze or narcotic.”

  “And I’d judge the people by how much Beatles they had.”

  She laughed, touching his elbow. “And if they didn’t? Were they heathens?”

  He shifted his hands in his pocket, his arms feeling looser, his face warmer. He smiled. “No, but this one house, I found way too many Yanni albums on vinyl. With no electricity, I couldn’t even torture myself out of curiosity.”

  “Barbarians.”

  They arrived at Rembrandt’s with two dozen other festival goers with the same idea, and they each ordered a coffee. Paul took in the nutty, earthy roasts brewing behind the counter. Boiling stale grounds found in a dented tin would be no more.

  She sipped her drink and turned. “Did you visit the two galleries I pointed you to?”

  “I did. They were good. The one with the paintings felt dark and gloomy.”

  “The Plague was a dark time for many.”

  “True.”

  She waited for him to say more, but he brought his cup to his lips. “What about the one next door?”

  He pushed the door to exit and nodded for her to head outside. “Angry.”

  Karen’s face made a slight pout. “Angry?”

  They now walked outside and steam from their drinks clouded with their breath. “All these bright pictures and snapshots, he said. “All those smiling faces and to know they’re dead or undead. At first I was sad for it all, then angry. Angry at myself.” He stopped, and turned to Karen.

  “I had to kill my father. After I did that, my sister disappeared.”

  She stuttered, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to cause you any grief.”

  He looked down. “No, no, it’s all right. You didn’t know. You pointed me to something you wanted to share. No harm in that.”

  “I still feel bad that it upset you.”