Equations danced around the whiteboard, taunting Shula with their inability to come together to explain the creation of the plasma shield. She had been staring at the board for days and nights on end and she was not closer to an answer. It was there, somewhere. She knew it. The other people placed on the impossible task of reverse engineering Eden’s technology were equally stumped.

Shula licked her dry lips and ran a hand through her mohawk hair. She knew what her mother would say. Take a break, Shu, the best mind is a rested mind. Sighing, she got up from her seat and exited the meeting room. She stuck her hands in her jeans, yawning as she did. She would die for a good cup of coffee but they were running low on that. As she walked down the corridor, she heard the announcement over the speakers about the fall of Holland Zone.

She grimaced. If they could just discover the secrets of plasma shields, they wouldn’t have to lose another zone. But the technology was too elusive. She grudgingly admired those Eden bastards who designed it. Somehow, they had cracked open the Easter egg.

Stopping at the snacks table, she picked up a granola bar and a packet of hot Milo. Her hand hovered over the chocolate chip cookie. She shouldn’t over-indulge, her mind told her. They needed to conserve supplies. Yet her rumbling stomach told a different story.

“For Pete’s sake, take the chocolate,” an amused voice came from behind her.

Scoffing, she left the chocolate cookie on the table. She turned around to face her long-legged, smirking colleague, Chun. “Is this some reverse psychology plot to make me not take it so you can have it?”

“Of course not.” Chun waved a finger at her hollow cheeks and skinny frame. “I’m helping you be healthier. You need more food fuel in your tank and that’s a fact.”

“I’m in perfect health, not to worry.”

“I’m not sure you’ll say that when you’re faced with zombies.” Chun laughed as he approached the snack table and swiped the chocolate chip cookie. “You won’t be as lucky as last time.”

Shula bristled. “Last time, if it weren’t for me, there wouldn’t even be a Zone 0.”

“Sure.” Chun winked at her as he removed the wrapper and bit down on the cookie. “You keep telling that to yourself, girl.”

Glowering, Shula wished she could throw a dagger at Chun’s receding back. If she hadn’t been working on site on the day of the zombie apocalypse and figured out how to recalibrate the angles of the field generator, the plasma shield would never have even touched the surface ground level. It would have remained an air shield and Chun’s fucking bony ass would have been mauled by zombies. If anything, he owed her his fucking life. And a chocolate chip cookie.

She stomped down the sweltering corridor, heading for the washroom where she could splash some cold water onto her smoking head. The people she passed by hurriedly scurried away, terrified of meeting her evil eye. She had developed somewhat of a reputation as being an intimidating and snappish engineer but there was nothing the manager of the plant could do about it since she was the most creative risk-taking problem solver in Zone 0.

Before she could hang a left at the women’s washroom, a tremor ran through the building’s structure. She clung to the wall as a muffled rumble shook the air. The tremor subsided. Her heart pounded in her chest as she looked around her. Was that an earthquake? But it couldn’t be. That amount of shaking was unheard of in tropical, equator-based Singapore. 

A red light above the wall at the end of the corridor flashed. She froze. The red light meant the plasma shield had gone down. But the technicians in the control center should be on top of that in an instant, ensuring backup field generators would kick in. She counted the number of flashes. It had been more than ten seconds.

A chill ran down her spine. She broke into a trot, and then a jog. Her mind raced with questions, and potential scenarios that could have occurred. None of them bode well. She burst into the control center which was a scene of pure chaos. Screens lined the large wall in front. Three rows of computers sat facing the wall with technicians monitoring the status of the plasma shield twenty-four hours a day… normally. 

Instead, people were running from one screen to the next. Crowds gathered at one of two points. The din in the room was worse than the roar of a jet plane. People were screaming orders, others were purely shrieking out of fright.

She rushed to the front where the screens displayed the condition of the whole power network and the field generators. Pushing past the crowd gathered around, she reached the technician manning the computer. A quick glance at the blinking icons on the screen showed nothing amiss. The power drawn into the field generators seemed normal across the zone. Yet the red alert on the top of the screen showed the shield was down.

“Maybe it’s an error,” she mumbled.

The technician shook his head. “We’ve got reports on the ground confirming the shield is down. One of the field generators exploded.”

“Exploded?”

“We think it was sabotage.”

She swore under her breath and dragged a hand down her cheeks. “Have we directed backup power to the field generators?”

“We’ve tried.” The technician’s voice was frayed, his eyes bulging like he had just seen a ghost. “It’s not working.”

“What do you mean not working?”

“The shield is still down.”

“That can’t be right.” Frowning, she motioned to him to get out of the chair. “Let me try.”

“Be my guest.”

He vacated the seat like he was sitting on a pile of hot coal, scrambling to escape his responsibility. She swung her ass into the chair and took control of the mouse. She clicked through the interface, turning on backup power, and channeling it to the field generators. Nothing happened. The shield didn’t come alive.

She checked the metal gates. Both were wide open. It couldn’t be. How was the status updating while everything else seemed perfectly normal? Panic rose in her chest as she tried everything she knew in the manual.

“It’s no use!” One of the managers gripped her shoulder. “We can’t control anything from here.”

She spun around. “Have we activated the emergency broadcast?”

“Yes- no!” The harried manager’s eyes darted around the crowd. “We tried but we don’t even know if it worked. Anyway, the guards should be setting up a perimeter. I hope.”

Shula gulped. There weren’t nearly enough guards to set up a physical blockade if the zombies flooded in. She sucked in a breath. The Holland Base. Those zombies would be attracted to their plasma shield. The residents. The kids. She snapped, “What are we doing here then?”

The manager pointed at the group in the distance. “They’re trying to reboot the whole system. Get whatever bug is in the system cleansed.”

“And is it working?”

“Doesn’t seem like it.”

Shula looked at the thinning crowd. “We need to get out. Now.”

“Go! I’m staying to try out one more thing.”

She hesitated before leaping out of the seat and running out of the control center. Her heart raced. She had to expect the worst. Screams drifted down the corridor as she ran to her office. People were panicking. If this was what it was like inside the power and shield management building, she could only imagine what was happening outside.

The door closed behind her as she circled her desk. She grabbed her bag and threw as many essential items into it as possible. An emergency granular bar, an unopened bottle of mineral water. Extra clothes, the shield manual - just in case, spare batteries, her PalmComm. She looped the bag over her shoulder. 

Jiggling the drawer, she opened it. Many of her test gadgets were strewn inside. She grabbed two sound bombs and tucked them into the side pocket of her bag. They had proven useful before but she wished she had created more of them. The smoke bomb was still a work in progress but she took it anyway.

She slammed the drawer close. She looked up.

A gasp tore from her throat. The manager was tottering on his feet at her door, his arm wrenched backward, his jaw open in a bloodied yawn. She gripped her bag and moved very slowly around her desk. Her fingers slipped across the table and up the stationery holder where she kept a spare pen knife. For emergencies. 

As her hand wrapped around the knife and slid it open, the manager lunged at her with a loud growl. She ducked to the side, letting the manager’s momentum send him crashing into the table. With a swift blow, she stabbed the knife into the back of his head. His body jerked in spasms and before he could collapse to the ground, she had pulled her knife out and ran out of her office.

In the corridor, she ran headfirst into a shrieking engineer. The two collapsed to the floor. She scrambled to her feet. The other engineer wasn’t as lucky. A zombie grabbed her legs, pulling her closer to the snapping mouth. 

“Help me!” the engineer pleaded with her.

She drew in a shuddering breath and ran. There was no helping people. She had already seen the wound on the engineer’s arm. As she bounded down the corridor, heading for the stairwell, she saw a wounded Chun on the ground, gasping his last breath. 

Gritting her teeth, she slammed into the door and took the stairs two at a time. Behind her, she could hear Chun’s body cracking back to life. Luckily, the path ahead was clear. She barrelled out the door at ground level and emerged into the streets.

The chaos outside made her freeze like a deer in headlights. Stunned, she watched as zombies feasted on bodies and people tore down the streets. A growl brought her to her senses. Her head snapped to the right. A group of zombies were heading her way. She broke into a run, her breath coming out in a wheeze. Behind her, Chun and the other zombified residents were pouring out. To her left, a larger flood of undead residents were on their way. She was trapped.

As her mind raced, the wail of an ambulance pierced the air. Her head swiveled to the left where the makeshift car zoomed down the road, swaying from left to right as zombies hung from its top and side. The ambulance crashed into a lamppost with a resounding bang, attracting all the zombies around her.

Relief surged through Shula. Her path was clear. But still, she didn’t move, her gaze locked onto the ambulance. People were spilling out from the back of the vehicle and right into the outstretched arms of the zombies. She watched with horror as a mother and her young daughter clung to the side of the ambulance, trying to crawl through the gaps. 

Gulping, she fought against her desire to run away. As she wallowed in indecision, the wails of a young child shook her into action. She swore under her breath, her hand dropping to the side pocket of her bag and fishing out the sound bomb. She lobbed it a distance away from the group of zombies surrounding the mother and daughter, watching as it hit the ground and drew the attention of the undead corpses with a loud siren.

A loud growl tore her gaze away. She turned to the right just as a straggler lunged at her. Her instincts kicked in. Ducking to the left, she raised her knife hand and brought it down on the zombie. Her stab missed his head, landing on the shoulder instead.

Before she could run away, the zombie grabbed her arm and yanked it up to his gaping mouth. Fear gripped her. In a burst of adrenaline, she pulled her knife out and stabbed it right in the eye. The zombie froze before falling to the ground.

Shula panted, her breath coming out short and rattled. She stared at the corpse, her fingers trembling as it gripped the pen knife. She should have eaten that chocolate cookie.