The Complex

By J. Rudolph

Neighbors in an apartment complex must band together to survive a zombie plague in this post-apocalyptic horror series opener.

Cali Anglin, RN, had a great life. It may have been nothing special to the rest of the world, but she loved it.

That was on a Wednesday.

By Friday, it was gone forever.

With the government gone, electricity extinguished, and the food supply dwindling, she must face questions she’s never asked herself before—just how far would she go to save her family, her friends, and her rapidly collapsing community? Would she kill for them? Would she die for them?

She’s about to find out . . .

Praise for The Complex

“I really enjoyed The Complex. . . . It brings a new and missing dynamic to the genre. . . . Ms. Rudolph tells a good story that left me wanting more.” —David Forsyth, author of the Sovereign Spirit Saga

“This is a fantastic read that I could not recommend more!” —Tony Baker, author of Survivors of the Dead

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9781618687562

Book preview

Contents

The Beginning

Threshold

Official Words

Pseudo Prep

Family Awareness

Time For Action

And Back Again

First Night/First Full Day

Looting Survival

One Down

Post Raid

Zombies At The Gate

Resource Day

The Next Supply Run

Eric Returns

Aftermath Of The Bite

The Funeral And The Fight

Barriers

Power Failures

Power Alternative

Council Planning

Return Of The Guys

The Haul

Power Up

Continuing On

Learning More

Creature Comforts

The Marauders

Trent’s Trench

Alexus

Jody’s Test

Return Of The Marauders

Water Woes

Marriage

Getting The Water

Alexus Woes

Security Woes

When It Rains

Recording On Hold

The Christmas Run

Christmas Is Coming

The Revelation

And Rue We Will

The Night It Changed

Our Losses And Gain

Joey’s Letter

What’s Next

Acknowledgments

About The Author

Other Books You’ll Love From

The Beginning

A significant earthquake rocked the small islands that made up the country of Japan. Their nuclear power plants leaked, and after a time it was decided that an evacuation must be undertaken. Radiation levels had been deemed harmful to humans. There were a great many people that needed to be evacuated, so luggage space was limited. Instructions were relayed to all the evacuees: belongings to be taken were limited to a single backpack per person. If any pets were to accompany the travelers, they must be small and in approved carriers.

In one house in the evacuation zone, a little boy had been tasked with packing in his room. He went about putting clothes in his backpack. He sat down on his bed to decide what he needed to take, and dwelled on the unfairness of having to leave his home. It wasn’t his fault, after all, that the stupid reactor was leaking. In his mind, they should just plug up the hole with the putty stuff that his father had used to patch a hole in their wall that the boy had accidentally made when he found his father’s golf clubs.

He sulked for a moment as he surveyed the room, until he spotted his rat. He had gotten the rat a year ago from a local street market and had named it Nezumi-San, which roughly translated to Rat-friend. The rat carried the lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus. The boy did not know this. He knew that the rat had been exposed to radiation like his family; it was why they were leaving, after all. But obviously he didn’t have a clue as to what sort of damage was being done in the rat’s body as the LCMV mutated. All he knew was that he loved his rat and had no intention of leaving him behind, so into the carrier the rat went. He sat back down to sulk again.

Having seen the boy’s distress over the whole thing, his parents came into his room with a surprise. His family had elected to visit friends in New York while the clean-up was underway. New York sounded amazing and immediately his moping was over. He would be going not only to America, but to New York, of all places! He looked into his rat’s cage with joy.

In halting, broken English the boy said to the rat, Nezumi-San, we are to see New York. We are to see Big Apple. We are to see Yankee baseball and catch home run baseball. If we must get go, Nezumi-San, this is the only way. You will love it; I have saw many movies with New York in it. For now on I speak only the English we make in our school lesson. He smiled at his rat and the rat squeaked softly. The boy took the squeak to mean the rat was confirming that the English-only rule could be a wise move.

The small fingers freed a treat from a crinkly plastic sack and pulled out a piece of dried fruit that he placed in the carrier. The rat took his time nibbling on it. Sliding his backpack over his shoulder, the boy glanced over his room one more time. He imagined all the new posters he was going to put up when he got back. He picked up the carrier and joined his family.

Before they were allowed to enter the airport, the boy and his family had to go through a radiation treatment center to ensure that they weren’t radioactive and couldn’t injure others. The family was taken to the first processing room where they had to deposit their belongings into a lead box. They were directed to put on hospital gowns that were handed to them, and to place their clothes into the boxes as well. A member of veterinary services took Nezumi-San to be checked out. The boy was concerned about what they may do to the rat. He was reassured by the lady holding the pet carrier that everything would be fine. She explained that the rat needed a bath, his carrier needed to be cleaned, and he needed to take a dose of potassium iodine just like the boy himself would be taking. They would be reunited soon.

He and his parents were sent through to the shower room. They were given the soaps and shampoos they needed to remove any residual radiation and yet another hospital gown to put on so they didn’t re-contaminate themselves with the first. After they scrubbed and dressed, they were taken to another room where men were standing with wands that measured how much radiation remained on them. They were told that the levels were in the acceptable range, given a pill the size of Mount Fuji, and told to wait on their clothing. Moments later the lady that had taken Nezumi-San returned with a very fluffy and somewhat annoyed rat. Just a bit later they were handed their treated clothing and backpacks and were free to go on to the airport.

On the arm of the lady who had washed the rat was a bandage that hadn’t been there before. She didn’t mention the injury to anyone, fearing that the breach in safety protocol would leave her without a job. It was her own fault, she reasoned. It was she who had not checked the water temperature before putting the rat in the spray. No animal wanted to take a cold shower, and it was that temperature that caused the rat to try to flee, using her arm as a take-off point. It was just a scratch, after all. She had cleaned it with soap; she would be fine. The rat certainly appeared healthy.

Once in the airport, his parents bought the tickets. The boy was disappointed that his rat had to travel with the other animals. He didn’t understand why he couldn’t just sit with Nezumi-San on his lap, but rules were rules. They would be traveling from Japan to Los Angeles first, then on to San Francisco where, after a layover, they would fly directly to New York. The multiple stops in California due to the connecting flights made the boy feel like an exotic jet-setting movie star. He hoped he would get to see a famous person.

After they flew into LAX, and the rat and their belongings were collected, the family made their way over to the food court for lunch. While they ate the boy took his friend out of his cage to have a snack. The rat sat on his shoulder, nibbling on sunflower seeds with great contentment. Another young boy ran up to pet the rat, without asking permission, and got scratched. As far as the young guardian was concerned, that kid deserved what he got. You don’t just put hands on a pet that isn’t yours. When the time came to board the next plane he took his rat to be checked in.

I will see you soon. You be good. He left the cage with the baggage people and rejoined his parents.

They went on to San Francisco. Just as it had happened at LAX, they retrieved their belongings and their pet to wait for their next flight. A woman with long blonde hair and a flowing sundress offered a bit of granola to the rat. The boy said that would be very good, and thanked her for the treat. He still felt bad that the rat was banished from the flight. The rat accidentally nipped her when taking the treat. She giggled, saying that it seemed the rat must love granola. She popped the bitten finger into her mouth to suck on the wound in an attempt to clean it out. She was one of those people who believed that the body creates its own cleaning system, and that saliva was a perfectly good antiseptic.

They boarded the last plane for a nonstop flight to New York. The pet carrier fell over when the plane hit turbulence, and the rat got loose. This airline prided itself on being more pet-friendly than others, and there was always someone that went to check on their animal passengers when they passed through rough patches, and in one of these routine checks, it was discovered that the young man’s beloved pet was loose. The airline staff attempted to get the rat back in its carrier and created a bit of a commotion in the process. The boy realized it was his pet that was loose, and convinced the airline staff to let him help since Nezumi-San knew him. The rat was backed into a corner when the boy reached for him. By that point, his pet was in panic mode. The boy was bitten deeply in his hand as the rat escaped one last time. It ran away when the plane landed in New York, which broke the boy’s heart, and to make things worse, he didn’t feel well. All the stress made his head hurt, and not too long after the bite he felt like he was starting to get the flu. In his mind, this had been his worst trip ever.

The young boy was far from home when the infection started to grip his body. He tried to make himself believe that he felt so poorly because he missed his Nezumi-San. He didn’t want to be sick; he was supposed to go see Yankee Stadium later. When he realized that he had a fever that went with the worst headache and stiff neck he’d ever had, he finally broke down and told his mom how bad he felt.

His mom laid her hand across his forehead. He was as hot as a furnace. She grabbed a bottle of children’s pain and fever reducer and carefully measured the dose before demanding he drink it. She was prepared for a fight – the boy never did like taking his medicine – but today he took it willingly. An hour later, he still was burning with the heat of a thousand suns, so she took her son to the emergency room. Less than fifteen minutes after they arrived, he began to seize, went into cardiac arrest, and died half a world away from home. They never even had time to get him changed into a hospital gown.

The doctors were baffled over how quickly he’d succumbed to his illness, and when the New York coroner’s office demanded that his body be examined by their office, there was no argument from anyone. They made arrangements to retrieve the body the next morning. Until then, he was sent down to the hospital’s morgue. His mother was ripped to shreds with grief. All she’d wanted was to have a nice vacation with her family. Instead, her family had been torn apart.

It was in that morgue that the boy opened his eyes. He groaned in his confined refrigerated holding box. A hunger he had never felt before gripped his stomach. The ache in his gut was a pain so intense it needed to be resolved. He moaned in discomfort. He slid down the length of his steel box, kicked at the door, and found that he was stuck.

The racket that he made kicking at the door caught the attention of the security guard making his rounds. The security guard came inside the morgue with small, hesitant steps. He walked up to the unit that was making the sounds. He reached the door with caution and pulled down on the handle of the box, slowly opening it. Right at the entrance of the box was a black body bag that thrashed.

The security guard shook with terror. In his thirty years at the hospital he had never experienced anything even close to this. People being taken to the morgue by mistake, while they were still alive, only happened in movies, but here he was, standing face to face with a body bag that moved.

The security guard lifted the body and placed it on a gurney. He knew from the tag that there was a child inside, and based on the weight of the bag, the child couldn’t have been much more than ten years old.

The aging guard ran his fingers through his white hair. If he had been keeping a list of all the weird things he’d seen in his life, the sight of this writhing body bag would take the cake. He murmured sounds of comfort to the person inside, hoping that this scared kid would feel a little better at the sound of his voice. He was hoping, too, that these soft reassurances would steady his own nerves. He couldn’t help but think of his granddaughter and how frightened she would be if it were her inside. He located the zipper and freed the trapped child as quickly as possible.

The boy stared at the security guard with blank, unfocused eyes and moaned again. The security guard wondered if the boy had brain damage from his ordeal. When the child reached for him, the guard went straight to him, assuming that he wanted to be comforted. He never saw the bite to the neck coming. The sharp teeth bit into the flesh easily, tearing away at the muscle and tendons. The guard screamed in pain and fumbled for his walkie talkie as the teeth found purchase even deeper in the neck. When he pulled that next bite away, the guard’s carotid artery was torn and, with each rapid squeeze of his heart, a fountain spray of blood painted the cold, sterile room with abstract art. He lost his blood volume in a matter of seconds, so he didn’t feel the boy continuing to eat.

The hunger that the boy felt was beginning to fade, until he heard the sounds of people walking outside the double doors of the morgue. He followed the sounds down a hallway and out to a loading dock. People were talking to each other, walking all around the area. He was covered in the blood of the security guard, but took no notice of it.

Hearing the other people woke up that hunger all over again. He wandered away from the loading dock and went to where the closest noise was. He found a teenage girl leaning against a wall, smoking a cigarette and talking on the phone. She saw the child and gasped at the sight of the blood. She disconnected the call, tossed her smoke aside, and ran up to him, assuming that he had been hurt, or had witnessed something terrible. She spoke in a soft voice, trying to convey comfort. She reached out to him, and he grabbed her wrist and bit into her forearm. She screamed as she pulled free and ran away; the boy continued on in his quest for food.

Through fights over food and mates, Nezumi-San infected other rats in New York with the radiated form of lymphocytic choriomeningitis, a new strain of the disease that had never existed before. Those rats went on to scratch and bite other rats in other colonies. The rats that acquired the virus became more aggressive than they were before and they bit people even when unprovoked.

The infection became an epidemic in New York, and the victims grew exponentially. Many of the people that were bitten by their fellow man went to the hospital, but not all. People who were bitten by the infected rats were less inclined to go to the hospital; no one wanted an exorbitant bill for a smear of antibiotic ointment.

No one had ever heard of anything like what was going on, and the boy bit many people, passing his infection on to others with every chomp. The fact that he was a child made for an even larger number of victims. The city was quickly gripped in terror over this mystery infection, and no one thought to look for the little boy who was left to wander the city forever.

Everyone that came into contact with one of the rats or someone who was infected contracted the virus. They became sick, died, then reanimated into a ravenous monster, motivated only by a deep insatiable hunger.

This is how the outbreak began.

The world did not end with a bang, nor did it end with a whimper. It was more of a chomp. And a slurp.

Threshold

The day that the virus hit critical threshold was much like the day before … in the beginning. I had worked the last night shift at the hospital on the cardiac unit, and the night itself didn’t stand out that much, though the ER was hopping like the Fourth of July. Had I not known better, I’d have guessed it was a full moon, a notorious omen for hospital staff.

The hospital where I worked was in a small town—small for Southern California, anyway. It was the only hospital for twenty-five miles around, so it made sense to make it a trauma center. And that night it was on fire: throughout the night, trauma codes kept being announced over the PA, one or two an hour. The staff in the cardiac unit mused over what could be going on out there in the world that could elicit this sudden spike in traumas, but no one knew of any reason. It wasn’t a holiday. It wasn’t a weekend. It was a Tuesday. Just any old Tuesday in the end of May.

The drive home was fairly quiet. Traffic was light; the usual activity of a weekday morning wasn’t there. The roads were light. I figured that since the schools had let out for summer break the day before that maybe the neighbors were taking a day off. I wondered if that also might explain why the trauma count was so high. Yeah, that probably was it. The high schoolers must have had a party that had gotten out of hand. I chuckled to myself as I pulled my truck into the carport. I should have realized that last night.

I lived in a gated apartment complex. I loved it there. I loved the grounds of the complex. I loved the neighbors. I especially loved the trees. There were many, and so tall, that they gave the community a sense of quiet that was essential to life in Southern California. I glanced over the courtyard to see that the neighbor kids had left their bikes out on the common grounds. Again. How they had managed to not get those bikes stolen was beyond me. The sidewalk had been decorated with colorful chalk; scattered patches had been washed away by the sprinklers.

I walked up the stairs to my front door and began to plan out what I was going to do that day, with sleep being high on my to do list. I emptied my pockets as I closed the door behind me and walked down the hall. I stuck my head into my ten-year-old son’s bedroom. Drew’s room was chaos now that he was on break. It made me happy to find him sprawled out across the bed, sound asleep, although how such a little person can take up so much area is beyond me. My husband, Trent, was sleeping in the next room, enjoying his day off. Trent had often commented on how he loved working for a small cabinet shop because he could make his own hours, a definite plus when kiddo went off track for his break, since his school was of the year round variety.

I had envy issues. People got sick regardless of what my son’s school schedule was, or what holiday it was. I couldn’t just close the hospital to suit me.

I went to the living room and fired up the laptop to check the message forums. My favorite forums are for Kindle fans. Yeah, I was ‘that geek.’ I loved to read and I loved electronic things and, as it turned out, I was not alone in my obsession. I found the general chat thread and was surprised to see that there had been over two hundred new posts in the twelve hours that I was at work. I must have missed out on some flame war. When I started reading the posts, people kept talking about how they couldn’t believe the news stories. Posts continued on about being scared.

What had I missed?

Posts about the news scared me. Being totally unaware of what was going on when a huge event happened gave me a sinking feeling in the gut. It made me recall 9/11, when the attacks occurred. I was at home that day, and we didn’t have internet or TV. I found out that the world was ending when my mother-in-law called me and broke the news over my prepaid cell phone.

I stared at the television screen, still turned off, for a bit. If I didn’t turn it on then whatever it was that was scaring my internet friends was not real yet. The remote control sat on the coffee table, taunting me. I finally reached over, picked it up, and pushed the power button. When the screen came to life, the newscaster looked as though she was frightened