Get Off My L@wn - A Zombie Novel (21 page)

A
s far as I could tell, CB2 hadn’t suffered a
single casualty. It was getting closer by the minute.

Before lunch Brandt read the directions on the
Liquid Nails and brought the cases inside to warm up. Apparently the goo is
more effective if it isn’t cold.

Bill and I checked in with Frank. Bill explained
his successful raid on the home supply distribution center. He mentioned the
grace exhibited in battle by his team especially Mrs. Christmas Tree.

“You took her with you?”

“Affirmative sir. She was amazing.”

“Well, I glad it worked out. I have enough
problems with Walter as it is. I don’t want to think about how difficult he
would be if Mrs. Christmas Tree didn’t come back.”

“I’m standing right here you know, Frank,” I
said.

“Yes, Walter, I know that. I said what I said
specifically for your benefit.”

“That’s enough. Man to faceless voice on the
radio I’m tired of the shit you’re giving me. My wife and I are working our
asses off and making a difference. Even if you’re not telling me, I can see the
number of children we’ve put back with their parents around the country and my
guys tell me the automatic rifles and Claymores I made for you are saving
lives. I’ll take responsibility for being a prima donna before but I think I’ve
earned some slack from you. And if I keep arguing to be evacuated you can’t
blame me for wanting
all
the people here to live through CB2.”

“Are you finished?”

“Yes.”

“Then you will be pleased to know we are making
arrangements with the North Western Administrative Zone to shift assets our
way. Many people are trying very hard to keep
all
of us alive, including
Christmas Tree. You have to keep your computers running. We’re hooked up to all
the Administrative Zones now. Your data center is handling analysis for the
entire country and Puerto Rico too. You have to keep your computers running. Agreed?”

That made me feel a lot better.

“Agreed.”

“Good. One last thing, have you been backing up
your systems right?”

“Of course, why?”

“Send us a copy, will you?”

That made me feel a lot less confident.

“Sure thing Frank.”

“Good. Lambeau out.”

I did not intend to send Lambeau the backup. If
they had it, there would be one less reason for rescue.

S
tarting with the windows overlooking the fuel
cell system, the men took down the shutters, slathered adhesive on both the concrete
and wood, and held the wood in place while the goo set. The first attempt was a
fail, perhaps due to the cold weather. The second and subsequent attempts
succeeded by holding the wood in place for a much longer time. Two soldiers at
a time balanced on our ladder to accomplish this.

Brandt said the rated curing time for the adhesive
was seven days. We would have two days, but it would be better than none.

A
bout 8 PM, those off duty gathered around the TV
again to watch the day’s second strike against MA unfold. The nature of the strike
was somewhat of a surprise to me. A squadron of B-52s from North Dakota was to
bring their unique form of thunder down on Milwaukee A.

From our seats on an orbiting satellite, this one
was really something.

Milwaukee A was now north of Manitowoc near the
Maribel Caves. The absence of favorable terrain was irrelevant in face of the
density of the bombing. High explosives fell in a deluge causing an area of
solid intense glowing in the infrared stream. In normal color, the explosions
glowed equally brightly. So brightly, in fact, that the shockwave of each
successive explosion was visible in the light of the last.

The massive pounding continued for only a few
minutes. The targets, being soft, slow and exposed didn’t necessitate going
longer.

In morning’s light helicopters would take a
close look at the results.

Before Ruth Ann and I turned in, I checked on
what was happening down in the datacenter. I opened the door to the machine
room to find Brandt inspecting the equipment. I was sure he looked like a person
who had hurriedly gone into a “Who me?” pose. My hunch was confirmed when he
turned towards me with his right hand unnaturally buried in his pants pocket.
When his hand reemerged, Brandt had a bulge in his pants. I am certain it
wasn’t there because he was happy to see me.

“Ah, Specialist. What brings you down to my toy
room?”  I said without letting on about my suspicions.

“I’m just admiring your set up sir. I still
can’t believe this small room in a concrete house is the biggest datacenter in
the Midwest.”

“It isn’t the biggest Specialist. It is the most
convenient. There are huge datacenters in the cities that make this look like
the closet it is. But that’s just it. They are huge. It would take a lot more
than a fuel cell to keep them cool and powered up. You know I heard a talk once
from somebody at one of the big search providers. The guy said that by 2050,
half of the electricity in the United States would be used by datacenters.”

“That much?”

“Yeah, and that’s just the U.S. Well good night,
Specialist. I’ll close the door behind you.” I said this with my arm
outstretched in an obvious gesture to have him leave.

“Uh, good night Mr. Handsman.”

I closed the door behind Brandt and gave my
equipment a quick but thorough looking over. I didn’t expect to see any new
boxes with blinking red lights wired into my rig. Whatever it was that Brandt
was doing would be invisible to the eye. Physical access to a machine is the
surest way to have malware deployed on your system. Brandt had had such access
for who knows how long or how many times.

I wish I could say that I sat down at a keyboard
and in a moment, found “a computer virus with recursive encryption, very hard
to crack” to the people who were not there to watch me. The truth is, in the
end, the bad guys always win. Computer security is like a hockey game. The
goalie can block a hundred shots on goal and still lose one to nothing.

It really didn’t matter if Brandt was installing
some kind of malware to, I would assume, give complete control of the machines
to Lambeau. If they wanted to do that sort of thing, there was little I could
do to stop them.

What concerned me is whether the malware would be
well written. If it was quality bad guy stuff, I didn’t care. If it was crappy
bad guy stuff, it could hurt my machines and jeopardize the important work they
do. If Frank had found his other rock star, he hadn’t insulted me about it yet.

I talked the whole thing out with Ruth Ann later
in bed. She agreed, with CB2 expected through here soon we had other things
about which to worry. She also, as usual, had good advice. Also as usual, with
me at least, she began bluntly.

“Back in California you know you acted like an
ass. I can say that because I love you, right? You were a grade-A A-hole. Back
there that was OK. I accepted that because that was your element.”

I looked at her, paying attention, and keeping
my mouth shut. Objecting when Ruth Ann was making “heartfelt observations”
would only prolong the agony. I say agony not so much that it was annoying to
hear her jabber on, no. It was annoying to hear the truth.

“When we moved back here, back to
my
element, you kept right on in your California mode. People were put off but you
and I have thick skins. Neither of us really gives a poop what people think but
after a while, it really started grating on me. Making friends in California
was easy being married to an asshole because you were a powerful asshole. You
were expected to be a jerk.”

Being a jerk comes with the territory in the
Valley. The bigger a prima donna you were the bigger your paycheck. Perceived
value and all that. Nice people can’t possibly know what they’re doing.

“Besides, our friends weren’t real friends. They
were assholes on the rise. Sucking up to us to get ahead themselves. That one
guy, you know the guy with the cheese name… Mario Ricotta, he was an aspiring
ass. I bet he went home to that bleached blonde bimbo of his and said, ‘You
know honey, I want to be as big an asshole as Doug Handsman someday. Then
people will really respect me.’”

“You made your point. I know you have another
one.”

“I’m getting to it. Every day lately, I am more
and more amazed that it took the end of the world for you to become more human.
You been showing empathy and compassion, attributes that could have gotten you
fired in the Valley. You were excited about helping parents find their
children. Where’s the money in that?”

“My point is, Doug, you are growing as a person
with everybody except Frank and Lambeau Field. You are still in A-hole, game
playing, conniving, scheming, screw you mode. Just stop it all ready. Give it a
rest.”

“But hon, if I give him everything he wants
there’s less reason to rescue us.”

“Doug, you caught Brandt fiddling with your
rigs. You said yourself you can assume he already compromised your systems. If
that is true, Lambeau is going to get what they want whether you give it to
them or not. The smart thing to do is volunteer what they want. Give them
everything before they have to ask again. Consider this a test.”

“So this is a game and your observation is that
I’m not playing it with the right strategy? Who is the scheming one again?”

“You know what I mean.”

I hate that on so many levels. I hate it when
the women in your life say that with an intensity that says they really think
men
do
know what they mean. With that said, I knew what she meant.

W
ednesday (Day 42), was a good news / bad news
kind of day.

I got up early and prepared all the code and
scripts I’ve written and sent them off to Lambeau. In addition, I backed up the
virtual servers and with them the databases that had been growing steadily. I
sent all that off to Lambeau, a very large upload under any circumstances but
made easier by an otherwise empty Gigabit connection. They now had a duplicate
of the environment that existed here early this morning.

I did all this before talking to Frank in our late
morning meeting. This way I could claim those altruistic team-player bennies
Ruth Ann didn’t quite say I should go for. This proved to be the right course of
action as Frank’s demeanor changed dramatically.

The really good news was that Milwaukee A was
eviscerated by the B-52 strike the night before. Only an estimated hundred
thousand creatures remained. Pretty soon they wouldn’t be able to call it a
horde.

More good news about MA, the remaining ghouls
had been deflected slightly west. This meant they would run into the Fox River
sooner. By the time MA reached the Green Bay area, it would undoubtedly be
smaller due to the TO’s that had already begun. Coming from the southwest
rather than due south, what is left of MA may not even notice the Lambeau safe
zone at all.

The overarching bad news was that while Lambeau
was considerably safer, they would not be resuming TO’s on Chicago B 2 until
after they were sure they faced no significant threat. A B-52 strike like the
one that was so successfully applied against MA would not be used in our
defense. It was deemed that there was no “compelling strategic interest in
expending the resources necessary for that kind of strike at this time.”

There was no avoiding it. CB2 would be here for
lunch around noon tomorrow.

As I helplessly watched CB2’s inexorable march
towards us on the satellite feed, I noticed something peculiar near Eau Claire.
CB2 would trample the nearly demolished city that had already been the site of
thinning operations and the eastward march of the Twin Cities horde. The horde
would be through there early the next morning, a few hours before they hit
Christmas Tree.

I was watching a lower-resolution stream. In the
mostly brown and white landscape, some bright yellow dots stood out.

Ruth Ann was next to me at the kitchen table,
practicing field stripping and cleaning a suppressed automatic rifle given to
her by Bill Mancheski in recognition of her contribution to the home supply
warehouse raid. She was as proud of her new acquisition as I was proud of her.

“Hey, look at this.” I switched to the full
resolution of the satellite stream. I centered on Carson Park in Eau Claire.

“Wow, that’s a front loader and a bull dozer,”
Ruth Ann said.

Sure enough, in the magnified view we could see
two pieces of heavy construction equipment tearing up Carson Park Drive, the
only road leading into the park. The park itself sits at the end of a little
peninsula jutting into Horseshoe Lake.

Little bits of the road disappeared with each fifteen-second
update of the area.

“Look there. They are piling all the rubble and
earth up there to make a berm behind the torn up road.” Ruth Ann poked at the
monitor with the pipe cleaner thing she was using to clear her weapon. It left
a mark on the screen.

“I saw some infrared dots coming from there
after we first got set up with the satellite but I thought it was small fires
left over from the TO.” If I had known to look more closely, I would have seen
the fires burned in the same spot night to night, likely signs of survivors. I
made a note to tell Frank that I could include specifically looking for
campfires to the thinning operation optimization process without additional
computational cost.

Spotting the earthmovers is how we learned of
the encampment at Carson Park that I described earlier.

The survivors found construction equipment and were
cutting themselves off more completely from the direction of CB2’s progress.
The daily radio updates kept everyone listening, including them, current on the
horde’s position and direction of march. While the survivors could not succeed
in making an island out of the peninsula, cutting the easy access of the road
left only dense woods leading into the heart of the park.

In cold weather, the dead typically follow a
path of least resistance. With Carson Park Drive blocked by a high berm, the
path of least resistance now led past the park. Stealth would keep them hidden.

The earthmovers moved off late in the morning. We
could see where the yellow vehicles stopped through the partially denuded trees
from our bird’s eye view. The vehicles were driven back into the park quite a
way so they would not be visible from the “mainland.”

“We’re not the only ones getting ready for CB2,”
Ruth Ann said.

“Speaking of getting ready, I’m off to find Bill
and see what he’s got the troops doing.”

I toddled off leaving Ruth Ann to make sweet
love to her rifle.