Shaun Harbinger - Survival - Revenge of the Living Dead

“Looks pretty cool,” I said. “And the lack of zombies makes it better than the old place.”

“That’s a definite plus,” he said. “So, I was going to ask what you lot have been up to but since you told me what’s in that crate, I think the answer is obvious.”

“How did you find us?” I asked him.

“We’ve been monitoring the military radio channels for a while now. The chatter at Camp Victor went off the charts. We knew something big was happening but had no idea what. Then we saw that you were in the area and we put two and two together.”

Now I was confused. “What do you mean you saw we were in the area?”

He showed me his Ministry of Defence ID badge. “Remember when we issued you with one of these? All these badges have tracking chips installed. So when we discovered something was going down at Camp Victor, we consulted the computer to see which operatives we had in the area. And there you were. We tracked you as far as the harbour.”

We reached the door to the building and he swiped his ID badge through the digital lock. “When we realised you’d left your boat, we followed the explosions and the smoke.” He chuckled. “We knew we’d find you there.”

“Well you didn’t come a moment too soon,” Tanya told him. “A few more minutes on that roof and we’d have been zombie chow.”

“Glad to help,” he said, leading us through a large tiled foyer and through another locked door which he opened with his badge. “Now perhaps you can help us. We’ve suspected for a while that something dodgy has been going on at Camp Victor but we haven’t been able to collect any useable info. We’re short-staffed, due to the fact that most of our employees became zombies. You know how it is. So I’d be grateful for any intelligence you might have.”

“Sure,” I said. “But I’d like to ask you a question first.”

“Okay, shoot.”

“Do you know the location of Bunker 53?”

His eyes narrowed. “Why do you ask?”

“You’ll know why when we tell you how we happen to have Patient Zero’s body. Bunker 53 is a government bunker and this is a government facility so you know where the bunker is, right?”

He nodded slowly. “Yes, we know where it is.”

“Great,” I said.

He unlocked another door, this one opening into a large auditorium. It reminded me of the room at the Apocalypse Island facility where we’d been given our instruction to carry out Operation Wildfire.

“Take a seat,” Hart said. “Marilyn will be along momentarily.”

“She still in charge?” Sam asked.

Hart nodded. “She is indeed. It was Marilyn who made the decision to abandon the old island and come here. That was a tough decision to make but in the end, she saved a lot of lives. We wouldn’t have lasted much longer there.”

Sam, Tanya, and Lucy sat in the front row. I sat behind them. I’d never been a front row kind of guy.

The seats faced a darkened stage. After a few seconds, the stage lights came on and Marilyn MacDonald appeared. She was impeccably dressed in a dark blue skirt and white blouse. Her blonde hair was pinned up on her head and she wore her usual thick-rimmed glasses. Her job as director of this facility must have been fraught with stress but she exuded an air of calm confidence.

She looked down at us from the stage and said, “Good to see you again. Now, perhaps you can tell me how you got your hands on Patient Zero.”

Between us, we told her the story of what had happened since we’d received the call for help from Echo Six. MacDonald listened intently, interrupting every now and then to clarify a detail or ask us to provide more information on a particular part of our tale.

When we were finished, she nodded thoughtfully. “We need to know exactly what Locke meant when he referred to Operation Dead Ground.”

“What about Bunker 53?” I asked. “That’s where Locke said Vess’s body should go. To Dr Sarah Ives.”

“The body stays here,” she said. “We don’t have any scientists left to study it but now that it’s secure, I don’t recommend taking it anywhere else. Especially if it could come back to life at any moment.”

“I agree with your reasoning,” I told her. “But he was quite specific. Bunker 53 and Dr Ives. He must have said that for a reason.”

She considered that for a moment before saying, “We’ll bring Dr Ives here. She can examine the body in this facility. We have equipment and a lab she can use. I won’t compromise the safety of my people by having the body taken out into the world. Too much can go wrong. As long as it stays within this facility, we can ensure it won’t hurt anyone else.”

I wasn’t so sure I shared in her optimism regarding that point. The fact that they’d had to move to this new facility because the old one was overrun with zombies showed that the people here weren’t exactly infallible when it came to security.

Not to mention the fact that all the scientists I’d seen on Apocalypse Island were now either dead or undead. That didn’t fill me with confidence at all.

“I suggest you enjoy a meal in our cafeteria while I arrange for Dr Ives to be escorted here. Perhaps when she arrives we might find out why Sergeant Locke had specifically requested that Vess’s body be sent to her.”

“I’ll show you to the cafeteria,” Hart said. “The food is good and I imagine you’ve been living on whatever you can get your hands on out there, which might be adequate but not necessarily pleasant.”

Actually, we’d eaten fairly well on the boats. I certainly didn’t have any complaints. But the fact that I’d lived on low-quality food before the zombie apocalypse meant that I probably wasn’t the best person to judge.

When we got to the cafeteria—a busy place with a long food counter and metal tables bolted to the floor—I found the food to be no better or worse than anything else I’d eaten either before or after the apocalypse. It was standard fare, really: bacon, eggs, baked beans, and toast with a mug of hot tea.

The four of us sat at a table near the window and ate in silence. Hart had disappeared to do some chore or other and had promised to be back soon.

I finished before the others and pushed my plate away with a satisfied belch.

Tanya, who was sitting next to me, hit my arm. “Alex, don’t be a pig.”

“Sorry,” I said, picking up my mug and drinking some of my tea. “Hey, does anyone else feel a sense of relief?”

“I’m glad they took that damned body off our hands,” Tanya said.

Sam nodded. “Yeah, man, I really don’t want to be around when that fucker wakes up.”

Lucy didn’t say anything. She just kept eating.

“We’re going to need new boats,” Tanya said after a short silence.

I felt a pang of loss for the Big Easy . She’d seen me through some bad times and good times.

“Maybe we should get bigger boats next time,” Sam suggested.

A quote from Jaws came to mind but I kept it to myself.

“Why do you want something bigger?” Tanya asked. “Are you trying to prove something?”

Sam scoffed. “No, I just thought that more space would be nice.”

We fell into a short silence again which was broken, surprisingly, by Lucy. “What do you think Bunker 53 is like?”

“No idea,” I said.

“I think I saw something about the emergency bunkers on TV once,” she said. “They had everything. Like, swimming pools and gyms and even shops. All hidden away behind doors that were impregnable. Totally secure from whatever danger there is outside.”

I recalled our conversation when she’d said she wanted to feel safe and wondered if she wanted to live somewhere like Bunker 53. It was probably everything she’d been talking about.