Chapter 9: Chapter 9: Rat Bastards.

The pistol was in my hand before I even noticed it. Inside the upper management section was chaos. It looked like zombies had been here from the detritus floating around. I didn’t see any hanging around currently, but the mess was a fairly strong indicator.

If there was a nest somewhere nearby that would make the possibility a certainty. I stepped inside and the hatch shut behind me automatically. I didn’t think to wedge it open with anything to secure my retreat if I had to.

The trash in the air was still, implying that whatever had made the mess hadn’t been about recently. That did not necessarily mean the danger was passed, though. I stepped further into the grand foyer, watching for movement.

Or zombie bodies. Or anything, really. There were offices ringing the place, and an honest to Bob wooden staircase curving up to an upper level with several large wooden doors. All of which were open.

I worked my way around the lower level, glancing up to make sure there weren’t any lurking surprises up there. Nothing moved save the trash I disturbed on my way. The first office had no nests in it, but looked to have been ransacked. Empty shelves and turned out drawers, chairs floating here and there, a withered and dead plant.

I had thought that station policy was for all furniture to have locking mechanisms to keep them grounded in case of gravity loss, but apparently that rule didn’t apply here. Or maybe the locks failed. If they were electromagnetic with their own independent power sources then that could have happened.

But I was more ready to believe that upper management made rules that didn’t apply to itself. I had once thought that Security was just a needless annoyance.

Perhaps it would be best to give the benefit of the doubt. As far as I knew, I was the last living human on Walker. I didn’t want to think of how many humans were left on Earth or in the Solar system. If there were any at all.

The next three offices were much the same. No zombies, just ransacked slash looted and empty places where the higher ups did whatever they did to keep Walker running and profitable. The fifth office was unlooted but empty. The next one was more interesting.

For one thing, the desk console was still active. The glowing console beckoned me forward but I still looked around first, checking behind and above me as well. Still nothing. The drifting trash was thicker here.

It wasn’t just discarded food wrappers, packing material, clothing, and napkins. There were shards of thermal plastic and splinters of wood. I caught a glimpse of shining yellow in the light of the console as well. A bullet. Or rather, the shell that the bullet left behind after it was fired. Someone had been shooting in here. Probably a lot of shooting.

I looked up one more time before reading the terminal. Still nothing that I could see. No howls or screams. Just the quiet hush of the environmental systems.

The first thing I noticed upon reading the terminal was an evacuation order. That was something I hadn’t seen on any of the laboratory announcement systems. I’d have remembered that, at least. I skimmed it.

It looked properly official, calling staff to assemble at the... Life boats? We had escape pods, not life boats. That’s what all the emergency drills and literature called them. That made me review it in more detail.

They were ordering all upper management staff to the life boats to be temporarily relocated while Walker Security and System military forces contained the riots.

“Riots.” Ha. Zombies did not riot. They ate people.

There was also several lines stating that the Station crew and residents were to be put on quarantine lockdown pending resolution of the situation, and that none of the residents were to be informed of management’s impending hiatus.

I scrolled down, reading previous entries. The next one talked about Walker refusing to take on any more refugees, how to address those applying for refugee status, and what steps to take to escalate if they didn’t comply with the wave off orders.

I hadn’t realized we took on any refugees before. It was in none of my news feeds. They could have kept their presence contained if they kept them to the warehouse and docks area, at a guess. That was likely how the zombie plague got on board, early on when no one seemed to know anything about it.

Below that was more normal. Station status reports, geopolitics, trading, and the like. I scrolled back up to the evacuation order. It was sent by the Station network itself, but limited to the management staff.

Then I saw the date. I felt my hands clench into fists and my heart rate accelerate.

I had rarely felt such a burning desire for violence in my life. I wanted to shoot someone. A lot. Those rat bastards had evacuated on the sly long before things had gone finally to hell for good.

And they’d left the station residents with a shelter in place order. When hordes of zombies were already roaming the halls, they’d massed Security at the Headquarters Level while they ran away.

I may have cursed a little bit.

Or maybe more than a little.

There’s no telling how long I stood there wishing for a face I could punch but also realizing they were probably already dead by now. Or as good as. There were lockdown procedures to isolate parts of the station that lost atmospheric containment, yet none of that had ever been enacted.

The zombies spread without restriction, making containment completely impossible. Dooming every innocent soul left on Walker as they fled like cockroaches when the kitchen light was turned on.

The bullet casing drifted across my field of vision. It reminded me of the state that I found upper management’s sanctum in. Maybe the fight here hadn’t involved zombies at all. Or more likely, hadn’t been just zombies.

I left the last office on the lower level and jumped up. There was no need for stairs in microgravity. Here there were only three large offices. The first I checked was just as empty as the ones downstairs and just as trashed. The second was where I finally found the bodies.

There were zombie corpses. I should have expected that much, at this point. But there were also human corpses, too. Men in Station Security uniforms. Others in dark suits. Both held guns. Not pistols, like I was carrying, but longer firearms.

Hundreds or thousands of bullet casings littered the air along with the shattered wood and plastic I’d seen before. The zombies were absolutely shredded. Bits of dried blood and gore added to the confusing cloud of detritus in the room.

I pushed myself up towards one of the Security corpses. He didn’t look to have been chewed on after death, so no zombies were active here lately. Probably. He didn’t even have any bite wounds that I could tell, but there was a little hole in his face and a much bigger one in the back of his head.

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Gunshot wound. I’d made enough of those to tell by now. The gun in his hands looked a lot more deadly than my pistol. I decided to look it over more later. From the state of the pouches on this man, he’d shot nearly all his bullets already.

The gore and handling of bodies did not disturb me as much as I’d thought it might. Perhaps because I could not smell the rotting death and decay. The emergency suit insulated me from that. I couldn’t feel much of what I was touching through the suit gloves, either.

It could also have been the fact that I hadn’t seen another living human in over seven years. Maybe I would have a nervous breakdown later.

If it happened, I hoped it would be later. It would be a problem if I broke down when zombies were around.

I checked other corpses. Most had been shot as well, but a few were chewed. Station Security and these suit guys had apparently shot each other. Maybe Security had found out about management leaving them behind. The suits didn’t look like executive types, they looked like the Security types- big and heavily muscled. Private Security, then.

A large display unit was swung out from the wall at the back of the room. I hadn’t been able to see it from outside for all the floating debris. And the corpses.

I wondered for a brief moment why the cleaning bots hadn’t seen to this mess, considering no one was left alive. Then I remembered that upper management had human cleaning staff. They’d explained this as a security measure, given that bots could be hacked. On reflection, that was certainly true.

It was hard to tell much about the room beyond the hidden door. It was just as filled with debris as the office had been. I stuck my suit boots to the floor and searched along the walls. I cleared larger pieces of debris as I went but there was so much I could barely see two feet from my visor, if that.

I had to explore this room by feel. The bulkheads were torn up, pockmarked with bullet craters and occasional sharp edged holes where heavier ordinance had struck. The deck was damaged in places as well. In several places my boots could not grip, making me have to shuffle around even slower.

Then I reached a corner and soon after I felt the hard edges of an airlock hatch. Mere bullets would not appreciably damage a structure designed to weather the wreck of a ship or station intact.

But in this mess I would never be able to seal the hatch to see what was on the other side. I’d have to find a way to clear all this mess before investigating it further. I left the middle office and its hidden room behind reluctantly. That airlock intrigued me.

The last office on the upper level was not nearly as packed with debris as the middle one. Leaving there I left a wake of spinning, drifting trash behind me. Some of it followed me in. This one also had a desk console, so I decided to see if there was anything useful in it. Unlocking it for access was child’s play with nanites and within seconds its core functions were laid bare.

There was a surprising amount that one could do with top level access to the station. I could not even begin to investigate it all. The power issue was glaringly obvious.

But many of the popup windows and alerts were described in technical language that was almost completely opaque to me. P-3 faults in N layer bus? Cyclonic plasma below threshold? It made less sense to me than the language of cats. At least then you could be right about half the time with food.

I needed to find a way off the station that wouldn’t involve me becoming a chew toy for flesh eaters. The emergency options menu had entirely too many options and functions to it. I could feel my energy draining just looking at it.

Come to think of it, it had been a while time since I’d slept last. And a lot had happened in the mean time. I was battered and bruised and sore. Easily distracted, too, by this point.

There had to be a way to get the cleaning bots up here to sort this mess out. The human cleaners had to have come after the bots. At least, that would have made sense. The office maintenance menu was gratifyingly small.

There was an option to use the station’s cleaner bots, but it required a high level authorization to do so. Which I cheatingly had, given the hacked access I was using.

There would be busy little cleaner bots invading the upper management spaces soon. But I had to clear out first. Their little brains wouldn’t let them come out while I was still here.

Before I left though, there was one more thing I had to do first. Had to. I wouldn’t be like those bastards that left Walker like a thief in the night. I had access to the full station announcement system.

I was going to spam the airwaves and the email with what I’d learned, and what was happening. It was just possible that there were other survivors- a slim chance, but a chance nonetheless.

The question was, how would they let me know they were still alive? If there was anyone there, they’d have to be able to communicate that somehow. Not every compartment had a terminal or com station. The bathrooms certainly didn’t- but there was no food in the bathrooms, so that one was a no go.

Still. I had to try. I was trying to be a better person. Even if I as the only person.

That meant I had to be the good person. It wasn’t really a choice.

Every compartment on station had an emergency supply station. That had to be it. That meant digging back through the massive emergency options menu, though. But for this, I had an answer. There was a toggle inside that could be manually switched when the station was in need of resupply.

Even if the supply dates were current there were things that could become damaged. We had to do regular inspections for this. Even antisocial introverted lab researchers did their regular inspections.

So that had to be part of the grand spamming broadcast. Switch the toggle in the emergency supply station to on so someone knows your alive. That someone being me.

Deep down though, I knew this was just a gesture. I had to do the right thing. Even when it made no sense. Because there was nobody left on Walker. No one was active on the system net. No one but me.

So I set the spam broadcast on an eight hour loop. Then dragged my increasingly pained, exhausted body back down to Security Medical. There was a gurney propped up against the bulkhead down there calling my name.

I have no memory of the journey back. I just remember falling face first into that thin mattress. My dreams were of the mindless dead chasing me, calling out my name. Sometimes they caught me. I fought back. But there was no end to them.

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