Pandemic Collapse - The First Horde: An Apocalyptic GameLit Thriller

by Leif Kennison

  Those shelving racks were labeled from left to right—A, B, C, and so on. There was about two and a half car widths between the aisles. Not an easy jump.

  I could also see all the things on the floor blocking the aisles, a plain old footpath was one hell of a maze. The burners couldn’t just walk over the crates or maneuver through the shelves like I could.

  With that plan in mind, I picked up an expandable baton in my hand. Sharp and forcefully, I swung out towards the ground, and the shaft of the baton clacked forward in the locked position.

  I was ready.

  After moving into position by a shelf opposite of Elgin and Tong, I started banging my baton into the metal bracket of the rack.

  A burner—one of the fresher ones who was still dressed in clothes—snapped its head towards me.

  I was in business.

  The burner shuffled pretty quickly towards me. Its motions were still human-like, but stiff like its muscles were tightened into rubbery knots. Behind it, a group of burners followed along.

  I kept up the clanging. When the fresh burner got close to me, he lashed out with his hands, trying to grab a hold of me. I was tempted to kill it, but that wasn’t the mission. My goal was to draw them away, and for that I needed to get the to follow me.

  As soon as the first burner lunged at me, the horde rasped and sped up.

  They weren’t shuffling anymore.

  They were running at me.

  Turning, I ran.

  What surprised me was that I wasn’t as fast as I was in STESIS. And, as I jumped over a crate, I found that I didn’t leap as far either. At first, it worried me. I was a little frustrated. But after a few moments of moving, it didn’t matter. What mattered was how I felt and experienced the world differently, how I saw each moment unfolding in front of me.

  As I vaulted through, rolled under, and leapt over the shelving, I was in a state of flow. I didn’t know whether or not I’d land where I needed to be. And I didn’t need to. Each step of the way, I was unconsciously processing and adjusting in that moment. I would jump forward, stretch my arms out, and there’d be the edge of a high shelf under my fingers the next moment. I’d swing through, tucking my knees to my chest and then launching them forward. I’d leap forward and Kong-vaulted in between shelves, and my hands were exactly where they needed to be. My feet landed in precisely the right position for me to take the next leap. One movement blended into the next.

  And as I was leaping and swinging around, I’d pause every so often to bang up the shelves with my baton. I’d wait for a few burners to round the bend of a corner, around a shelf, and I’d smash it in the head with the baton. If I’d catch a straggler, I’d trip it with a sort of judo sweep. Once it was down on the ground, I’d pound the tip of my baton into its head. Sometimes it’d take just a few strikes to crack through the skull and into the brain, but if I didn’t do it properly it would take a few more.

  All the noise that I was making had the desired effect. Before, the burners were milling around, naturally going towards the center where the STESIS pods were humming. But slowly, the burners at the outskirts of the horde started to get pulled towards me as they followed their fellow burners.

  With my eyes scanning the environment, I smiled as I cracked my baton into another skull.

  I’d led the burners down a long aisle—about a hundred feet that I’d sprinted in five seconds—between two tall pallet racks in a corner of the warehouse. My plan was to climb up the rack all the way to the ceiling and take a moment to observe them.

  As soon as I got to the top and looked down, I was a little harrowed by what I saw.

  There were so many burners packed together in that aisle that the horde had spilled over into the next aisle over. And they were all leaning their weight on the rack.

  I started tilting.

  Not good.

  The rack was slowly leaning, swaying side to side, and I cursed the way that it had been shoddily installed.

  But then it occurred to me that I should let the burners push the shelf over. Now, I didn’t want it to have a domino effect. I was on top of Shelf B, with burners to my left and right. If they pushed it to the right, it would be a disaster. Shelf B would hit C, Shelf C would hit Shelf D, and on and on. What I wanted them to do was make them push Shelf B over onto Shelf A and drop all of the crates on top of them. Hopefully, it’d really fuck up the horde.

  Up on top of the racks, I leaped across the gap to Shelf A, scrambling up a plastic-wrapped pallet with my feet and pulling myself up. Then, I pulled out the flare out of my pocket and lit it.

  The loud hiss of the flare and the blinding light it produced drew the horde’s attention. The mass of bodies immediately pushed in my direction.

  I tried to rile them up by banging around even more, and it seemed to work.

  Shelf B creaked and creaked, and then it fell right into mine.

  Pallets of heavy materials came crashing down over the horde.

  I’d succeeded in incapacitating a good number of burners.

  But there was no reason to be proud.

  The commotion attracted even more burners, even more frenzied than before.

  And I was in a corner, with a goddamned ramp leading towards me.

  Thankfully, the burners didn’t know how to climb. But I knew that if there were enough of them clambering over one another, they could make a ladder made of bodies. I had no time to stay there.

  I had to figure something out. Quick.

  The only thing that came to mind was to carefully walk down the shelving post—which was only inches wide—and to do a cat leap across to Shelf C, where there was a section filled with bags of concrete.

  I’d never made a jump that far before. But I had to act fast.

  So I did.

  Hastily, I walked down the post. The groundward momentum sped me up a little faster than I thought, and I wasn’t sure if I had the proper footing. But gravity pulled me forward and the distance between me and the bloody grimy diseased hands of the burners was getting dangerously small.

  I leapt off of my right foot, pushing off the perilously narrow post with the ball of my foot and extending with my ankle and leg.

  Through the air, I sailed.

  I shot my left leg forward, then my right.

  My arms were aimed as far forward as I could.

  Then, my feet slammed into the gritty bags of cement.

  And under my fingers, I felt plyboard.

  I’d caught the edge of the shelving with my hands.

  I scrambled up.

  I was safe.

  There on top of Shelf C, I could see that the horde had swarmed my corner of the warehouse. I couldn’t get see the exits from there though, so I wasn’t sure whether Elgin or Tong had made it to safety. From one shelf to another, I leapt until I could see them.

  Off in the farthest corner from me, Elgin and Tong were watching tensely.

  In a wide and high gesture, I waved at them and gave them a thumbs up. They returned the gesture.

  I just had to make it over to them, and we’d be safe.

  To get as many of them to stay in that corner of the warehouse, I lit my last flare and clanged around with the baton. When enough of them started were committed to attacking my position, I jumped down.

  I rolled when I hit the ground and used the momentum to carry me into a sprint. There was a small horde in between me and the exit door. I sped around the burners and saw Elgin and Tong. Tong threw the door open. I ran through, and they followed.

  We slammed the door shut behind us. But it wasn’t going to hold. They were installed to open outward.

  “There’s a truck this way!” Tong yelled.

  We raced away from the warehouse and towards the truck. When we got to it, we hopped right in. Tong started the truck, and I looked back through the window as we sped out onto the road, leaving a cloud of dust behind us.

  The burners had gotten out just as expected. They were running towards us, but there was no w
ay they’d catch up.

  As we drove up the road, I started to think about what we’d just gone through.

  I’d just saved Elgin and Tong. They owed me.

  I was going to make them help me find Nyla.

  SIXTEEN

  Alpha Testers

  Tong pulled the truck into an abandoned strip mall. It was about a mile north. We got out of the cab of the truck and sat together on the benches in the back. Tong found a crate full of MREs and handed each of us one.

  “Not as effective as the BPIS,” he said, “but better than nothing.”

  Then he asked me and Elgin, “You think we lost them?”

  I shrugged and said, “I hope so. Pretty sure, I guess.”

  “Elgin, what’s next?” asked Tong.

  We’d lost the STESIS machines and three men. The warehouse was taken.

  And we’d encountered the very first horde of burners.

  Later, we found out that the burners were coming from a pond in a golf course—hence why they were dripping wet. The National Guard found nearly a thousand bodies in that little body of water, which had been spiked with formaldehyde. The bodies were decomposing and stacked on top of each other, weighed down with bags of sand. Now, nobody knows for sure, but there are theories that this was how the secondary virus developed—in a cesspool of decomposing infected bodies, the novel pesti-retrovirus had mutated into creation, reanimating the people who had been infected by the first virus. As for how those bodies got there, well…

  There was a nearby funeral home that owned the cemetery that was right across the street from the golf course. They’d gotten a contract from the city government to hold and process the bodies of people who had died from PREV-21, which stands for pesti-retrovirus. They said that they could cremate a ton of them and hold hundreds and hundreds of bodies.

  I guess nobody checked out whether they really could, because the bastards lied. Turns out that they only had room for sixty bodies. See, what they were doing was taking the bodies out at night and dumping them into that pond in the golf course. The golf course had closed for the longest time, what with the whole lockdown and all. And the folks at the funeral home knew that nobody was checking up on the property. Nyla had investigated and found out that they needed the money because big corporations were taking all the small business bailout money and there wasn’t any left for them.

  Who would’ve thought…the first zombies came crawling out of a cesspool, the same way that humankind came to life.

  Anyway, Elgin asked me if the data from the simulations was being sent to the central server. Instinctively, I tried to throw the console out with my hand, but I stopped myself before I went too far with the motion. I told her that I doubted it since we were running in pseudo -simulation mode. She mulled over what she was going to do. With a taut jaw and deeply creased eyebrows, she looked frustrated.

  “We lost Warner, Addie, and Halstead,” she said. “Warner, we know how he went. Poor guy got bit by the burner. Addie and Halstead…even if they didn’t get brain dead from the simulation, well…they’re gone now.”

  Her shoulders were stooped and every breath she exhaled was tinged with resign.

  It was the perfect time for me to strike.

  Throughout the entire ordeal, I’d been looking for a way for me to find Nyla. I’d found out that she was in that containment zone, but I didn’t know where it was. And if it was guarded, well…as much as I wanted to believe that I could be a hero and do it all on my own, I couldn’t. I knew I’d need some help, but I wasn’t sure who I could ask. I’d considered getting Yakov and Ishrak to help, but it would’ve been a tough sell to get them to risk their necks. I thought about whether I could get anyone from the team to help me, but that wasn’t likely either. I wanted Elgin’s help most of all. The only problem was that she had a strong sense of integrity and loyalty to her country, at least to my estimation. And asking her to help break someone out of a military installation definitely wasn’t something she’d be doing under normal circumstances.

  But now that her iron spirit was bending just the slightest bit…this was the moment that I could try to recruit her.

  “Elgin…” I started to say softly.

  She looked up at me.

  “What is it?”

  “I read some files, and…well, I thought you should know about it.”

  I told her that about everything I’d found when I was snooping around that night that I couldn’t fall asleep. I told her about how I’d found memos that said that they were stress testing the system. Sure, the data they generated from the simulations was valuable. But it was mostly a byproduct. What they really wanted was data about how much simulated pain it took to disrupt the input-output signal to the point where the user’s brain was damaged past the point of repair.

  At first, when I was starting to tell her everything, she was tense and her eyes turned suspicious. She didn’t like the idea that I’d done something behind her back—or the fact that I’d managed to do something under the radar. But then the information I was giving her started sinking in.

  “…I’m sorry, Elgin,” I said. “There’s no other way to put it. You and your team were disposable. You were meant to be crash test dummies.” Like alpha testers, I thought.

  The slightest trace of anger flashed, pulling the corner of her mouth up for the briefest moment.

  Quickly, I added, “It makes me mad that they’d do that to someone as loyal and dedicated as you, Sergeant Elgin.”

  Elgin stewed for a long, long moment. Tong too. He looked like he was ready to hurl a brick into something. I could tell he had a lot to say, but he had too much respect for the chain of command—he was waiting for Elgin to speak her mind.

  Then, something subsided in Elgin. It was as though she’d swallowed the anger. In its place was something more placid, like doubt and resignation.

  Slowly, she shook her head and spoke softly.

  “Y’know…I guess it’s starting to make sense.”

  I didn’t understand what she meant, but Tong seemed to.

  “No wonder they didn’t send anyone. No wonder they just told us to keep training.”

  Tong scoffed. “No wonder they didn’t give a shit that our network connection was fucked. Fuckin’ assholes abandoned us too.”

  She tongued her cheek and shook her head slowly.

  “We knew what we were signing up for,” she said to Tong.

  Tong’s nose flared out in anger. “No, it was not this. I signed up thinking that we’d be helping speed up national defense from internal threats. I didn’t sign up so they could chew me up and use me like this.”

  Elgin sighed. “Tong, we’re leftovers.”

  Furiously, he shook his head. “No, fuck that. Just because we were washouts doesn’t mean that we’re worthless. Nobody deserves to be used like that.”

  It turns out that Elgin’s team—amongst others like hers—were recruited from pools of “vulnerable individuals.” Army and National Guard recruits who had failed or were in danger of failing basic training. Or people whose careers were at risk—sergeants who had reports of sexual misconduct, captains who were caught having affairs or stealing from the post exchange, colonels who were being investigated for fraud and arms dealing, even people who were in military prison for rape and murder. Whoever was in charge of the program was devious.

  The air was thick with the feeling of utter defeat. Elgin and Tong sat there, stooped over with their elbows on their knees.

  Then, something clicked in Elgin’s head.

  “Wait a second,” she said. “What were you looking for when you found all those files?”

  Perfect. A segue into what I needed them to do, and I didn’t even have to maneuver them into it.

  I let the silence hang in the air for a bit before replying.

  “…I was looking for information.”

  Elgin pressed. “About what?”

  “You remember back at Brooklyn Navy Yard? Where you came to pick me up?�
�

  “Yeah.”

  “That wasn’t my first time there. That was the second time. The first time was when I went with my girlfriend Nyla.”

  Yeah, so I lied a bit about her being my girlfriend. Whatever.

  “She got caught in a sweep,” I continued saying. “It was a quarantine sweep. I needed to know where they took her.”

  I wasn’t sure if I was having any impact. They both still had an expressionless face. So I kept going.

  “Tong, where do you live?” I asked.

  “The Bronx,” he said.

  “You got family here?” I asked. “People you love and care about?”

  “My girlfriend.”

  “Imagine if a horde of burners were grabbing your girlfriend, tearing at her hair and eyes.”

  My words were getting through. Gradually, I started seeing some anger and aggression in him. He sat back up. He had a firmness in his jaw, and a hard flinty gleam in his eyes. Deep down inside, he was a warrior. A fighter. A defender.

  I drove it home. “Don’t think it can’t happen. You saw those simulations.”

  Tong nodded, and Elgin slapped him on the shoulder.

  “The man saved our lives,” she said to Tong. “We owe him. Let’s gear up.”

  As we loaded into the truck, countless worries raced through my mind. I hadn’t the slightest idea what the White Zone was like. I didn’t know what enemies I’d be facing. I didn’t even know what the layout of the place was like. Was it a warehouse? Was it the parking lot of a McDonald’s?

  While Tong rummaged for equipment, Elgin explained to me that there were three biocontainment zones in New York: white, blue, and red. The white one was where they sent people for testing. If someone tested positive for the virus, they’d be sent to the red zone. If someone tested positive for the antibodies—meaning they’d been exposed to the virus but wasn’t positive at the moment—they’d be sent to the blue zone for observation.

  The central point of the white zone was an abandoned hotel—one of those budget ones for travelers, not the fancy type. The city had converted the entire hotel into a testing site where people who were quarantined were being held for 72 hours after getting tested for the virus. The only problem was that there weren’t enough tests, and the testing took time. And there were too many new people coming in. It was getting too crowded and there weren’t enough beds in there, so they started putting up tents and cots in the parking lot. There was also a massive middle school just a few blocks away—one of the largest in the surrounding area. It served two purposes. First, people could go there to pick up free meals. Second, the classrooms and gymnasium were housing people there as well.