It starts the way everything starts on a Saturday night in New Raccoon City — a welfare check. Caller on Arklay Avenue reports a male subject stumbling in the roadway, covered in what appears to be blood, non-responsive to verbal commands. She describes him as "walking, but wrong." You enter it as a welfare check, possible injury from unknown cause, tone a unit, and move on. You've done this four thousand times.
Then a second call comes in. Different caller, adjacent street. Same description. Then a third from the Gas & Go on Birkin Street — "There's a lady in the parking lot trying to bite people." The call-taker asks if the subject appears to be under the influence. The caller says, "She doesn't appear to be under the influence of being alive."
Your first responding deputy keys up and requests backup. His voice is steady but clipped: "I've got approximately fifteen subjects in the roadway, all exhibiting the same behavior. They are not responding to verbal commands and one of them just bit a bystander. Requesting additional units and AMR." You don't have a nature code for this. You try Officer Needs Emergency Assistance, but that doesn't feel quite right either. It's more like Officer Needs Assistance Against The Undead, a category that doesn't exist yet.
Within twenty minutes, your call volume triples. Half are panicked. The other half fall into one of two categories: people who have been waiting for this exact scenario their entire lives (one man provides his GPS coordinates, a headcount, movement patterns, and wants to know if he's authorized to "take defensive action with a crossbow"), and people who think this is a prank and are calling to complain that the prank is disrupting their Saturday night plans.
Mutual aid gets interesting. The sheriff's watch commander asks what nature code you're using. You say "it's kind of a situation." He asks you to be more specific. You try. He asks if you're serious. You assure him you are as serious as fifteen people who are eating a mailman on Arklay Avenue can make a person. He says he'll call you back.
The health department after-hours line goes to voicemail. The voicemail is full.
CAD keeps auto-correcting your entries. You type "SUBJECTS EXHIBITING HOSTILE UNDEAD BEHAVIOR" and it changes to "SUBJECTS EXHIBITING HOSTILE UNDER BEHAVIOR." You give up and create a custom nature code: "ZOMBIE." Your supervisor asks if you're serious. You say "the system won't let me type undead and I'm not calling this a disturbance." She stares at you for three seconds, looks at the CAD screen, looks at the phone board, and says "works for me."
This is a resource allocation problem before it's a classification problem. Three calls with the same profile in close proximity suggests either a shared cause (hazmat exposure, contaminated substance, waterborne pathogen) or a mass casualty event in its early phase. You don't need to name it. You need to get ahead of it.
Your responding units need actionable information: multiple subjects, hostile behavior, do not approach alone, stage until backup arrives. You're also now in a position where the nature of the event affects who you call — this isn't just law enforcement, it's potentially EMS, hazmat, public health, and OES. Early notification buys time even when the picture is still forming.
The nature code is the least important thing in this scenario. Dispatchers get stuck trying to find the "right" code when what they really need is to communicate the situation clearly on the radio and let the code catch up later. If your CAD system doesn't have a code for it, make a note, use the closest approximation, and keep moving.
Every comm center has met this caller. Maybe not with a crossbow. Maybe it's a scanner enthusiast who shows up at every fire, or a neighborhood watch captain who follows suspects. The information is genuinely useful. The person providing it is one decision away from becoming your next problem.
The balance is: keep them talking, keep them reporting, keep them stationary. You're not going to talk someone out of a lifetime of preparation for this exact moment, but you can redirect the energy. "Your information is extremely helpful. What I need you to do right now is stay where you are and keep reporting what you see. You're more valuable to us as eyes than as a responder." That's the line.
If they go anyway, they go. You've documented the advisement. But the longer you keep them on the phone feeding you real-time intel, the more useful they are and the less likely they are to go full Daryl Dixon in a residential neighborhood.
This actually happens in the real world more than you'd think — not with zombies, obviously, but with any event that sounds implausible. Chemical releases, active threats, even severe weather events generate calls from people who don't believe the alert or want to argue about whether it's really happening. The lines don't care about the caller's opinion. They're still occupied.
Triage protocols should already distinguish between callers reporting new information, callers confirming known information, and callers who are consuming resources without contributing to the response. The third category is the hardest because you can't always tell until you're already on the line.
Short, scripted confirmations help: "We are aware of the incident. Please shelter in place, lock your doors, and avoid the area of [streets]. Call back only if you have new information or a life-threatening emergency." Get off the line. Free the channel. The complaint calls can wait.
Credibility is infrastructure. When a watch commander says "I'll call you back," what they're really saying is "I don't have enough information to commit resources to what sounds impossible." That's not unreasonable. But it is a bottleneck that can get people killed during a genuine crisis.
Escalation paths exist for a reason. If the watch commander won't move, you go up. The duty officer, the on-call chief, the OES coordinator — someone in the chain has the authority and the disposition to act on incomplete information. Your job is to find that person and give them what you have: "I have X confirmed calls across Y square miles, one confirmed injury, units requesting backup, and I need [specific resource]. Can you authorize?"
As for the health department voicemail — that's a gap that exists right now in most jurisdictions, not just in zombie scenarios. After-hours public health response is chronically underfunded and understaffed. If the voicemail is full, you escalate to your emergency management coordinator, who may have a direct contact or an alternate notification path. If they don't, that's a planning failure worth surfacing in the AAR.
This is a fictional scenario. No actual zombies were dispatched to, for, or by any communications center. The scenario is loosely inspired by CONPLAN 8888 — a real, unclassified 2011 U.S. Strategic Command training document that uses a zombie apocalypse as a planning exercise specifically because it's fictional and therefore can't be mistaken for an actual operational plan. We are borrowing their logic. The dispatch problems in this exercise — nature code gaps, mutual aid credibility, call volume triage, civilian management, after-hours notification failures — are real. The zombies are not. Probably.
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