Get Off My L@wn - A Zombie Novel (16 page)

T
hursday (Day 36), was the start of a new phase in
our survival story. My house was now a military installation of sorts officially
called Camp Christmas Tree named after how we lit of the night with our
infrared floodlights. Ruth Ann and I had our own squad of hardened zombie
killers to protect us. This morning, we went for a walk.

Ruth Ann and I talked with the Lieutenant and
Sgt. Orderly. As we chit chatted about this and that they politely kept their
automatic weapons pointed in another direction. Fifteen yards away from us,
spread like the cardinal points on a compass were four more soldiers armed more
heavily than those beside us.

The sound of soft snow crunching underfoot and
quiet but lively conversation intermingled with an occasional moan followed by
the exhale of a suppressed assault rifle.

It was quite idyllic really.

Our companions told us of their escape from the
fallen safe zone at Chippewa Valley Regional Airport a little more than two
weeks before.

“At first we really thought we could pick a spot
of ground and hold it. Come on, bullets and bombs against fingernails and
teeth? Where’s the challenge in that?” Lieutenant Mancheski began.

“We even went out on patrols looking for them
when all we had to do was ring a dinner bell and they’d find us. Stealth wasn’t
an option for us like you have here. We had too many people at the airport to
keep hidden.”

“Puh.” I saw the soldier to our right lower his
suppressed rifle. I did not see the undead he just put down, lost in a row of evergreens
ahead of us.

“Dispatchers from the local law enforcement
branches did a great job of keeping our patrols in places with escape routes
and where we could support each other. One weakness in this was that the
dispatch centers were too far apart and their buildings too large to defend.
When we lost them, one by one, we lost our command and control. The patrols
had
to stop. Offense with our limited resources was out of the question,” he
continued.

“Orderly here was on one of the last patrols.
They were literally chased back into our perimeter.”

“We had .50 cals on Humvees. We had our weapons
and side arms but not a single suppressed weapon between us. Every time we
nailed one son of a bitch, the noise brought another ten to take its place.
Sometimes we made it back to the safe zone with a round still left in the
chamber, sometimes we didn’t. That last time, we came back empty and winded,”
the Sargent added. “It was frustrating. Every time out, more of them. Less of
us.”

  “The worst were the people in the safe zone
who got sick. At first, we pulled them away from their families to put them
down. After a while, we could not risk even that. We executed parents and
children in front of each other,” the Lieutenant’s voice cracked a little. His
eyes were fixed on the horizon.

“Puh.”

“When it was clear that we couldn’t hold our line
we had about eighteen hours that we could fly people out on small planes. It
was like the English at Dunkirk. Little planes as few as three passengers at a
time. The biggest plane, Orderly, what was it like five passengers plus the
pilot?” Orderly nodded.

“We had three Gatling guns dropped in. We could
have used more but that’s all we could get. Three couldn’t cover all of both of
runways, so the planes had to climb out or land in shorter and shorter lengths.
Then we couldn’t hold even that. We continued the evac with choppers but soon
we couldn’t hold the clear patch off 90
^th
street,” Mancheski went
on.

“We started moving people across the river but
we didn’t have enough boats. We strung ropes across the river to help people
swim across. We used what boats we had for the little kids and elderly and to
catch people downstream who couldn’t hold on. Choppers on the other side lifted
all the civilians out in the end.”

“If the other side of the river wasn’t just
farms, we’d have been overrun for sure,” Orderly said. “The road trip to Door
County was no picnic. We had to go north around the bigger cities and come down
on 43 to cross the Fox River. Going through Green Bay was awful. We kept the
lake to our left and air cover made the difference on the right. We’d be walkers
too if it weren’t for that.”

“Puh.”

A
Blackhawk landing back at the house told us it
was time to head home. Some workers had arrived to finish yesterday’s
miraculous conversion of our house into Camp Christmas Tree.

When we got back, it was work time for me too. The
first project to work on would to be hosted on my traditional Linux servers.
The ex-financial programmers in Door County worked for some of Wisconsin’s
well-known insurance companies. They were experts in the field of optimization.

Given a number of constraints plus a number of
parameters, they wrote programs that optimized for a particular goal. For example,
they might use medical data as constraints. Age, gender, smoking and alcohol
use might be the parameters to vary. Their output might be insurance premiums
that maximized the company’s profit while keeping their rates in line with
competitors.

It was not too far a stretch to apply their
knowledge to taking terrain as constraints and horde movement as parameters.
Their results would be optimized targeting plans for thinning operations.

As you know, the hordes were too big for men with
rifles to make a dent. Heavier ordinance had to be used. For bombs and missiles
to be used most effectively, the ghouls have to be packed together. Wounding
does not help. Only a completely shredded body or decapitated head is any use.

So far, thinning operations tended to take place
at the banks of rivers and lakes because they effectively slow a horde’s
progress until the creatures start squeezing over bridges or other crossings.
The problem is there aren’t enough rivers and lakes to allow the military to
hit the hordes frequently enough. Going back to the Munz, Hudea, Imad and Smith
zombie apocalypse paper:

“Only sufficiently frequent attacks, with increasing
force, will result in eradication, assuming the available resources can be
mustered in time.”

It was imperative that more terrain features be
leveraged as choke points. More choke points mean attacking more frequently
satisfying every aspect of Munz et al.

Identifying less obvious choke points required
fine grain modeling of horde movement and terrain. Because of these programmers’
work, thinning operations took place more frequently and efficiently. It was a
numbers game we had no choice but to win.

To get their analysis system running I had to script
data wrangling code and create a job input and scheduling mechanism. Their code
was up and running, producing results by early the next morning. Their input
data still included handmade estimates of horde size and position however. Processes
that include hand-made data can’t be scaled to massive levels. I would be
writing the code to analyze satellite pictures directly, both daytime and
nighttime, to provide size, speed and direction data without human input.

T
he country’s scientific eggheads may have begun
redeeming themselves today. Survivors down in the Gulf region include experts
in oil-spill remediation techniques. They knew how to grow oil-eating microbes,
even ones that work at the low temperatures found in the deep ocean. They
wondered what they could trick the bacteria into doing on undead matter.

They brought their idea to their Administrative
Zone who made it possible for their research to take place. The research, after
a few experiments, showed enough promise to make today’s radio broadcast.
Either the report was true or it was propaganda to pump a little sunshine out
to a demoralized and shrinking populace. In either case, the idea seemed
plausible.

At the end of a thinning operation, after fresh wounds
had been inflicted on the undead, an aerosol of the modified bacteria would be
released. Landing on newly exposed dead meat, the bugs were supposed to speed
up rotting even in temperatures down into the 30’s.

The environmental impact of the spray was not
known yet. That living test people didn’t die immediately on exposure was good
enough for wartime use.

Here “up north” we were already below freezing
so the new development couldn’t help us. But, assuming the report were true and
the bugs could be grown in large quantities so there would be enough to go
around, it would mean an early spring of sorts in northern latitudes.

That evening Lieutenant Mancheski’s personal
radio beeped.

“Six this is two, over.”

“Go ahead two.”

“LT there are two Zekes stumbling towards the
back of the house. Permission to engage?”

“Affirmative two. Taken them down.”

“Hooah six,” heard, understood and acknowledged.
A moment later:

“Six this is two. Zekes down sir.”

“Very well. Six out.”

O
n Friday (Day 37), I started work on the image
processing software needed to measure horde size, speed, and direction from
satellite images. This was not very hard to do slowly. The idea is this:
establish a baseline of what an area looked like before a horde arrived. The
baseline allowed the software to filter out changes due to wind blowing trees, shifting
shadows and the like. Then as the horde arrived, compare the new pictures to
the baseline. Based upon differences exceeding a certain threshold, a tiny spot
on the ground was covered by zombies or not. A slightly more subtle step was
figuring out the contour of the horde itself. Then, counting up the number of
occupied picture elements (pixels) and subtracting from the total inside the
contour gave a pretty good estimate of the horde’s number. Finally, monitoring
the progress of the contour itself gave physical size, speed and direction with
even finer data being available to pinpoint what parts of a horde were more
densely packed that others.

To make this algorithm run fast so that larger
and larger swaths of ground could be analyzed was harder. To do it, I converted
standard computing code into massively parallel programs that ran on the small
supercomputer I had. Supercomputers aren’t called super for nothing. Even my
small supercomputer ate this kind of processing for breakfast. After a full day
at it, my code could process pictures far faster than the optimization code
could figure out where to attack. I added traditional servers built from old
parts lying around to help in equalizing the system so that no cycles went to
waste.

After a few hours gaining experience with the
system’s performance, whoever was in charge of such things authorized Christmas
Tree to receive satellite data from other Administrative Zones.

Camp Christmas Tree had shifted quietly from
being tactically important to strategically important.

Spotting hordes at night proved straightforward.
Taking deeper statistics from baseline images and comparing these to the
current feeds, meant cold zombies.

Day and night now, the military had fine-grained
data on horde location, speed, direction, size and density. Thinning operations
could be conducted around the clock using just the right resources for each
unique set of conditions.

Ruth Ann and I took a good look at the Chicago B
horde and a few others around the country. At more than three million strong,
Chicago B was terrifying. We’re not religious. Just the same we prayed Chicago
B would stay away from us.

Chicago B wasn’t the largest horde around. Ruth
Ann and I saw a comprehensive picture of what was going on around the country
that probably no one else outside the top brass would see until historians got
access to the same data.

“Well, now we know how much filtering goes on in
the radio updated,” Ruth Ann said. “We aren’t being told anything about how bad
things are around the major cities.”

Information was being very limited indeed.

It was a good day’s work and my basement data
center was humming.

I
n a symbolic but meaningful gesture, the workers
here today cored out a hole in the frozen ground and planted a thirty-foot
pole. On it flew the Star Spangled Banner. Having read our story this far you
would be correct if you assumed that before all this I would not have given two
shits about flying a flag, especially on
my
lawn.

Now though I almost cried when I came up for air
from programming. Ruth Ann and I hugged each other tightly as we watched the
flag wave in the wind. I was driven to tears. Was it love of country or
indignation at the destruction being wrought upon it? I don’t know. I felt good
to see the symbol.

Given what contribution Christmas Tree was
making to the war effort, to me the flag shouted, “You can walk but you can’t
hide. You have come after us long enough. Now we’re coming after you.”

S
everal times during the day Bill Mancheski’s
radio beeped to announce walkers, in ones and twos approaching the back of the
house. I was with the Lieutenant when one call came. I motioned to him that I’d
like to say something before he replied on the radio.

“Can you ask them what direction the Zekes are coming
from when the see one approaching the house?”

“Three, this is six.”

“Whenever a Zeke approaches the house please say
from which direction they are coming and to which direction they are going.
Pass it on. Hooah?”

I heard four mike clicks, one for each soldier
on the roof.

“Three, say directions for the Zekes so far.”

“The ones we have put down today have come no
direction in particular. They all appeared to be heading towards the back of
the house.”

I motioned to Bill again my desire to speak.

“Hold three.”

“Can you ask them to let them get close to the
house before dropping them? They are all heading to the back of the house.
Let’s see where at the back of the house.”

“All, this is six. We want to see where they are
heading specifically. Let Zeke get close and report.”