by Joe McKinney
23. Four heavy wool blankets
24. Four sleeping bags
25. A 5-gallon bucket to use as a toilet, plus a box of heavy duty black trash bags to line the waste bucket
26. A large box of matches
Then there are four backpacks, one for each member of the family. The individual backpacks contain:
1. Two flashlights (one small and one large)
2. Batteries for the flashlights, camera and radio
3. A small AM/FM radio
4. A whistle
5. Dust masks
6. A Swiss Army knife
7. Roll of toilet paper
8. Envelopes containing cash
9. A local map and a state map
10. Three MREs and three 1-gallon water bottles
11. A Sharpie marker, notepads, pens, and duct tape
12. A pocket folder containing all important documents, phone numbers, maps with escape routes and meet-up locations, and family photos (my oldest daughter has a dog tag on her backpack with her allergy information)
13. Extra eyeglasses for my oldest daughter and my wife
14. Toothbrush and toothpaste
15. Extra keys to the house and to both grandparents’ houses
16. A small waterproof box of matches
17. A small box of candles
18. Extra battery-powered chargers for our cell phones
19. A heavy wool blanket
20. A bedroll
21. A coil of safety rope, 25 feet long
22. A signaling mirror
My wife drives a Toyota 4Runner with 130,000 miles on it. It’s in great shape, though, and still runs like a top. My Nissan Altima has 101,000 miles on it but isn’t in as great a shape. Still, we have a store-bought emergency kit for each car. Ours are from Bridgestone and include:
1. A flashlight
2. Hood-mounted spotlight
3. Safety triangles
4. A heavy wool blanket
5. Jumper cables
6. A small air-compressor and pump
7. Duct tape
8. Heavy duty safety gloves
9. Latex gloves
10. Small Ziploc baggies
11. Black electrical tape
12. Batteries
13. A small first aid kit
14. A poncho
15. A tire gauge
16. Two screwdrivers, one of each kind
17. Heavy duty scissors
18. Zip ties
To this kit, I’ve added:
1. Fix-a-flat in a can
2. A 5-gallon bucket
3. Two 5-gallon water jugs
4. A signaling mirror
5. A box of heavy-duty trash bags
6. Another copy of our family’s important documents and photos
7. A disposable camera
Earlier that afternoon I went through these kits and found a number of problems, such as:
1. The family kit and the individual kits were supposed to contain envelopes with a little cash in each. At some point during the last few years we’d used a good deal of that cash. I had to go to the bank to draw out our savings, which included the $8,400 dollars in our savings and the $3,200 in our checking account. I took out all but $50 of this in cash and refilled our emergency kit envelopes.
2. The feminine products in the family kit and my wife’s personal kit were several years old. I had to buy new ones. Luckily, I knew which ones to buy. Incidentally, I used our credit card for this and all other purchases.
3. I gassed up my Nissan, my wife’s Toyota, and the GMC Yukon we are currently borrowing from my parents. This behemoth has 220,000 miles on it, and has some problems, but still runs okay.
4. The pictures in our family’s important documents binders were not current. I had to get up-to-date photos of our kids and put these into each kit. (These are invaluable in case members of the family get separated. Imagine a six-year-old, for example, trying to provide a physical description of a lost family member.)
5. The phone chargers I had in the kits were for the Android phones we used to own. We have iPhones now. I had to buy all new chargers, plus one for my iPad.
6. The water jugs had to be cleaned and filled. I did this, and bought fourteen more 5-gallon jugs from the local Bass Pro Shops. I filled these as well.
7. I went to the local Army Surplus store and bought as many of the MREs as I could find
8. I didn’t trust the batteries in any of the kits, so I bought new ones.
9. The heavy work gloves I had for my kids were too small, so I bought new ones.
10. I hadn’t packed clothes in the original kit because the kids grow out of these too fast and they can mildew if left in the kits too long. I packed extra clothes and warm gear and sturdy shoes for each of us.
11. I take blood pressure medication. I had about twenty pills left in my current prescription, so I went to the pharmacist and asked for my next refill, which comes in 90-day packs. They told me the insurance wouldn’t authorize a refill because I wasn’t due to need it yet, so I had to purchase the next 90 days at the non-insurance price of $320.
12. I bought as much ammunition as I could find for my two Glock .40 caliber pistols, my 12-gauge shotgun, and my AR-15. There was surprisingly little .223 ammo to be found, though. I bought all four of the boxes I found for sale.
13 I bought extra over-the-counter medications for the whole family.
14 I bought more canned food, juice boxes, and cereal bars.
15 We have two cats, so I also bought four bags of pet food.
While my wife was emailing our family members and getting everybody’s plan straight, I loaded up her 4Runner and my parents’ Yukon. The Yukon had a lot of miles on it, but it was huge, and could carry everything we thought we might need. Plus, it still worked okay. In fact, we’d had fewer problems with the Yukon than with my Nissan, so that was a good sign.
We watched the news some more, the outbreak spreading faster than I had expected, and then my wife asked the question both of us had been too scared to bring up.
“What are you going to do?”
She meant about my job. Technically, I was on scheduled leave. The Department had emergency mobilization procedures for bringing all its officers back on duty, but so far, that hadn’t been done. I figured it would only be a matter of time.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, you better figure it out!” she shot back. I blinked at her in surprise. “You have a family, Joe. You have a wife and kids. Your place is here with us.”
She was right, of course. But even still, I did take an oath, and I wouldn’t be the man I know myself to be if I didn’t make good on that oath.
We fought about that the rest of the night.
The Next Morning
We drove out to my parents’ place and unpacked. The mood was light. As we’d hoped, our kids were treating it like a big adventure, a day away from school to spend with Nana and Grandpa. By tacit agreement, none of us spoke of the crisis in front of the children. The longer they could live in ignorance, we figured, the better.
One by one the rest of the family showed up, and soon we had all fallen into a casual bustle reminiscent of Thanksgiving Day. The mood was friendly and everybody was cooperative; it was nice.
Then my cell phone started ringing. Because I hold the rank of an administrator, I get regular emails and text messages any time a news-worthy event occurs. I had received a few that morning, but all were of the common variety—a shooting here and there, an overturned eighteen-wheeler, a gas main ruptured by construction workers.
And then the airport reported its first case. Despite heightened security throughout the airport, a woman had collapsed near the baggage claim carousel and had gone unnoticed for almost thirty minutes. Then she stood up, waded into a crowd of people near the baggage carousel, and bit and clawed sixteen people before she was subdued. Airport police were eventually forced to shoot her in the head, but not before a general panic ensued. Ac
cording to the reports I was getting on my phone, the airport still wasn’t secure.
Then I checked my messages.
“What is it?” my wife asked. “Are they asking you to come in?”
I nodded.
“Don’t go,” she said flatly.
“Tina, we talked about this.”
“Yeah, we did. And I told you not to go.”
“I have to.”
“No, you don’t. What you have to do is stay here with us. With your family, Joe.”
It was quite a dilemma, my sworn oath or my family. I couldn’t believe how torn I was. And the funny thing about it is that I’ve made that dilemma the thematic focus of much of my zombie fiction, yet when it came time to decide for myself, for real, I found that it was so much harder than I’d ever portrayed it in my books.
Tina and I went off to the barn where we could talk without the kids hearing. Good thing, too, because we both started yelling. We both yelled a lot.
Actually, I think the yelling made it easier for me to make up my mind to go into work, because when I left, I was angry with her for not understanding. I don’t know exactly what I wanted her to say, or do, or not do…I just knew that yelling at me was like driving a wedge between us. I got out of there, and I couldn’t get gone fast enough.
The Next Few Days
I run the 911 Call Center for the City of San Antonio. I tell people this, and sometimes it confuses them. “So, you’re like a dispatcher?”
“No,” I tell them. “I run the place. That means I’m in charge of all 170 civilian and sworn dispatchers, call takers, and radio technicians—all of them report to me. I decide how those resources are deployed, and when the system gets overloaded, I’m the one making the tough decisions.
When I came into work, I found things pretty much as bad as they could get. We were unable to get in touch with about sixty percent of our personnel. Most had probably already left town or were simply afraid to come into work because they would be away from their families. We were down to a skeleton crew, and most of those were already eighteen hours into shifts that should have only lasted eight.
Then the reports started coming in.
The incident at the airport had gotten completely out of hand. Hundreds, if not thousands, were thought to be infected.
San Antonio has almost a hundred hospitals of one size or another, and already a few of them were claiming cases of zombie infection. Soon one hospital after another closed its doors, refusing new patients.
Officers in the field were reporting cases of zombie infection, too. In the first four hours I was at the center I heard about eighteen officer-involved shootings over the radio.
But for all that, that first night was not so bad. It wasn’t anything like I portrayed in my book Dead City. Cell phones kept working. The radios kept working. Traffic flowed heavy but in an orderly fashion. Slowly but steadily, the city started to empty as people headed for rural areas outside of town.
And, perhaps most importantly, order was maintained. Our officers made their calls, handled the long hours and the uncertainty and their own fear in the face of mounting complications. The Fire Department did their part too. I was up until three that morning, monitoring incoming calls and feeding status updates to the Command Staff, and when I finally slipped off to my office to sleep on my couch, I thought we pretty much had things in hand.
I was wrong.
One of the civilian supervisors woke me just before daylight. Things, she said, had gotten much worse.
I got a bottle of water from the mini fridge beneath my desk and listened as she ran it down for me:
1. San Antonio is a military town with several large military bases, and we were being told that they were taking over. San Antonio, as of 0630 hours, was under martial law;
2. During the night, at least four officers had been killed by zombies. Fifty-seven more had been dispatched to incidents but were now unaccounted for;
3. A roll call of all sworn personnel in the department had been taken so that accurate numbers could be given to the military authorities. Our total strength was 2,290 officers of all ranks, but our roll call was only able to account for 643 of those officers. The others were either dead or AWOL;
4. Stage III of the Department’s Emergency Action Protocol had been declared, which basically meant that the situation had exceeded the ability of the combined resources of the San Antonio Police Department and the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office;
5. I had been a police officer for nearly twenty years at that point, and I had never heard of us declaring a Stage III situation. We were entering into unknown territory.
But declaring a Stage III situation gave me the authority to lock the doors to the Communications Center. At this point, no one was getting in...or out. The personnel still inside the center were stuck here, basically chained to their jobs, like it or not. And suddenly the gun on my hip took on an ominous new implication. I could see my dispatchers looking at it out of the corners of their eyes, wondering if I would really use it on them or not. I thought of Tina out at my parent’s place, and of my two little girls, who I missed desperately, and I prayed that none of those dispatchers would call my bluff and dare me to shoot them for abandoning their post.
Thankfully, none did.
Six Days Later
A week passed, during which time those of us in the 911 Center saw the city, and in fact the rest of the world, fall apart.
I snuck away regularly to call Tina. She told me that things were quiet at my parent’s place. Power was still on, they had lots of food and fresh water, and the kids were bored but okay.
Morale was still high, she said.
But for the rest of the world, the news was not good. Most of the news channels had gone to loops, playing the same clips over and over, trying to cover up the fact they had nothing new to report. In a way, it reminded me of the morning of 9-11, with the TV newscasters grasping at every new bit of rumor or official statement and deconstructing it until nothing made sense.
And for the officers on the street, the zombie apocalypse had turned into a rolling gunfight that raged from one street to the next. Martial law had never really taken on, and officers who thought that they’d be doing patrol alongside soldiers soon found themselves standing alone against hordes of the living dead, like rocks in the middle of a fast-moving river, slowly being worn down and consumed.
San Antonio, like the rest of the world, was dying.
I made a choice.
I called all my dispatchers, all my call takers, into a huddle in the middle of the communications floor. As a student of Texas history, and especially of San Antonio history, I knew the story of Colonel William Travis, commander of the Alamo during the famous battle with Mexican General Santa Anna. Travis, facing certain defeat during the final hours of the battle, received a note from Santa Anna demanding surrender. Travis, of course, knew his own mind on this issue. He would die rather than give up his command. And being the good commander that he was, he knew the value of having his men reaffirm their commitment to the cause. So he called the Alamo defenders together, drew his sword, and drew a line in the sand. He then asked the defenders to step across the line and join him in the final, and almost certainly fatal, hours of the battle. All but one, a man named Moses Rose, joined him. Travis then released Moses Rose and gave Santa Anna his formal answer in the form of canon fire. The rest, as they say, is history.
I was hoping for an equally strong show of support among my staff. Unfortunately, I didn’t get it. I drew my line in the sand, and then told the assembled crowd that anyone who crossed it was welcome to leave the building. They could go wherever fate might take them, and God bless them on their way.
At first, no one crossed. Then one did. Another followed. Then three more. Nine more. I stood there in disbelief as one by one they filed past me. In the end, I was left with four dispatchers and one call taker. The other twenty-two hung their heads and hurried out the back door, bound for God knows w
here. I never saw them again.
But once they were gone, I turned to my hangers on and said, “Thank you, all of you. Bless you.” I think I was crying. I’m not sure. I only know that one by one the remaining few huddled around me and put their hands on me and kept telling me, over and over, that they were behind me one-hundred percent.
I nodded, and together they went back to their stations.
28 Days Later
Even the faithful can eventually realize that all is lost.
Though the power remained on, and the cell phones still worked, and we did okay surviving on food from the break room and the vending machines, all radio traffic had ceased. If there were officers still alive out there, they weren’t paying attention to their radios. It had been four days since we’d heard anything from anyone, and the time had come to decide.
During the worst days of the Black Death, back in the Middle Ages, the English developed the Twenty-eight Days of Confinement Law. The basic import was this, if a member of your family came down with symptoms of the plague, your entire family was quarantined in your home for twenty-eight days, the length of one lunar cycle. At the end of the time, your front door was opened. If any persons were still alive, and symptom-free, they were allowed to rejoin society. I don’t know it for a fact, but I suspect this was in the mind of the makers of the popular film franchise which takes its name from the Twenty-eight Days of Confinement Law.
Anyway, we had reached the end mark. There seemed no point in maintaining our post. There were no officers to dispatch, no news to relay to the Command Staff. Everyone was dead.
But still walking around.
I told my personnel that we had gone down with the ship. We had fought the good fight all the way to the end. There was no point in going on because there was no point left to make. We had done our duty.
The only thing left to do was to survive.
“I release you,” I said. “By the authority vested in me by the City of San Antonio, I declare your duty faithfully fulfilled. God bless you as you go forth. You are dismissed, and honorably so.”