Survival Bunker System Developer

Looking for Clues

Lunch was good. Pizza and cola was good food for curing stress. The system developer decided to indulge a little and celebrate being alive by procrastinating. He went out for a walk after lunch to admire the views of his neighbourhood while grabbing a new packet of cigarettes from the drug store. At the same time, he bought some beer as an excuse to survey the behaviour of stray animals in the city and talk to the shopkeeper.

“It’s rare to see you buying cigarettes and beer at the same time,” John the shopkeeper commented.

Ever since Caleb moved to Windsor Terrace, he became acquainted with the owner of the small shop and was a regular customer. John was right. Cigarettes and beer didn’t usually come hand in hand but since Caleb was indulging in the present, he was doing something he normally wouldn’t do.

“That’s right. I’m celebrating a little before throwing myself at a new project. Say, have you seen anything odd lately?”

John blinked. Even after knowing the system developer for eight years, the shopkeeper didn’t think that Caleb was someone very interested in the outside world. For him to take initiative to find out was something that John wasn’t ready for. Still, the shopkeeper was more than delighted to answer any of Caleb’s questions. If there was one thing the middle-aged owner was good at, it would be listening to small talks and gossip.

“What kind of odd things are we talking about?” he asked and Caleb frowned.

As a socially awkward person, he hesitated. Asking about cannibal rats and pigeons directly would only make him appear insane. Then again, he wasn’t the sanest person that John knew so asking this much should be fine, right?

“Animals behaving weirdly and attacking their owners or random strangers for starters,” Caleb said with a poker face.

Whatever John was expecting to hear, he wasn’t ready to be asked such a strange thing. Still, Caleb’s question couldn’t help but make John frown. Was there such a thing as too much coincidence in this world?

“Funny that you mention it... Two days ago I overheard some teens complaining about the increase of rats. They were seen running around even in broad daylight and attacking birds. One of the teens said that the rats were vicious and would even attack people in the area without reason. He is a Youtuber and caught the thing on film. I don’t know if the footage has gone viral but that would be considered rather odd, don’t you think?”

Caleb’s expression hardened when he heard it. Rats have started behaving aggressively in New York City. That was terrible news. It wouldn’t be long before PXE22 infected other species and humans. He was already too late to prevent the apocalypse. The timer was ticking and Caleb hurriedly paid for his purchase before returning to his apartment. He hasn’t seen anything in Windsor Terrace so he had roughly a month to get ready before it reaches his area. Still, the system developer needed to confirm where the rats were seen. Has it already affected the locations in the second wave or are they only beginning in the areas near the East River?

Jeremy greeted his owner when Caleb returned but the system developer didn’t spare his cat a single glance, heading straight to the laptop once he placed his purchases down on the coffee table. His face was grimmer than the grim reaper and his fingers flew over the keyboard faster than a twenty-four-hour rushed job.

Being a very talented programmer, Caleb had a special program that assisted him with many of his research jobs. He called out the program and input the search filters. Right now, his main priority was to search the internet about everything related to the strange sightings of rats or animals with hostile behaviour in New York City over the past month. That video clip was something Caleb wanted to confirm.

Once the filters and search criteria were added, Caleb put away his purchases and allowed the program to do its task. After tuning the entire internet upside down, Caleb was able to retrieve surface-level information about the sightings from forums, social media posts and the video that John talked about. A little more digging on his side gave him everything he needed to know in the next thirty minutes.

“Tramway Plaza was where the video was taken. Also, what’s the strange news about the birds in Carl Schurz Park attacking visitors?” Caleb asked Jeremy who only ignored him.

His initial hypothesis of rats becoming the first ghouls to spread the virus might be inaccurate after the discovery. If birds were already attacking visitors in Manhattan, wouldn’t the news be inaccurate about the first and second waves?

“No, I need to validate this information in person. Besides, something tells me that Carl Schurz Park might hold the key information that I need. PXE22 cannot be as simple as some polluted water source. Jeremy, I will be heading out. Take care of the house, won't you?”

Jeremy meowed in response before sauntering to the bedroom for his afternoon nap. Caleb sighed. Jeremy would always be Jeremy. Before he left, he put his assistant to work for a different sort of information. This time, he included Project PXE22 in the search as well as anything related to DNA modification that he couldn’t find the last time.

Confident that everything was in order, Caleb went to his bedroom to pick out some suitable clothes that might get wet, dirty or torn. Just as a precaution, he also wore thicker layers of clothing that left little exposed in case he got attacked by the ghoul animals.

The drive to Tramway Plaza was short but it took a long time for Caleb to be able to find a parking space. Who knew that it would still be so busy during this hour? The system developer got out of his car and tried to find the area that matched the video’s location. From the angle that the video was taken from, he could make out the rough direction the Youtuber went. Still, he wasn’t seeing any ferocious rats in the vicinity as he saw in the videos.

After walking around for a good while, Caleb relented. He hated socialising and was an extremely introverted person but he didn’t have much of a choice now. The rats weren’t showing themselves and Caleb had a job to do.

“Excuse me,” he asked the hot dog seller who didn’t look very busy or happy.

The old man who owned the cart was grouchy. “What do you want?”

Knowing that it would be hard to pry the man’s mouth open without purchasing anything, Caleb looked at the menu. It had been a while since he had a hot dog and honestly, he didn’t know if he wanted to eat anything from a street stand. Still, he ordered the first thing on the menu just to please the owner.

“Can I have a hot dog and apple Snapple combo?” he smiled.

The vendor beamed at the order and started preparing the food immediately. Caleb waited patiently as the vendor squeezed a generous amount of ketchup and mustard to his hot dog before boxing it up for takeaway with the chilled apple Snapple.

“That’ll be six dollars,” the vendor smiled and handed Caleb his orders.

The system developer gave the good man a ten-dollar bill and told him to keep the change before he started asking his questions.

“You come to Tramway Plaza frequently?”

The vendor shrugged. “Once every couple of days especially when I know the tourists are coming. I push my cart all over the city where there are people. Can’t say I’m here very often but I come here often enough.”

Caleb nodded. “I was hoping you could help me out. There’s this video on the internet that’s trending but I don’t know exactly where they took it. Could you help me find the location?”

He brought out his phone to play the video of the ferocious rats in Tramway Plaza that he downloaded illegally. The vendor watched it and scratched his chin before glancing around.

“It should be over there. I heard about the ferocious rats attacking a bunch of Chinese tourists. Funny that happened but I won’t say I’m surprised. Those tourists walk around with food in their hands and littering everywhere. Still, these rats look like the ones the boys took. Pretty strange for those rats, won’t you say? They never used to be so bold.”

Caleb nodded. “Apart from Tramway Plaza do you think there are any ferocious rats or birds? Have you seen anything similar happening to animals around the city or is that just a Tramway thing?”

The hotdog vendor frowned. “Now that you mention it, I think it’s been happening all over more recently. I don’t go too far from the East River so I don’t know what’s happening to the rest of the city but this stretch is getting weirder by the day. The rats don’t attack all the time but they certainly know how to find food when they are hungry and you don’t mess with them nowadays. In the past, I would shoo the pigeons away when they come but now I pack and run. A wild one came and scratched me on the arm over here with its beak. Bled for a while and scared the living daylights out of me! I’d be careful if I were you.”

Caleb swallowed. “C-can you show me the wound?”

It was odd. If these animals were turning into ghouls, why was the hot dog seller who had been attacked still not turning into a ghoul? Perhaps the virus still hasn’t awakened. Like all other viruses, it takes time for them to adapt to their new host and mutate into something deadlier. Caleb knew that the spread had begun but he harboured hope knowing that the virus was still weak. Aggression in animals was probably only the first stage before the transformation and the fully awakened virus would be the intelligent ghoul.

The wound on the hotdog vendor’s arm didn’t look too bad and Caleb didn’t see any strange signs of festering. The hot dog man was grumpy but not aggressive so Caleb knew he wasn’t a ghoul. At least not yet. He thanked the man for his cooperation and left to walk along the East River on Manhattan’s side.

On his way, Caleb passed by a University, a school and a hospital. The journey took about forty minutes on foot and the system developer felt something amiss. Wouldn’t birds hang out together on trees or flock together on the sidewalks? The fact that he didn’t see many of them around made him wonder where they went. The sun was out and the weather was lovely but something feels missing from the picture.

The moment he reached the park, Caleb understood what was wrong. The birds that he thought were missing were all gathered at a particular spot in the park pecking at something. The size of the flock scared Caleb and there were even different species of birds in the same group, something that doesn’t happen naturally.

The birds were clawing their way into the soil and Caleb approached carefully, not wanting to incur the wrath of the feathered flock. As he approached, Caleb took out his phone and started filming. He needed to study the strange behaviour when he returned. The birds were aggressive and started pecking at something that they dug up from the soil. Using the camera to zoom in from a safe distance, Caleb tried to make out what that object was. He stood there for more than fifteen minutes and finally understood what he was seeing.

Feeling sick to his stomach, Caleb high-tailed out of the park and emptied the contents of his stomach including the pizza from lunch. That white thing was turned out to be the bone of a human hand that remained after its flesh had been pecked clean. If it wasn’t for the watch that was unearthed, Caleb would not have understood what he was seeing so quickly.

Someone had been buried in the park and the corpse must have been the first ghoul. The birds were aggressive because of the strange virus they contracted after eating some of the rats. The behaviour matches the first signs of a human ghoul. After getting infected, the human will have a high fever and often be in a delusional state with a very aggressive temper. After the fever passes, the infected humans will crave food of any sort including rotting or expired meat. They crave meat the most and will ignore any non-meat food items. The final stage when a human transforms into a complete ghoul is when they no longer respond to reasoning and will attack anything living in the area and eating them.

The rats were at the first stage of ghoulification, the birds were at the second stage of ghoulification and a human had already been ghoulified. Now that Caleb knew the truth, he had to hasten his search for the ones responsible. For now, Caleb sent an anonymous tip-off to the police about the buried person in Carl Schurz Park. He would hack their systems later to find out the identity of the buried victim later.