Day Zero (Patreon)

On Day Zero, an unidentified woman escaped from captivity.

She didn’t realize it was Day Zero, of course. ‘Day Zero’ was what the scattered survivors called it afterwards, if they called it anything. She was pretty sure that was the day she got out, but it might have been a bit later. The power grid had failed bit by bit and the facility she’d been kept in was pretty remote, but still close enough to the epicenter of the outbreak to be a potential instigation factor. No one would ever know for certain because everyone there who’d have known was dead –or near enough that it made no difference.

What she did know at the time that all hell had broken loose in the facility, followed by a power cut. 

The door to her containment room had been electronic with the usual kind of failsafes. Normally the guards circumvented that via the lowbrow method of putting a dowel rod on the track to keep the sliding glass door shut. Her impression of the facility was of a project whose money had long ago run out. There weren’t any doctors around anymore; just a rotating collection of bored guards watching the surviving specimens and waiting for them to die on their own. 

That dowel had gotten knocked askew by someone running down the corridor shouting into a handheld radio so there was nothing to keep the door from gliding open when the power failed several hours later.

So the woman escaped, found better clothes than the pale blue scrubs she’d lived up to that point, found a car with keys that had swerved off the road with no sign of a driver, picked a direction, and drove until she ran out of gas. 

It had been long enough since Day Zero that people weren’t counting anything anymore, except the seasons and the woman had started calling herself Jamie Crow. Her hair had grown out a little into a little pixie cut and it kind of made her look like Jamie Fox, so she’d adopted the name. The fox part was less applicable. If anything, she was a crow. Crows were scavengers and so was Jamie. So, Jamie Crow.

Jamie stepped over a low concrete wall that had once served as the base of a gas station’s front glass window. Pulverized glass crunched under the sole of her boot. Someone had driven a car through that window at one point, which was stupid. The car was still there, stuck on the concrete riser and there was a big dark patch near the driver side door. The zeds had probably dragged the driver out and then savaged the poor bastard on the spot. Any leftovers would have gotten up and wandered off to do the same elsewhere.

The gas station wasn’t too picked over considering the state of the front. There was still food on the shelves; bagged chips, dusty tubs of Dinty Moore beef stew, and bottles of Powerade in the defunct coolers. The locals, if there were any, must have not found this place.

At that moment a low, irritable grumble echoed through the room.

Alternatively, there could be a berserker denning inside the store and local scavengers weren’t hungry enough to go near it yet.

Jamie looked around until she spotted the zed. It was hunkered down into a little ball at the farthest corner from the light. Its eyes were solid red. The brown of its pupils were lost in the welter of broken, bleeding capillaries that were the former whites of its eyes. A bar of orangey-red light lay about two feet away from it and the angle of the setting sun would send that bar inching ever closer. The berserker was backed up against the wall, too dumb to pick another direction, eying its enemy, and complaining deep within its ruined throat.

She thought that it might have been female once, but the infection did weird things to people. This one had long matted hair and some rings clinging stubbornly to its claw-like fingers; so, definitely feminine whatever else it had had going on in life. 

She looked around until she saw the remains of a sunshade rolled up near the ceiling. It was probably there to protect the cashiers and shoppers from glare. There was a loop of nylon dangling down from it where the corner of the glass shop front would have been. Moving slowly, she edged over to the look and used it to lower the shade until the zed was shrouded in darkness. The unhappy noise stopped.

That dealt with, she dropped her rucksack onto the floor behind her and started shopping. She gave the shelves near the berserker a pass. ‘Zerks would tackle and savage anything that startled them; people, other zeds, stray animals, flapping cloth, a trash can blown over by the wind, whatever. The one in the corner was quiet, but once it got into attack mode it wouldn’t be able to stop for a while.

Food, medicine, and hygiene supplies were her priorities. Some of it was for her, but she really wanted some trade goods. Hygiene supplies would be the most marketable stuff, right behind meds. People would haggle for everything except toilet paper and tampons.

There was a good variety of stuff, but not a ton of anything. The moist towelettes and pepto bismol would pay for her time though.

Another sound got her attention as she zipped up her pack. There were some noises you could ignore in the wasteland left behind by the zeds, but the sound of a safety being switched off wasn’t one of them. She looked up and saw a group of humans (non-deceased humans) crouched in between cars in the parking lot. They all wore black, but there was enough variety that they didn’t look like they’d been issued uniforms. That was reassuring. The look she got from the guy in front was not.

He held up a hand, pointed at her bag, and crooked a finger at her. He tilted his gun so she could see the long, silver tube of the suppressor on his gun. Message received: give us your bag.

She let her hand drift towards the outer pouch on her pack, trying not to be obvious about it. She always left it partially unzipped for this exact situation. She reached in and her hand closed around a small fuzzy body. It was a toy monkey dressed up like a super hero, but the guy’s eyes widened when he spotted it and he made a gesture at his crew. They started backing up fast.

Two months ago, Jamie might have let them run. Since then she’d learned that people like that would just find her again later so now she threw the monkey.

A few feet into the arc of its flight triggered a gyroscopic switch in the toy and it began to scream. 

Jamie threw herself out of the open just in time for the berserker huddled up in the corner to lose its absolute shit. It didn’t like sun while it was calm, but frenzy had short circuited whatever preservation instincts it had left. It didn’t care about the guns either or the fact that it was vastly outnumbered. The berserker vaulted over the shoulder-high shelving units howling its fury and charging in the direction where all the noise and motion was coming from, passing the quiet and still Jamie up entirely.

If Jamie had needed more evidence that the group was nothing more than a well-supplied band of thieves then she would have gotten it when two of them panicked and did the worst thing they could have done; they started shooting.

“Jesu—!” One of the group who kept their cool started to swear and then bit it off. She shouldered her rifle, turned, and ran. She didn’t get far. Shamblers poured quite literally out the windows of the hardware store next to the gas station where they’d been sheltering from the daylight. The first were propelled forwards by the press of bodies behind them boiling forward to attack the noise. The zeds kept coming; enough of them that they had to be part of a murmuration. That meant all the other houses nearby were probably packed too. 

Jamie grabbed her pack, stopping only to collect her monkey, and ran for the back of the gas station. She found a backdoor that was unbolted and hanging half open. She could see long dragging tracks in the churned mud outside and realized that must have been where the berserker had been getting in and out. She peeked out and, failing to see any gun-toting whack jobs, began to pick her way through the sloppy backyard. 

More gunfire went off behind her and then a scream; the first of many.

Bertha was still where Jamie had left her, nibbling at some scraggly grass behind a brick shed where Jamie had stashed a rucksack filled with the rest of her finds for the day. Working quickly, she consolidated her stuff and loaded it onto Bertha’s back. The horse didn’t want to leave her grazing spot, but wasn’t too much of an ass about being led off. Being stone deaf, Bertha couldn’t hear the shrill and pain filled cries that Jamie could, so she wasn’t in a hurry. She didn’t see that well either and had to be led, but Jamie didn’t know how to ride anyway so it didn’t matter.

One thing you learned in the post-apocalypse world was to judge the screams of the dying and Jamie was pretty sure the zeds had only gotten one or two of the remaining bandits. The others had escaped for the moment. Zeds were opportunistic. Sometimes a big enough group could escape a horde by sacrificing one or two people and she was pretty sure this group had just done that. 

She’d have to be careful. The next time they saw her they wouldn’t bother trying to rob her –unless she saw them first, of course. That would be a different story. 

The noise from the gas station began to wake the surrounding zeds up early. Jamie fought to keep her breathing calm and even as a swarm of shamblers poured out of a two story apartment building. The zeds scrambled towards the source of the noise, but parted around her and Bertha like water around a boulder. She let her breath out as the last one passed. 

At least she knew the bandits wouldn’t be following her today. Still, she took a circuitous route back to her local bolt hole making sure to stay off anything that would hold Betha’s unique tracks.

Her current den was an old fine jewelry store; the kind with a teeny tiny sign, no windows and an ‘by appointment only’ sign on the door. The former owner had been an early alternative energy adopter. There were solar panels on the roof and a small windmill. It was enough to keep the lights on and the security door online.

Jamie punched herself in and maneuvered Bertha inside. 

The interior was not a shop anymore. Some of the infrastructure that Jamie hadn’t been able to move was still in place, but the rest of it was split evenly between living space and the animal cages. Jamie led Bertha through the store and out onto a cement patio that had probably once served as an employee break area. It was a stable now. The patio was walled in on three sides with cement and had a canopy of steel bars overhead. There was a back gate with a sturdy bar on it. Bertha spotted her feed bag and shoved her nose into it, happy to munch while Jamie unloaded her.

Normally Jamie would have tried to hit up one of the neighboring settlements while the sun was still up, but that was a bad idea with the raiders and a horde out. She hadn’t scored anything really good that she thought a townie might be waiting on. If she’d found antibiotics or something, that would have been worth the risk, but not today’s gas station haul. 

Instead she went looking for her bed and the stack of library books beside it. She cracked open the one on top, not caring too much about which one it was, and started to read.

She kept reading as the sun began to set. Darkness consumed her little hideaway and outside she felt them begin to stir. Inside the shop the only sounds came from the cages and the occasional whuff from Bertha as she dozed, but outside the zeds began to emerge from their hiding places to patrol the city. 

Jamie set her book aside once she could no longer make out words on the page. Sighing, she flopped back onto the mattress and her little nest of blankets. 

Her stomach woke as night settled fully on the city. She had plenty to eat. There was a rabbit and some quail in the icebox and some tomatoes she’d bartered for sitting out on her little kitchen counter.

The first gunshot of the night sounded somewhere not too far off before Jamie could make up her mind and she closed her eyes. 

Stupid.

She hoped that wasn’t a townie because, if it was, then the whole settlement would be gone by morning. It probably wasn’t. All the dumb neighbors had died off by now, but there were still drifters passing through sometimes who hadn’t learned the one crucial law of living among the zeds; keep quiet after dark.

Actually, it could also have been those bandits, Jamie reasoned with herself and the idea  lifted her mood enough that she was able to get up and go looking for something to eat. The leader and some of the senior types had known their business, but they had clearly fluffed their numbers with less savvy survivors. She supposed that made sense given their strategy for escaping the horde.