Zombie Exodus Novel, Chapter 10 - Jason (Patreon)

Jason rested his ear against the Pet Semetary movie poster and listened through the thin wall A bump and a long scrape repeated through the wall, over and over, moving from the right corner of the room to the left, near the back of the closet.. 

“Damn you, Lois and Clark!” he yelled through the wall as he listened to the shrill sounds of heavy breathing. His voice turned softer. “Damn you, Remo.”

He met Remo the day he moved in to the apartment building. Jason never knew bodybuilders smoked as much pot as he could. When Remo helped him carry up a box of monitors and a three-foot-by-three-foot official replica of the iron throne from Game of Thrones, Jason figured he would offer a quick bowl as a thank you. Three hours, two pizzas, and all of Jason’s weed later, they had solidified a new friendship.

Remo was not just a bodybuilder, nor just an electrician—he was a doomsday prepper. Never had Jason met such a paranoid individual, but his neighbor’s mindset made it even easier to like him.

“Area 54 is not the only facility in America incarcerating alien lifeforms. I can show you a dozen black sites with solid evidence of detainment centers in Connecticut, Puerto Rico, Texas, and both Carolinas.”

Jason enjoyed listening to the conspiracy theories, though he never believed any. Even he was not that crazy. He had his own set of theories bubbling in his brain, and there was that one day Jason shared actual evidence of the Zeta virus that Remo’s life changed forever. The concept of an extinction-level virus loose in the world consumed his life.

“The virus must have been created by a team of scientists, likely for benevolent intentions but secretly funded by military organizations.”

Before long, Remo turned his eight-hundred-square-foot apartment into a bunker with reinforced walls, crates of water and preserved rations, bolts of industrial plastic, and guns. Lots of guns. Maps soon covered the walls, medical supplies were ordered in bulk from a pharmacy in Mexico, and he even bought a Hazmat suit off Craigslist. It would have gone further, but the contents of Remo’s apartment weighed so much, the floor was bowing into the downstairs apartment.

A harsh thump landed on the wall, and Jason recoiled in a violent jerk, throwing himself sideways into a folding table. He knocked it over, spilling a plate of cold fries and a stack of technical manuals on the floor, along with Jason. He heard the thump and long scrape again, and knew it could only be one person.

It did not come as too much of a shock when Remo proposed the tunnel.

“We can connect our two apartments—that way, once the virus hits, we can quarantine ourselves but still have access to one another and this old storage area.”

Remo had paid for a blueprint of their floor of the building and had identified an unused area along both of their apartments originally planned for central air ductwork. Somehow the building never utilized this negative space, and Remo proposed breaking through their closet walls for access to the hidden area. He built fake walls with invisible seams as secret entrances and wired auxiliary lighting and storage shelving throughout the tunnel.

When the viral outbreak broke over major news outlets and infections spread like a stadium wave, Jason knew he could survive for months with the supplies in the tunnel and in his neighbor’s apartment. Maybe even years.

“My place is almost sealed from ceiling to floor with sheets of plastic, and I have oxygen tanks just in case we find out Zeta’s airborne. I’ll stop by your place and seal you in, right after I stop over Thomas’s. He borrowed my DVD set of season two of Lois and Clark.”

It was the last he had heard from Remo over ten hours ago. The only other sounds he had heard were banging from Remo’s apartment and muffled screams in the hallway. Adding to now was thumping and scraping in the tunnel.

Jason stood up and shook his arm free of hardening ketchup from fries heated in a microwave hours ago, or maybe even yesterday. Every move he ever made relied on statistics and careful planning. For the first time in a long time, he had no clue what to do now.

The speakers on his PC made a shrill beep, followed by a kissing sound. It was an email from Julianne. Jason leaped over the collapsed folding table and half-slid-half-fell into his desk, his hand hammering the return key. A window popped up in Gmail.

It’s happening. Get in touch with Deter. Stay off the streets. It’s all real.

The timestamp read six hours ago. Traffic through the Internet was thick, and messages, even basic emails, were delayed. The content and timing of the message did not matter to Jason. An image of Julianne appeared in his mind, of her in her office at work. It was how he always remembered her: sitting on one leg, tapping a pen in one hand, pushing back her shoulder-length, black hair with the other. It was the scene from their first meeting, when she smiled at him for the first time and gave him the feeling poets wrote about or the stuff of a Nicholas Sparks’ movie, he thought.

A hard thump hammered the closet wall. Jason did not flinch.

“Shut up, Remo.”

He clicked out of his email and opened a new browser session, navigating to NetDarkStayOff.net. LEGIT had set up the site as a private tunnel for their own traffic. 

He opened a terminal window on his main PC, which he had nicknamed Behemoth due to its enormity of processing power, and rattled off a few lines of code in seconds. The system spit back a series of Internet addresses he knew to be entryways to the city’s street camera surveillance system. His code pinged them in rapid succession, sending out virtual handshakes until one of those systems shook back. With the outbreak in full swing, the surveillance cameras were poorly maintained and unprotected. Even so, he had no illusions of the time required to hack into the system. Once he gained access, he could plot a safe course and avoid military and police blockades. He would go to Julianne’s apartment and get them both out of town.

While his code did its work, he picked up his iPhone and swiped to his favorites. He stopped on a name—Uncle Lou.