The Next Few Days
I run the 911 Call Center for the City of San Antonio. I tell people this, and sometimes it confuses them. “So, you’re like a dispatcher?”
“No,” I tell them. “I run the place. That means I’m in charge of all 270 civilian and sworn dispatchers, call takers and radio technicians - all of them report to me. I decide how those resources are deployed, and when the system gets overloaded, I’m the one in charge of making the tough decisions. Though I hold the rank of sergeant, most of the time I tell lieutenants and even captains what to do. I report directly to the Assistant Chief, second only to the Chief himself, and when the shit hits the fan, I usually talk directly to the Chief. Some cops occasionally have to make decisions above their pay grade. But me, I live above my pay grade.
And when I came into work I found things pretty much as bad as they could get. We were unable to get in touch with about sixty percent of our personnel. Most had probably already left town or were simply afraid to come into work because they would be away from their families. We were down to a skeleton crew, and most of those were already 18 hours into shifts that should have only lasted 8 hours.
Then the reports started coming in.
The incident at the airport had gotten completely out of hand. Hundreds if not thousands were reported to be infected.
San Antonio has almost a hundred hospitals of one size or another, and already a few of them were claiming cases of zombie infection. Soon one hospital after another closed its doors, refusing any new patients.
Our officers out in the field were reporting cases of zombie infection, too. In the first four hours I was at the center I heard eighteen officer-involved shootings come over the radio.
But for all that, that first night was not so bad. It wasn’t anything like I portrayed in my book DEAD CITY. Cell phones kept working. The radios kept working. Traffic flowed heavy, but in an orderly fashion. Slowly, but steadily, the city started to empty as people headed for the rural areas outside of town.
And, perhaps most importantly, order was maintained. Our officers made their calls, handled the long hours and the uncertainty and their own fear in the face of mounting complications. The Fire Department too did their part. I was up until three that morning, monitoring incoming calls and feeding status updates to the Command Staff, and when I finally slipped off to my office to sleep on my couch, I thought we pretty much had things in hand.
But I was wrong.
One of the civilian supervisors woke me just before daylight. Things, she said, had gotten much worse.
I got a bottle of water from the mini fridge beneath my desk and listened as she ran it down for me:
1. San Antonio is a military town, with several large military bases, and we were being told that they were taking over. San Antonio, as of 0630 hours, was under martial law;
2. During the night, at least four officers had been killed by zombies. 57 more had been dispatched to incidents but were now unaccounted for;
3. A roll call of all sworn personnel in the Department had been taken so that accurate numbers could be given to the military authorities. Our total strength was 2,290 officers of all ranks, but our roll call was only able to account for 643 of those officers. The others were either dead or AWOL;
4. Stage III of the Department’s Emergency Action Protocol had been declared, which basically meant that the situation had exceeded the ability of the combined resources of the San Antonio Police Department and the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office to respond to the situation;
5. I had been a police officer for nearly twenty years at that point, and I had never heard of us declaring a Stage III situation. We were entering into unknown territory.
But declaring a Stage III situation gave me the authority to essentially lock the doors to the Communications Center. At this point, no one was getting in...or out. The personnel still inside the center were stuck here and were basically chained to their jobs, like it or not.
And suddenly the gun on my hip took on an ominous new implication.
I could see my dispatchers looking at it out of the corner of their eye, wondering if I would really use it on them or not. I thought of Tina out at my parent’s place, and of my own two little girls, who I missed desperately, and I prayed that none of those dispatchers would call my bluff and dare me to shoot them for abandoning their post.
Thankfully, none did.