Shaun Harbinger: Storm

As I sat on the sun deck in my boxers, letting the warm sun heat my skin, I was glad the three had taken such precautions but doubtful there had been any need. The army seemed to be having a huge hybrid problem. We were an annoyance but they had bigger things to think about than four unknown people who had taken DJ Johnny Drake from them.

We had Survivor Radio coming out of the boat’s speakers but it was non-stop music. There was no Survivor Reach Out every hour. No dialogue between tracks. Just one song after another.

I had found a notepad and pen on the kitchen counter, with the “Sail To Your Destiny” logo at the top of each page, and as I sat in the sun, I drew a grid on the top page. Two downward lines crossed with two horizontal lines like a tic-tac-toe board.

In the top middle square, I wrote “Zombies”. In the top right square, I wrote “Hybrids”.

In the middle left square, I put “normal person” and at the bottom left, I scrawled “vaccinated person”.

In the squares where the zombies and people intersected, I wrote down what happened when that type of zombie bit that type of person.

Zombie bites normal person; normal person dies and is reanimated as a zombie.

Zombie bites vaccinated person; vaccinated person is bit only once. Wanders away and after four days becomes a hybrid. If approached while turning, will say, “Leave me alone.”

Hybrid bites normal person; hybrid kills them and eats them.

Hybrid bites vaccinated person; hybrid kills them and eats them.

Below the grid, I wrote, “Hybrids also kill and eat zombies”.

I studied the page for a moment.

What I saw there gave me hope. The hybrids were actually sabotaging the spread of the virus. All it wanted was to spread to as many people as possible and turn them into zombies that would then spread it to more people. The zombies were controlled by the virus and did everything they could to spread it to their prey.

On the other hand, the hybrids seemed to be controlled by a rage that made them kill and eat their victims. They weren’t spreading the virus, they were killing potential hosts. They were also killing the zombies.

The arch enemy of the virus was the hybrid.

As more soldiers became vaccinated then bitten by zombies, the hybrid population increased. They were faster than the zombies and appeared to be stronger, so they would eventually decimate the zombie population and the population of living humans. The virus would have no more hosts and no more prey. It would die out.

Unless it mutated.

That was possible. Bacteria and viruses mutated all the time in response to the use of pharmaceutical drugs on patients. If this virus mutated, would it produce something worse than the hybrids? Or would it find a way around the vaccine to kill vaccinated victims and reanimate them as zombies as it did with normal people?

There were too many unknowns, too many variables. I didn’t have the knowledge to put it all together.

For now, I had to take hope in the fact that the hybrids were slowing the spread of the virus. Sure, they were doing it by killing everything they could get their hands on but at least it was an effective way to reduce the number of hosts the virus could infect.

I closed my eyes and turned my face to the sun. I couldn’t be so clinical about the deaths of all those people when Joe and my parents were in the middle of all this. For all I knew, Lucy might be in danger and not safe aboard The Big Easy . I would only know for sure when I got to the lighthouse.

The lighthouse. It was the last place in the world I wanted to go. The memory of Mike and Elena’s deaths still stung but I managed to keep it below the surface of my thoughts. I knew visiting the lighthouse would make the memory come swimming up to the surface like a monster from the deep.

Jax came over and sat down next to me. “What are you writing?”

I showed her my grid. “Just some thoughts about the zombies.” I told her my theory that the rise of the hybrids could mean the end of the virus.

She thought it over for a while then nodded. “You could be right. But how does that help us right now?”

I shrugged. “It’s just a theory. It doesn’t help us in any practical way. I don’t think there’s anything that can kill the virus and stop the zombies and the hybrids. The best we can hope for is that the hybrids kill the zombies then die off eventually.”

“That could take years.” She looked towards the shoreline. On the cliffs, zombies shambled beneath the morning sun, driven by the virus in their bodies.

“I can’t think of any other way this is going to end,” I said.

“There are people who know a lot more about the virus than we do,” Jax replied. “They could come up with a solution.”

“On a secret government island?” I asked, unable to keep the disbelief out of my voice.

She looked at me with a serious expression on her face. “Apocalypse Island is real, Alex. We’ve known about it for years. The scientists there probably caused this fuck up so they might have a chance of stopping it. The place isn’t a joke or an urban legend; it’s real. Where do you think the vaccine came from?”

I held up my hands in an attempt to placate her. “Okay, okay. I didn’t say the place doesn’t exist. If they developed the vaccine, then maybe they can find a cure.” It sounded like what she wanted to hear but I wasn’t sure I believed it myself. The vaccine, if it had even been developed at Apocalypse Island, did not work. In most cases.

I wondered if there were any vaccinated soldiers who were bitten and recovered completely, without turning into hybrids. It was possible. We wouldn’t know about those because they would return to active duty as soldiers. Or maybe they were sent to Apocalypse Island for testing in the hopes of developing a better vaccine. I had no idea. It was all guesswork.

Whether it was optimism or wish fulfilment, Jax needed to believe in Apocalypse Island. I guessed the thought of scientists on an island somewhere, working on a possible solution to the predicament we found ourselves in, was a comfort to her.

My own pessimistic outlook made me think that even if Apocalypse Island did exist, the scientists would only be working in their own best interests, not in the interests of the people stuck on the mainland with the undead monsters.

I didn’t say anything to Jax about that. I still had the feeling there was a loved one she was worrying about and I wanted her to be as optimistic about that as she could. I still clung to the thread of hope that Joe and my parents were alive and I knew how thin that thread was. It wasn’t up to me to pull another strand from Jax’s.

So instead, I said, “Have you got people still alive somewhere on the mainland?”

“I hope so,” she said. Tears pooled in her eyes, glistened in the sun. “My boyfriend was at home when the virus spread. I spoke to him on the phone the day before and he said he was going to spend the weekend watching TV with his feet up. I haven’t heard from him since. He could be okay. It’s not like we live in a big city or anything. We live in a small village in Derbyshire. There’s a good chance he’s still alive.”

“Yes, there is,” I said. I hoped for Jax’s sake he was. If he was in a village at the time of the virus breakout, he could have holed up there. Or escaped to the countryside. Maybe the army were too busy rounding people up from more populated areas to worry about villages.

But I thought of the village Jax and I had entered, looking for food. It had been empty. Desolate.

“I don’t know how I can reach him,” she said. “At the moment, going that far inland is too dangerous. Not knowing if he’s all right is the worst thing. It’s driving me crazy with worry.”