Survivor Response

by Patrick J. Harris

  “Vee, why are we turning around?” she said. “We’re to go to the hospital.”

  Vee called over her shoulder, “We’re getting redirected to Central. Orders are to quarantine the bodies on arrival.”

  “Where are we going to quarantine them when we get there?” Karen asked Donovan. “It’s not like we have a lot of empty buildings, let alone rooms that meet any quarantine protocol.”

  Donovan shrugged. “Beats me. It doesn’t seem odd though. We normally take bodies back, swab for DNA samples for the registry, and then incinerate ’em.”

  Karen remembered. All bodies ZMTs picked up, whether already killed, or killed by the team, were brought back to central for disposal. Families could request ashes, but the city forbade any bodies to be buried. Grave sites took up land. Most victims were known, and DNA swabs confirmed they matched to the register the city already had of its citizens. If the victim was unknown, the sample could potentially ID them. Plus, this system was designed to combat crime, increasing the likelihood of forensic evidence from a crime scene identifying suspects.

  The two dead suspects between Karen and Donovan jostled to every bounce and movement within the truck. The wires exposed from the one without the helmet seemed alien to Karen, like an uncomfortable fascination. If they removed the black jumpsuit, what else would they find attached to the wires? There was a biological affect to the electrodes, similar to cochlear implants. It was a guess, but the electrodes stimulated something.

  “Do any of you know anyone at the hospital? Someone that knows about electrodes? Maybe we could have them come look at these bodies before they get incinerated?” Karen asked the crew.

  Donovan shook his head no, and Vee called out “No!”

  But Shelly said, “I got a buddy who’s a PTOT.”

  “A what?”

  “Physical therapist, occupational therapist. I know he uses electrodes to stimulate muscles. Jerk freaked me out when he used one on me at a party. Turned my fist into a parlor trick, opening and closing it at will.”

  “Can you call him? What’s his name?”

  “Kevin. Yeah, I can call him.”

  “Great. Vee, who did the order come from, for us to turn around? Was it Alan or Milo?”

  “I know Milo’s on duty, but I didn’t recognize the voice. Kind of a young girl.”

  Karen ran through a possible list of people, and stopped worrying about a trivial detail. “Okay, Shelly, call Kevin and have him get to Central ASAP. I want to make sure someone with a clue can give us an idea as to what the hell is on these guys.”

  “On it.”

  Shelly began speaking to Kevin over the phone, and the ZMT truck came to a halt.

  “Well, this is unexpected,” Vee said.

  Karen and Donovan moved to the front to peer through the window. A crowd swelled in the street with arms raised. In their hands, cell phones glowed and bobbed, flickering like an electronic candle, and an occasional orange flame would wobble atop a lighter.

  “It’s part of the Containment Day celebrations, it looks like,” Donovan said.

  “I wasn’t expecting this many people when I came back through here, though. I mean, just look at the crowd,” Vee said. “And why the hell aren’t they freaking out about what happened a few miles away?”

  Donavan peered through the front windshield. “Rituals for grief are hard to shake.”

  Hundreds, maybe more than a thousand people crowded the street from one side to the other for less than twenty-five yards. For the truck to make it through the crowd, they’d need to part it. Vee flipped two switches on the center console and red and blue lights washed over the crowd. Shelly clicked a different switch on and off to emit an sudden whooping of the siren. Several blank faces turned and tapped the hood of the rig and stepped aside. More hands rapped at the body of the vehicle and dull pangs of metal echoed inside.

  “And we’re stopped,” Shelly said.

  “I’ll get out and see if I can move them aside,” Donovan said.

  “I’ll come, too,” Karen said. “Keep flashing the lights and sirens.”

  “Will do.”

  Karen and Donovan shuffled to the back, careful to not touch the bodies in the center. Donovan paused and reached up to a cabinet and pulled out a disposable blanket. He spread his arms wide and unfolded the thin blue cloth, draping it over the two dead bodies, and tucked the edge of the blanket into the seams of the stretcher.

  “Even if they peek in here, they won’t get much” Donovan said.

  Karen smirked, appreciating the attention to detail to minimize who saw the dead bodies. “Good idea.”

  Donovan grasped the door’s handle. “Ready?”

  “Let’s go.”

  Donovan pushed the door open with care as not to accidentally hit someone, while more people walked toward the growing mass. They both climbed out, Karen first, and strayed to the left side of the vehicle, and Donovan closed the door and went right. Karen looked around. Cell phones still floated above, and the collective shuffling and murmuring voices swirled into static. No chanting or yelling, but a steady, somber tone emanated from the crowd.

  The ZMT rig inched forward and Karen looked ahead to see the central point of congregation—the Saecula Gallery, the unofficial Plague memorial and site of hers and Paul’s first date.

  She stood next to the headlights and looked to Vee, who returned a thumbs up and pointed forward. Donovan was already in front, with his arms spread wide, gently urging people out of the ZMTs’ path.

  “Move! Coming through,” Karen shouted, breaking the crowd’s collective silence, and faces turned. She felt a twinge of guilt and returned to calling out, but at a lower volume. She knew friends and neighbors who held the site as a sacred space, and calling out orders hung in the air like heresy.

  “Karen?” a woman’s voice said.

  Jane and Deanna stood in the crowd each holding a lit cell phone, and Jane weaved her way through the crowd to Karen.

  “Jane, hey,” Karen said.

  “Hey yourself. Where’s Paul?”

  Deanna hugged Jane from behind and waved to Karen. Karen returned a half smile and a wave. “It’s been a long evening. We got caught in the mess in Belleville and got separated. I—I honestly don’t know where he is.”

  Jane’s smile gave way to a frown. “Is he okay? Have you called him?”

  “I don’t know. My phone got smashed by some—”

  She paused, filtering her choice of words, “—crazy who picked it up and threw it down the street where it shattered to pieces.”

  “Dee,” Jane looked over her shoulder. “Do you have Paul’s number? Can you call him?”

  “I think I do.” Deanna switched off her phone’s flashlight and navigated the address book. “Yep, calling now.”

  “We heard, while we were on our way here, about a massive accident down there, but not much else. Deanna was able to bug out of the Aviary early so we could make this.”

  “What is this?” Karen said, eyeing the crowd.

  “I’ve heard it called several things, with the most common being, ‘The Procession.’ I think this is the first year for it to happen. People are walking from all parts of the city to this spot, the memorial, with their cell phones lit, because who the hell wants to deal with lit candles if they don’t have to?”

  “And they just stand here?”

  “I guess? I don’t know,” Jane said. “Some people appear to just be milling about. Others are going inside. Thomas and Maria went inside, I think.”

  “Paul’s not answering,” Deanna said. “I sent a text to have him call Jane or I immediately.”

  To Karen, the crowd went silent and her vision narrowed, focusing past Deanna’s face. The collective crowd turned into a boiler room. Her feet locked and she pulled her arms around herself. Alone in a crowd, she fought to push back the panic attack. Her mind flashed to her husband. Blake. The sight of him running through burnt-out suburban sprawl to draw a pack of zombies away from their
group. Never to return. For a week she had waited. Forcing her group to go on with out her. Ignoring hunger. Barely subsisting on water and stale animal crackers. Certain he’d return, grinning and covered in dirt. Two members of her group had circled back to the cookie cutter townhome and carried her on their shoulders as she despondently paced with them.

  Her grief persisted for nearly three months until they camped in an art gallery in a mid-size town out side of Chicago. There, she slept underneath a washed-out color photograph of a dogwood tree against a horizon. Was the sun setting, or was it rising? Was the day ending, or was it beginning? The three-by-five-inch white placard with the piece’s title, Horizon Decision, gave her no clues. She made her own decision: It was a sunrise, a beginning, and she was going to stop wallowing and live. It was tragic that Blake disappeared to God knows what, but she still lived. But when she arrived to Greenport, she let him go, pinning his picture to the wall of the memorial.

  “Karen? Karen, are you okay?” Jane said.

  “I—I need to go inside the memorial.” The quiet murmuring of the crowd returned and she pushed between heavy coats and scarves to the amber lit windows of the building. Her desire to see Blake’s wide grin and receding hair line tugged her forward. She thought she found peace when she walked away from his pinned photograph. But to lose Paul in the same way—disappearing into a seemingly safe place dredged the grief to the surface.

  At the foyer of the memorial, she crossed into a living scrapbook. Snapshots, candids, portraits, intimate, groups, singles, couples, full colored, sepia, tones of gray, square, large, wallet sized, all hung from the four walls and ceiling as printed ghosts. An elderly Hispanic couple knelt with an electric candle and clasped a rosary. A woman, no older than twenty-five, traced her fingers overs a large group portrait of people caught mid air above a receding wave of water. A portly middle aged man in tears tacked a four-by-six color photo of what looked to be his twin. The room was silent, except for the occasional whisper or sniffling nose. Karen grew warmer moving to the far corner, where Blake’s picture hung by a red thumbtack. Pictures overlapped, but faces never became obscured. His picture was where she had left it, its colors beginning to fade.

  She exhaled and closed her eyes tight. She didn’t want to pin another photo to the wall. She’d find him. She could use the city’s vast network to do it. She could pull video feeds and cross reference locations and facial recognition. It’d be borderline misuse, but a lost ZMT crew member would justify the orders. Karen, now resolved, turned and began navigating the memorial’s patrons, and a hand brushed her forearm.

  “Karen,” a familiar voice whispered.

  Thomas stood hand in hand with his girlfriend.

  “Good to see you,” he continued. “I got your messages, and I’m getting nonstop updates from the crew working dispatch tonight.” He waved the phone in his hand.

  She spilled her words: “I got separated from Paul.”

  “That’s awful,” Maria said. “Thomas got word you were on a ZMT transport, but we figured you both were on it.”

  Karen smiled weakly. “Thank you for the good thoughts, but unfortunately no, he’s not. I’m on my way back to Central now.”

  “What brought you here then?” Thomas said.

  “We got rerouted from the hospital to Central, and got caught in the crowd. I’m supposed to be helping clear the path for the transport at the moment.”

  Thomas turned to the windows and the ZMT truck edged out of the thickest part of the crowd. “All these people, definitely bigger than I expected. We came, ’cause Deanna told us about it. Me and Maria both have pictures up.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, and I hope this place helps bring you both a bit of peace,” Karen said. She motioned to leave, but Thomas brushed her shoulder.

  “Thanks. But speaking of Central—we saw a picture of Ghost Girl by Maria’s brother’s photo.”

  Karen cocked her head. “Really?”

  “I swear it’s her.”

  “Thomas basically just stopped me and said” Maria said, mimicking Thomas’ shocked face, ‘That’s her, Maria’ pretty loud.”

  “I’ll show you.” Thomas pulled Karen by the hand across the room. “See?” His index finger landed on a small wallet-size school picture. A red-haired pre-teen sat smiling in front of a sky blue back drop.

  Karen checked her bearings of where she stood in the room; an uneasy deja vu caught her. “Are you sure this is her, Thomas?”

  “I mean, not 100 percent, but if that’s not pre-Plague Ghost Girl, then, well, I don’t know. Is there a problem?”

  “That’s where Paul put a picture of his sister.”

  “I thought she was...”

  Karen took a breath. “Ghost Girl is Paul’s sister. And we’ve seen her too.”

  Thomas took a few seconds to mouth the words. “You mean—”

  “Paul said her name was Morgan. But her name, now, is Sophie.”

  Chapter 15

  “Get the fuck out of the car!”

  Paul shook his head. He didn’t think he blacked out after his head slammed into the leather headrest and ricocheted against the window. His vision blurred and a high-pitched squeal reverberated in his ears. This day was beating the shit out of his body, and he didn’t know when or where it would end. He moved his arm to a stray band of light from a street lamp and looked at his watch to focus his eyes. End of shift and drinks at The Aviary seemed distant. How much time had passed since Julian’s crash? An hour? Maybe more?

  Julian grabbed his wrist. “Paul, checking the time isn’t going to do jack. We need to move.”

  Paul glanced to the shattered-out back window, now littering the back cargo area. Violent pebbles of glass reflected a fiery orange from the street light. He shuffled across the seat. Julian swung the door open, and his hand grazed the cracked leather hole. The leather flared out exposing the yellow foam padding. An exit wound, meant for one of them.

  Bobby stood outside the crashed SUV, reloading his gun with a magazine. After a satisfactory click, he pulled the gun back, loaded a bullet into the chamber, and holstered the weapon under his jacket.

  “Guys, get moving,” Bobby said, running to the back of the SUV. “Get down to the boardwalk, and we’ll lose them there.”

  Paul bent over with his hands on his knees. “Do you have a gun, an extra gun? I need to shoot back at whatever’s shooting at me.”

  “For you, maybe,” Bobby called out as he reached through the back window, careful of the broken glass. “But get going, I’ll catch up.”

  Paul eyed the boardwalk in the distance, still a hundred yards out down the bridge and across a series of concrete medians. He hoped Bobby was right about sanctuary, or at least that when they found Nasher, they’d be safe. He looked to Julian. “Let’s get going then.”

  Julian walked in a brisk stride and Paul’s knees and core muscles ached to keep up. He patted his front pants pocket for his phone, and pulled it out. Jagged cracks sprawled across the screen, but it lit up and signaled four bars of service. A text alert from Deanna: Paul, call me when you get this. Hope you’re ok.

  He ignored the messaged. He huffed and dialed Karen’s cell. He last saw her on the floor of a Belleville coffee shop, seconds after the eighteen wheeler pinballed a row of cars. He regretted his instincts to run and help, and wished he had stayed with her instead. The call went directly to her voicemail. He slowed his pace to listen to her direct and playful recorded greeting—

  “You know what to do! Unless you’re a zombie.”

  “Karen, it’s Paul. I’m okay. On the way to Foxer to—”

  He heard a hollow thud outside, and a wretched croak. Two zombies tumbled out of the parked eighteen wheeler’s cab. Their pale faces indicated they recently turned, one sooner than the other, as the taller of the two was missing his right cheek, while blood glistened across the other’s beard. They haphazardly pushed themselves up off the pavement and hurried their pace to Paul.

  Paul jammed t
he phone back into his pocket, forgetting to end the call, and began to run, wincing each time his right leg hit the ground.

  “Run!”

  Paul gasped for breath and ignored the pain. Farther back, Bobby appeared from the SUV and raised a gun in Julian’s direction.

  Julian yelled, “Paul, drop! Get down, now!”

  “What?” Instead of obeying Julian, Paul looked over his shoulder at the zombies in pursuit. A gunshot cracked and the taller zombie’s skull exploded, and slammed to the ground. Paul rolled forward, careful to land on his good leg, and crawled out of Bobby’s line of sight. Another shot fired, hitting the bearded zombie in the neck, spinning it around to the pavement. It gurgled and spasmed, arms still clawing, mouth still searching for live flesh.

  Bobby jogged up to it, casually lowered a pistol gripped assault rifle to the hissing zombie’s outstretched arms, and pulled the trigger. Chunks of brain matter splattered across the ground and landed near Paul. Some stuck to Bobby’s pants. He didn’t stop to brush it off.

  Paul pushed himself up and rolled his neck. Too much pavement in one day. Too many times Bobby had saved him. Bobby was focused and deliberate in his demeanor. Paul knew him as a self-described redneck who made it out of the bayou along the coast. Fast and loose with a tight shot, at times he had to slow Bobby down on a call to ensure he followed protocol. They were beyond protocol, and the next tight shot might not be as accurate. By chance or on purpose?

  Paul stepped forward. “Did you find a spare gun in the back with the rifle?”

  “I did, here,” Bobby pulled a nine millimeter from the small of his back.

  Paul took the gun, checked the safety was switched on, ejected the magazine to see it fully loaded, clicked it back in place and tucked it away. “Thanks,” he said. As Bobby looked to reply, Paul swung his right fist, hooking Bobby with a solid smack to his left cheek.

  Bobby stumbled backwards, reflexively blinked his eyes and stretched his jaw. He raised the rifle at Paul. “What the fuck, man?”

  “Third time today you recklessly shot in my direction with no warning,” Paul said, extending a hand with three fingers upraised. “Three! Are you going to shoot me before the night ends?”