Our bodies clean and our stomachs full, we spread out a map over the hood of the car and began mulling over our next destination.
I found this puzzling, seeing as our current location seemed to be just what we were looking for: a peaceful, suburban area. There were ranch-style homes and the occasional warehouse or facility, but that was about it.
We hadn’t seen many zombies around here either, though we couldn’t let our guard down in case those houses still had owners trudging around. You never knew when a dormant zombie might come out to play.
“Can’t we just, you know, stay here?” I asked Otoha, looking over the sandbank.
I had a hard time imagining a place more ideal than this. An endless water supply, a road close by, enough fish to last us a lifetime... What more could you want?
“No.”
“Why? Give me one good reason.”
Otoha pointed to a large facility at the lower reaches of the river. “There. Happy?”
“The nuclear power plant...”
“Ah, a meltdown is what you’re worried about. I see.” Tetsuko nodded approvingly. “They were restarting some of the reactors recently. I’m not sure if this one in particular was restarted, though.”
Most of Japan’s nuclear power plants had been closed for the last twenty years or so. To fill in the gap in her energy-consumption needs, Japan had turned to newly developed solar tech and the smart grid network, along with some old-fashioned thermal power plants.
Eventually, Japan had finally clawed her way out of an economic recession, but things hadn’t stopped there. In hopes of ushering in a new golden age, Japan had then turned her attention to the electronics industry, supporting its growth through national policy four or five years ago. According to all known estimates, Japan’s energy-consumption needs would only increase with time.
As a result, Japan had begun looking into ways she could get her nuclear plants up and running again a little while before any of us had been born. As one might expect, anti-nuclear sentiments had arisen and promptly died out before they could ever really go mainstream. Japan had had an economic recession to confront, after all.
“The workers have likely turned zombie by now.”
The parts of a nuclear plant that weren’t automated would usually be operated by workers, who had almost certainly been infected. Zombies had a tendency to mimic their old behaviors, meaning the plants were relatively harmless for the time being. That said, they were a disaster just waiting to happen if nothing was done about them.
“Everywhere within an eighty-kilometer radius of a power plant is a potential danger zone.” Otoha ran her finger across the map, drawing a nice, round circle. “As you can see, we can’t stick around for long.”
Needless to say, our current location was within said eighty-kilometer radius.
“Doesn’t appear as though we have a great deal of options, eh?” Tetsuko said, crossing her arms.
“A deserted island could work,” Shino piped up.
Based on our experiences with the sandbank, a deserted island did sound rather enticing. However, it had one fatal flaw: accessibility. Something as simple as casually strolling over to the nearest shopping mall or hardware store for supplies would instead be a monumental undertaking.
I sighed. “We’ll need a real boat, I’m guessing? Don’t imagine our inflatable buddy or a shoddy raft will do the trick.”
It’d be nice if there were a fully functional boat conveniently waiting for us somewhere, but that’s probably not gonna happen.
We had once searched a harbor from end to end, and all of the vessels had either been too big for us to handle or in shambles, or both.
“Aren’t swimmers going to be a threat?”
Not like we’ve ever encountered one before, but doesn’t mean we won’t.
“That they will, if they do exist.”
Unlike fictional zombies, whose attributes adapted to a screenwriter’s every whim, our zombies should’ve been fairly consistent. In theory, anyway. If there was a way for us to verify that they were, in fact, incapable of swimming, a deserted island would likely shoot up to the very top of our priority list.
“Hold up. If zombies can’t swim, doesn’t that mean there’s a good chance that remote islands and the like weren’t hit?”
“Now that you mention it...” Tetsuko nodded thoughtfully.
“The outbreak occurred at roughly the same time all around the globe,” Otoha said. “America, Africa, China, Europe, Australia... Everyone, including our humble island nation of Japan, got hit. From multiple spots, too. Why? That I don’t know, but what I do know is that any remote islands were likely impacted as well.”
We all exchanged glances.
Actually, yeah. Otherwise, the fact that the whole world was overrun in a matter of days wouldn’t make sense. But that leaves us with another question.
“If the zombie outbreak was, in fact, caused by bacteria or a virus or whatever, it couldn’t possibly have sprung up everywhere in the exact same timeframe, right?”
That’s not how infectious diseases work; they don’t just crop up out of nowhere. Maybe it had a carrier capable of worldwide travel? But then again, man-made or not, am I seriously supposed to believe that there’s this scary new disease that’s so infectious it just so happens to have brought humanity to its knees? Wouldn’t we have already caught it by now if that were the case? Not that I’ve really given it much thought.
What if it’s not a disease? What if it’s a bioweapon that got loose? Or maybe someone let it out?
Silence settled over the group for a little while.
“In any case, I’ll take the deserted island idea into consideration,” Otoha concluded, folding her arms over her chest.