Free Survival Instinct: A Zombie Novel by Kristal Stittle

happened to the music?”  Jack turned his attention back to the window, his brows crinkling slightly.
    Jessica stopped laughing and looked out as well.  “I don’t know.”
    “Why is everyone leaving?”  Jack pointed towards the gates.  “This thing is supposed to go on for a few more hours.”
    “Maybe some kind of emergency.  A bomb threat maybe?  Look how they’re all running.  It must be some kind of threat.”  Jessica shrugged but was concerned.  They were in one of the closest buildings to the park and an explosion could easily reach them.
    “Maybe.”
    “Maybe we should find a radio or a TV.  They’ll probably have something on it.”  Jessica got up.
    “Yeah.”  Jack followed suit.  “I hope it’s not another 9/11 threat.”
    “That’s too awful to think about.”  Jessica shuddered.  Although they were in Canada, everyone had watched that incident closely and mourned those who had died.
    The two of them looked around the cubicles for a radio.  Jessica noticed more family photos, more marks of achievement, and gag items; all attempts at lightening the mood of the dreary place.  Jack found a radio first and summoned Jessica over.  He turned it on and tuned it to an all-news station.  All they got was static.
    “Are you sure you have it on the right station?”  Jessica tried to look at the dial, but Jack kept fiddling with it.
    “Of course I’m sure,” Jack’s brow crinkled more.  “Andrew listens to it all the time.”  He kept turning the dial slowly through the AM channels, but nothing came in on anything.
    “Try FM.”  Jessica had an idea that maybe the AM receiver was just broken.
    Jack flipped a switch on the side of the pink plastic box.  He started slowly going through all the stations again, but still they got nothing.  “Come on, there has to be something.”
    “Could be the radio’s broken.”  Jessica started looking for another one.  “Oh hey, someone here left their computer on.”
    She sat down in front of it, while Jack walked over.  She shifted the mouse to get it off the screen saver, and it was quickly replaced with the image of two smiling kids, likely the desk’s owners.  It only took a moment for her to find the internet icon and double click it.  A page opened up telling them they couldn’t connect, that something was wrong with their internet.
    “Well there goes that,” Jessica sighed ,  “should we look for another radio?”
    Jack shook his head.  “I have a bad feeling.  Whatever is happening, it’s probably safer to evacuate.  I’d rather not be in a tall, glass-sided building that holds the offices of a prominent company, how about you?”
    “Yeah, you’re probably right.”  Jessica pushed back from the computer.  “Still, I want to check my laptop.  It has wireless.”
    They collected her bag from the seat next to the window and set the laptop on a desk.  It took a few minutes to boot up, but it was a fairly new system so there wasn’t much junk to slow it down.  She tried the internet right away but got the same error message.  She even tried using three different types of browsers, but none of them could connect.  Jack then asked her to look for a signal, but her computer couldn’t find one.  With a sigh, Jessica powered down and packed up the bag.
    They walked over to the elevators where Jessica pushed the call button.  She noticed Jack had abandoned the lawn chair, but when she pointed this out, Jack said just to leave it.  It was cheap and about to fall apart anyway.
    “Maybe we should take the stairs,” Jack thought aloud.
    “You’re pretty paranoid about this, aren’t you?” Jessica joked.  When her computer hadn’t worked, his facial lines had deepened into a worried frown that Jessica was not used to seeing.  It appeared only on rare occasions when something was going disastrously wrong, like someone was an hour late for a big meeting, or a speech was lost minutes before it had to be