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Foreword: The City That Never Sleeps now has a population that never sleeps, so who has the greater advantage against them and each other – the chess player or the Resident Evil fan? I hope you enjoy it, and the Water series is still alive.

C’mon, Judy, Loeb said under his breath, watching the girl on the screen waste the undead with her automatic rifle. She was wearing a tight black jumpsuit and a beret as she negotiated a series of alleys and streets. C’mon, honey. Shoot the ones behind you. … That’s right. … Get that one over there. … Yeah! … They are no match for you tonight.”  He pecked at the control keys. Let’s see how you do by the burning car. … Mmmmmh … Are you going to be in my bed tonight, honey? … Black is definitely your color. … He hit a few more keys. Jump here. … That’s it. ... Now down this path. … Are you going to be in my bed tonight? … I’m waiting. … Are you coming home to me tonight, baby? … Let’s take a look over here. A gate flew open on the screen and a dozen zombies spilled out, grabbing the girl and -- eventually -- killing her. I guess not, Loeb laughed. Game over. Too bad. You cheated. YOU DIED.

Before the coming of the Plague, there were a number of jobs that could be described as months of tedious boredom punctuated with minutes of sheer terror. The media first applied that in the ‘70’s to nuclear power plant workers, but commercial airline pilots also thought that way about their own jobs, as did security guards, submarine crews, and anyone having anything to do with Mike Tyson, George W. Bush, or North Korea.

The balance shifted in the opposite direction, however, once the first post-mortem cases started appearing on the streets and even the most skeptical citizens found themselves facing the horrible reality in their own back yards. Terror became the normal state of affairs no matter what you did for a living -- and for most people just staying alive became their living -- but if there still existed an imbalanced, tedious/terrifying job, it was that of the Forward Medical Observers.

The FMO’s were the human front lines of the geographical front lines of the battlefield as the Plague spread west. They would watch and wait and wait and watch for the first cases of the disease to appear in otherwise healthy populations, and then begin a process that would result in another massive triage, another evacuation, another retreat, and a redrawn front line miles away. Boredom was the real enemy for the FMO’s because all the other aspects of the job were so intense – especially the consequences of failure. Is that guy a zombie, or is he just a drunk? Is that woman uncouth, unsanitary, or undead? Please, God, those kids are just pretending to be zombies, okay? Right? Okay, God?

The elite FMO’s were assigned to watch nearby infected and already evacuated urban areas on monitors at the front, recording all sorts of data on what they observed – how many undead were walking around, how they were walking, was it the same as last week or different? -- things like that. Remote controlled, swiveling and zooming mounted cameras operated all over the infected zones, often several sharing a mount, and each watcher had his or her own territory or “beat”. The FMO Operations Center for Manhattan was in New Jersey, stationed on the western edge of what was euphemistically called “The Meadowlands.” It was really just a big swamp.

The cream of the elite were the Runners – they were the people who set up the cameras and kept them operating, which meant they spent a lot of time in the infected areas, surviving the things and attending to the video cameras when necessary. It was no day at the beach. They had to be physically fit and resistant to the disease. The radiation in the atmosphere sporadically screwed up telecommunications, so the cameras were hard-wired into phone lines, and although this wasn’t too difficult, the Runners had to be technically proficient enough to handle unforeseen problems that might occur on-site. They also needed nerves of steel -- it was not at all unusual to stand there waiting for the Ops Center to test and confirm the replacement camera with 50 of the things slowly coming in for the kill. Miscalculate on the timing or your escape route and you were either dead meat or meat for the dead, and usually both.

Each tactical retreat from infected areas meant the Runners had to negotiate increasing amounts of zombie-infested territory to get to the older cameras, and although the zombies left the cameras alone, the elements took their toll along with accidents, fires and surges. The phone cables the cameras plugged into absorbed the bizarre radiation in the air, which sometimes caused a spontaneous power surge, and then any units hooked up to the affected line would usually have to be replaced. Repairs themselves were rarely done. It was a lot easier and quicker to simply replace them – since they plugged into standard phone jacks -- but the Runners retrieved the damaged units anyway so the techs could experiment with protecting them from future surges. More was at stake than the units – conceivably, a strong enough surge could affect the equipment all the way back to the Operations Center itself and maybe even electrocute the watchers the same way lightning might strike them if they chanced using a telephone during a storm. 

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