#RealZombies: The Octothorp Trilogy

By Jared Quinn

Charlie has it all: a job he hates, crushing debt and no plan for the future. Will the zombie apocalypse be just what he needs to turn it all around?

 

The Octothorp series follows three different characters through the same realistic, contemporary Sci-Fi universe full of mystery, intrigue, adventure and also there are some zombies and aliens.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mechanical Pty Ltd
• Release date: Oct 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393466727

Book preview

#RealZombies

At first my perimeter held strong, but gradually as they became more aggressive, cracks emerged and the intruders were now getting through almost entirely unimpeded.

Oh my god Charlie - give this guy your direct number, I’m not your secretary.

Libby-on-the-front desk had been willing to bend the rules and run interference for me when she thought she was helping out with unreasonable debt collectors after my Grandpa’s estate, but when the callers told her they were actually looking for payments on a loan I had hastily procured during a riverboat casino binge last year, suddenly Libby had to follow corporate’s strict rules on personal calls.

There was a clack on the line as Libby put down her phone. The textured plastic of the handset felt sweaty. An annoyed sounding banker drone spoke with a slight hiss:

Mister Horner, our next step is to go to court and get an order to garnish your wages, the court will decide how much you get paid, and we get the rest - ask yourself, is that something you can lives with?

It wasn’t, partly because my big city lifestyle had to be paid for, but mostly because I had taken out a crippling payday loan like an idiot when a slightly inebriated version of myself found their loan office right across the street from a casino where I’d been losing, but feeling lucky.

Goddam loan sharks, there ought to be some kind of law about loaning money to losers like me. I hung up the phone and let the next call ring for a couple of minutes.

"Chuck, why is your phone ringing again? You better not be taking non-business calls during work hours."

Daryl, my increasingly rotund 30 or 40 something boss, provided adult supervision on our floor. I didn’t understand Daryl. He hated the company, which I could get behind, but he was also a relentless workaholic and stickler for company rules. I didn’t get it. He was a bulbous, pear-shaped enigma.

If I were taking the calls, then the phone wouldn’t be ringing, would it?

Touché.

#

The company was M & Hollander, a Wall Street trading firm where most of the ivy educated traders took home monthly bonuses that could annihilate my debilitating debts and still leave change. Their car lot had become increasingly German and shiny over the last couple of years and while my paltry after-hours excesses wouldn’t stand out against the polished wood backdrops of the 6th floor, they were best kept quiet down here in the rather more beige and linoleum 3rd floor IT department.

My Senior Network Specialist title had been enough to impress Mom after a poor showing at college, but was not enough to warrant any kind of formal business attire. The company issued us the same gray logo’d polo shirt as the janitorial staff so we’d know our place. My primary duties were plugging things into things and then investigating why those things had stopped working.

It was boring work, occasionally punctuated by moments of panic instigated by the geniuses on the floors above. They often worked themselves into a lather around something they just had to have right now. When phrases like We’re on the back foot and without this we’re blind started being thrown around by clowns in $4000 suits, they expected us, the wage slaves from L3, to work round the clock without complaint.

But in this market? I’ll take what I can get.

Upstairs

That, is a fuckin’ zombie

TV and movie characters are never sure what to call them: walkers, undead, the infected, anything to avoid calling a spade what is clearly a spade. In real life, it only took Libby a glance over my shoulder at the pixelated Internet news feed I had on my screen to make a diagnosis. From then, it was about 20 minutes until #realzombies became a serious tag on Twitter. Authorities were using #realzombies in their announcements by that evening, and the official Zombie containment and destruction bill passed Congress late on Thursday the same week.

They the fast or slow kind? Daryl asked, without turning around.

He looks pretty goddam fast to me

Welp, we’re fucked.

#

Initially, Hollywood’s imagined world of zombies meant humanity was oddly well prepared for the actual zombie infection. Everyone knew how to talk about it and intuitively understood the dangers. The US Army swung into action, enforcing containment around America’s air and sea ports. After the containment bill passed, it provided transport assistance to affected Americans within a matter of days. I wondered whether there was already a serious plan drawn up for this scenario or if the government was just working directly off a movie script to determine what to do next.

The first of the zombies were in the US, and all the ones that got loose were from planes landed on the east coast. It seemed that they were wandering the airport for some time before they made it to the streets, so nobody was sure which flight the first zombies were from.

Corporate’s response to the outbreak was to email everyone@corporate asking anyone non critical to stay home if they were feeling sick or hungry for flesh and then to rush installing TVs near the traders so they could better track mainstream news of the outbreak and its effect on liquidity or bulls or something.

Next morning I heaved an overloaded trolley of flat brown TV boxes out of the elevator on 6th.

Straight through to the bullpen please Charles.

Sure thing, Ani.

My cheap dress shoes slipped on the carpet as I simultaneously tried to suck in my gut and move the loaded trolley without sounding out of breath. Ani - Anika, was only a year or two older than me, but was a fixture at the company. She worked reception and kept all the operations on her floor running smoothly. If you wanted to get anything, or anyone, in or out of the main trading floor on 6th, it needed Ani’s approval. She managed who sat where and dictated when junior traders would move up to the more senior pods. Rumor had it she even got a percentage of the trading bonuses on her floor, unheard of for utility staff.

Ohio raised, you wouldn’t catch the remnants of Ani’s Bangalore family accent unless you concentrated real hard. Once I’d seen her flirt with a delivery guy using a valley girl accent that made me scrunch my toes up inside my shoes for reasons I still don’t fully understand.

I swiped my ID card, opened the door and then tried to push it the rest of the way open with the trolley, only to have the heavy office door push the trolley sideways and then click shut as I used my foot to catch the topmost TV sliding off the trolley.

How about I...

Ani had appeared beside me with hands hesitantly reaching towards the door and with that grimace people do when some idiot is about to break something.

Thanks.

#

The next few hours I worked around the edges of the noisy bullpen, unboxing screens and bolting mounting kits to a spare space on the outside wall. Once the mounting kits were up the screens clicked into place and one at a time, the screen flickered to life with their manufacturer logos moving on a blue background.

That was fast! One of the taller, younger traders slapped me on the back on the way back to his desk. PETER VANDENBERG read his desk’s slide-in name plate.

Yeah, well VESA mounts make it pretty easy these days to... I trailed off as Pete set down his coffee, spun around on his chair and looked up at the wall.

Tune ‘em in - need to see those hashtag realzombies!

Oh! Right, well the screens are in, but we still need a cable feed, Daryl said the guy is coming tomorrow afternoon. See, in these tall buildings, we need cables be- I explained.

Jesus Christ, tomorrow? Peter interrupted.

This thing could be over by then!

Peter was clearly not one for details.

Well, you could just bring the news feed up on your corp workstation if you need it now.

What? I didn’t think we could load anything on those pieces of crap, been staring at my phone all morning.

Well, not on the Bloomberg terminals you can’t, but Internet feeds should work from corp, if you turn on the proxy settings... you want me to? I asked, reaching for Pete’s corporate desktop keyboard.

Fuck yes! Can we get MSNBC too? Pete was on his feet and ushering me towards his desk.

I spent the rest of the afternoon duplicating my IT magic for traders across the floor. Some of them were already watching Twitter and social feeds, but for others opening the rapidly auto-updating #realzombies Twitter stream on their screens was a revelation. So when I fumbled my way back past Ani with a trolley full of cardboard and foam core, I felt like I’d been useful.

#

Pete asks for Charlie

According to the news,