The slight clank and rattle of the elevator sounded loud in my ears but no zombies appeared to investigate. Ideally, I’d be able to sneak around until I found the survivor. Failing that, if I could find the horde and see where they were going, that might lead me to them.

Or maybe I would wander around until the zombies found me. That could happen, too.

The docks were unfamiliar to me. Large warehouse units loomed in the shadows with long and broad corridors between them. There didn’t appear to be anywhere to hide from zombies outside. Which meant that there was a higher likelihood that the survivor was in one of the warehouses.

I decided to check the ones closest to the cafeteria first to be sure. They weren’t exactly close. Everything down here seemed to be scaled for giants. Even in the combat suit I felt small.

The howls sounded far away as I pulsed the jets to cross the open space to the first warehouse. That was good and bad. Good because it meant the survivor hadn’t been caught yet. Bad, because it meant that the zombies were still chasing them. They wouldn’t be easily shaken from their hunt.

There were zombies floating silently near the warehouse, curled limply like the other hibernating ones I’d seen. Few lights were working in the docks so I’d missed them in the shadows. How were they sleeping through the howls though? Even with the urgency driving me, I had to know. I grabbed one by the head, keeping its jaw shut. It did not react at all.

This was extremely abnormal. Zombies howled. They attacked, they clawed and bit and consumed. There were no circumstances I was aware of where zombies did not react to stimuli. Something this abnormal demanded investigation, but I would have to be quick.

I looked through the system menus rapidly, searching for any sort of sensing equipment that could help me. It turned out that the combat suit had a sophisticated suite of sensors that I hadn’t been utilizing. It was only when I started searching for specific commands that I found them. My lack of training was coming back to bite me again.

Combat sensors were a strange combination of thermal, low light, visual, and field sensing. Swirling colors and lines and a vague sense of pressure assaulted me before I switched out of it. Thermal and low light vision was at least somewhat comprehensible. The zombie in my hand was dark but clearly visible. It was also completely cold and dead. There didn’t appear to be any wounds on it.

Had it starved to death? The docks didn’t appear to have much in the way of food. The cafeteria I’d just left hadn’t even had any nests in it. Without access to food and water it was possible. I’d never seen evidence of it before. But in my observations of Earth, the hypothesis was inescapable. Zombies didn’t linger long where food and water were scarce.

If that was the case, how had the massive horde here survived for so long? There had to have been at least some food somewhere. And water of course, but I wasn’t sure how much a zombie needed of either to remain alive. I left the corpse where it floated and took off. The howls were getting louder.

The warehouses were tall but they did not reach all the way to the ceiling in the docks. The entire area revealed itself in greens and blues as I viewed it from above. In the distance I could spot yellow and red sparks. The sparks became a wave as it passed to my left, through the gaps between warehouses.

I was not aware of whether or not zombies could see in the dark. But it was time to find out.

Sneaking around the ceiling in the combat suit turned out to be more interesting than expected. With the vision enhancement provided, I could see so much more than the camera feed in Chief’s office. The ceiling was a maze of pipes, wiring conduit, structural beams, gravity harnesses, and even old fashioned block and tackle. There were also mounds of trash that had gotten wedged into the crevices and stuck there. And zombies.

Lots more zombies than I had expected. Most were dead. At least I assumed they were. They appeared to be matching the temperature of their surroundings. There were some that were slightly warmer. Were they still alive somehow, just deeply mired in torpor to the point they could not respond to the prey alert signal?

I had to slow down and avoid several things that could have betrayed my presence. Possibly alive zombies and some metal sheeting that would likely ring like a gong if I struck it were the hazards in this route. Below I could see the brightly lit horde.

It appeared that there were more zombies that were not attracted to the horde than I expected. There were whole other groups of them in the distance that I could see. Some were clustered around one of the traders, others scattered and wandering, another entire horde in the far distance near the biggest freighter at one end of the docks.

Back in the Chief’s office I had thought there were maybe up to ten thousand zombies. That estimate would need to be revised upward. Drastically.

The brightly lit horde was spread out in a long line. I could not make out just what or who they were chasing from my vantage point. I’d have to get closer for that.

I took the chance to duck down into the gap between warehouses where it was relatively clear. There had to be a way to get the zombies off the trail somehow, but what? Even with all the ammunition I had loaded I couldn’t destroy this one horde. Let alone any others that got attracted once the explosions and gunfire started.

With any luck I could decoy away at least some of the horde. But that would only get me into combat, not prevent the ones that were closer to the survivor from eventually catching them. Somehow I had to get to them first and then work on losing the zombies.

Dusty crates and heavy containers littered my path. It was the years of constant microgravity acrobatics that I’d trained and practiced in that kept me from running into something and announcing my presence. The suit jets that accelerated me were quiet, but not silent. I doubted the zombies could hear me over their own frenzied cries, though.

I blasted through intersections without pause, ducking a frozen cargo hauler arm at the last moment and nearly skipping off the deck. Up ahead the horde still hadn’t given up the chase. Whoever was up there seemed to have changed direction. The horde was now heading away from me, further down the docks.

Further towards the other horde I knew was already waiting at the far end.

By the time I reached the horde I had already gone back to the darkness above the warehouses. I dodged through the trash and the corpses like it was a minefield. Which it was. The minute I crashed into something the zombies would alert to my position. I could not let that happen.

Occasionally zombies would bounce off the ceiling in their mad pursuit. That meant I had to travel over the warehouses directly rather than the clearer spots over the paths between. The sound of the horde rattled my armor and shook me.

The last time I’d heard that sound I had nearly died. If the airlock had taken just a moment longer to open the back when I’d been this close to a horde before, they would have peeled me like an apple.

The horde was massive. It stretched the length of three warehouses before I finally sighted the frontrunners. Still no sign of a survivor yet. Had they escaped already? Where the zombies just chasing ghosts?

In frustration I cycled through the vision modes I had available, barely missing a floating crate that seemed to appear out of nowhere. Normal vision with slight corrections for low light gave me the answer.

The first thing I noticed was the long silver hair. Not white, not gray, but metallic silver. How low light vision missed that I’d no idea. Then there were the little triangular cat ears that stuck up through the air. And the fluffy looking silver tail. They’d evidently had significant body mods. I could vaguely recall catgirl modifications being a fad once, and this might be the result of that.

But the larger point was that she was alive. And human. Cat ears notwithstanding.

There was also the problem of how close the zombies were getting. The catgirl person seemed to have boundless energy, but the zombies were almost literally tireless. I’d never seen them stop as long as they had prey in their sights. They weren’t quite nipping at her tail, but some were close enough that they tried to lunge forward and tackle her.

This failed as the zombies were just as inept in microgravity as they’d always been. I saw two crash into each other as they leapt forward at the same time. One used the other as a springboard and tried again but still failed to catch the fleeing survivor as she vaulted over a stack of crates. The first one slammed into the stack, toppling it as the others climbed over the resulting pile.

It was time to stop hiding. I slammed the jets to full power, angling in to the horde and swatting a few out of my way as I littered grenades to explode behind me. They didn’t make the large, wet holes that they had in the food storage corridor, not being packed together as tightly. But there were respectable amounts of gore and blood scattered about.

The survivor cast a glance back my way, but didn’t slow. That was smart. The zombies didn’t care about casualties. At worst case, they would eat their own dead if no other sources of food were available. I couldn’t fire forward because I was afraid of hitting her by accident with my poor aim. Definitely no grenades.

Even using the suit jets I only closed the distance slowly. Now aware of my presence, the horde took full advantage of my proximity by attempting to dogpile me. Some zombies got stuck on the spikes and blades the combat suit had basically everywhere. I had to shake them off. I swung my fists at the ones that came close, but they closed from every direction. Even above and behind me.

I took to spinning and corkscrewing my flight path. Fewer infected were able to get purchase on me that way, and no more black lines crossed my vision like the last time I was in melee with zombies. The spinning and dodging was starting to make me dizzy as I bounced off the deck, then a warehouse before righting myself and pushing on.

Ironically, that served to open a pocket long enough to see the survivor duck into the first open warehouse I’d seen since entering the docks. Something looked vaguely familiar about it. But I didn’t remember anything more before I was crashing into it, then inside, then forcing the huge warehouse door shut and quickly wedging a cargo crane against it to keep it shut.

The catgirl survivor was jumping between the racks and flinging boxes and crates at the zombies to keep them away when I realized just where we were. The warehouse had looked familiar because I’d seen in on the monitor at the Chief’s station. It had showed up when I was looking for other stasis pods on Walker, ones that weren’t in the Hospital pod room.

Below the catgirl vs zombies battle were two stasis pods. One of them was open.