The Drift by C.J. Tudor

Published by Ballantine Books on January 31, 2023

Following too many years of zombie novels, pandemic novels seem to be the new thing. After experiencing the reality of a pandemic, I suppose readers want to be comforted by reading about how it could be so much worse. Pandemics that kill almost everyone would meet that desire, but what about a pandemic that produces zombies? The Drift has a little something for every fan of trash fiction.

A world-ending virus is killing most people it affects, although a small percentage survive as Whistlers. Whistlers aren’t exactly zombies, but they are not entirely unlike zombies. The ones infected with the Choler variant are mindlessly violent like zombies, but they don’t shamble or eat brains. At least, they don’t appear to do so. The Whistlers are never developed in enough detail to make their nature clear, although it’s clear that living as a Whistler would not be a lifestyle of choice.

Blood plasma from infected people can be used to manufacture a vaccine that confers short-term immunity, so naturally infected people are kept alive and imprisoned so their blood plasma can be harvested for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful. One place where harvesting occurs is called the Retreat. It’s on a mountaintop. If there were ever good intentions underlying the Retreat, they have given way to producing the vaccine for a criminal organization that supplies it to wealthy people. The criminals presumably immunize themselves so they don’t get sick and die like everyone else, but the benefit they receive from wealthy people in a world that is filling up with dead people and Whistlers is one of many gaps in logic that the novel doesn’t seriously address.

Part of the novel follows characters at the Retreat who are dealing with the theft of plasma and the disappearance of workers. Whistlers are kept locked in the basement as involuntary plasma donors. But if the power goes out for longer than eight seconds, the cells automatically unlock. It took a special kind of sub-genius to devise that system. It will be no surprise to learn that the power fails.

Two other plot threads involve the dumbest young people you would ever hope not to meet. A dozen students at Invicta Academy are being evacuated on a bus that slides off the road and crashes during a blizzard. One of the bus passengers is pregnant and about to deliver because of course she is.

The Academy was just a private school for rich kids until the Department chose it as the location for a research center headed by a leading virologist. (The Department’s full name results in the acronym DRIFT because the world thrives on stupid acronyms.) Did the Department choose to turn a private school into a research center because no research centers were already set up and ready to go? Really? What happened to the CDC in Atlanta?

In any event, one of the kids on the bus is the daughter of the ruthless virologist who runs the Department. “Ruthless” because he wants to kill everyone who becomes infected, meaning pretty much everyone, including his daughter (or so she fears).

Anyway, after the bus crashes the emergency exit won’t open, probably because it was sabotaged by the bus driver who somehow disappeared unless he’s now pretending to be one of the bus passengers. Seriously, none of the passengers looked at the driver before the bus crashed? I guess private school students can’t be bothered to look at the bus driver.

A student hits upon the brilliant idea of pulling the toilet out of the bus and escaping through the hole they imagine they might find. Now, if you can remove the toilet, why not use it to break a window on side of the bus that isn’t buried in snow and get out that way? They complain that they don't have a hammer to break the window but the thought of using a steel toilet as a battering ram never occurs to them.

But wait, a passenger has already tunneled through the snow from a broken window in the side of the bus that is buried. The tunnel was necessary to search for a bomb in the luggage compartment (the passengers miraculously deduce that the bomb exists and know when it will explode based solely on intuition) but they decide they can’t rebuild the tunnel after it collapses because, well, that would be almost as easy as breaking another window. Besides, there are wolves outside and maybe Whistlers and it’s just so darn cold so maybe it would be better to stay inside the bus. Until the Department hit squad shows up to spoil that idea with machine guns. Good grief.

Another group of young people are stranded on a cable car that, while climbing the mountain to the Retreat, stops after the haul cable breaks. The young people don’t remember getting on the cable car. Escaping from a cable car without plummeting to the ground is more challenging than disembarking from a bus, so the cable car passengers busy themselves with killing each other. That task becomes easier when one of them finds a hidden weapon. There’s a whole story to how the weapon came be hidden but it makes just as much sense as the rest of the novel, meaning it doesn’t make much sense at all.

Some of the people in each group might be infected so they might as well sit back and die in peace. Instead, the passengers in both conveyances spend an inordinate amount of time discussing their predicaments and blaming each other while devising worthless plans. Frankly, I was rooting for hit teams to do away with all these whiny idiots. They make the same snarky comments (“Excuse me, I forgot to pack my screwdriver”) over and over while doing little in the way of cooperative problem-solving.

The needlessly convoluted plot eventually connects the kids on the bus to the kids on the cable car, relying on false identities and a late information dump to produces surprises that are too silly to shock. A mawkish moment near the story’s end produced no tears but it did make my eyes roll. The best thing I can say about The Drift is that many characters die before the novel ends. Good riddance to them.

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