Get Off My L@wn - A Zombie Novel (17 page)

T
here was no doubt about it any longer. On
Saturday (Day 38), anyone looking at the progress of the TC and CB hordes
walking Wisconsin could see they were going to merge around Mauston by
tomorrow. So much for the power of prayer.

“What’s going to happen when they merge?” Ruth
Ann began.

“I don’t think they are going to have a rumble
like the Sharks and the Jets,” I said while trying to think of something more
likely. “The one from Illinois is now about three times larger than the one
from Minnesota. I think just the momentum of the Chicago horde alone will drag
the smaller horde back north. Towards us.”

“Looks like Christmas Tree will be in the center
of another stampede,” Bill Mancheski added. “We have about a week to get
ready.”

“Maybe it’s time to get out of here?” said Ruth
Ann.

“What? Bill just got here. Lambeau just invested
a ton of resources in us.”

“Doug, you’re talking like we’re some startup
that just got funded. This is our lives we’re talking about. We should be
thinking about leaving. Hell, we should be leaving, period.”

“I wouldn’t worry too much hon. We survived a
horde once and now we’re even better off than before. Tell her Bill.”

“I’m sorry Doug. I go where they tell me.”

“Well, I’m not going anywhere. Lambeau needs our
results right
now
. The whole country needs our results. There’s more
code I have to write. I can’t write code while I’m packing up, flying to
Lambeau and unpacking. Shit, half the equipment wouldn’t make the trip and turn
on again. Where do we get replacement parts? It would at least a day maybe two
to get running again if we even can get running again,” I was pretty adamant.

“You’re playing with our lives now Doug.”

“Hon, I have been since the day we got married.
Besides, you should trust me. I work for the government.” My joke did not go
over well.

L
ater in the day I saw a new configuration file come down
from Lambeau for the thinning optimizer. I had to restart the system to
incorporate the new settings. By email from one of my people, I got the low
down on the new download.

“We added modeling for aerial dropped land mines.
Mauston is perfect for them.”

I checked the maps. They were right. East of
Mauston is a waterway. West of Mauston is the some of the most uneven terrain
in all of Wisconsin, the hills and bluffs of the Driftless Area formed more
than 500,000 years ago. In between was a flat plain through which CB would be soon
shuffling.

I wrote back:

“How much area are they thinking of mining?”

I got back:

“All of it.”

Ah, well. Land mines make a lot of sense but they
hadn’t been used in the U.S. up until now. They are known throughout the world
as the gift that keeps on giving. Once that area was mined, it was likely it
would remain a no man’s land for decades. Once again, whom am I kidding? The
land is a no man’s land already.

In addition, the U.S. had resisted treaties for
years banning land mines. We had more mines than anyone else. The higher ups
figured if we have them, might as well use them.

Within a half an hour our analysis system
confirmed the area was great for a thinning operation when the new weapon
system, aerial mines, was added to the palette.

In another hour, the satellite feed captured formations
of planes over the area. In another hour after that, helicopters crisscrossed
the plain south of Mauston, north of Wisconsin Dells.

Aerial mines are anti-personnel weapons. They
are intended to maim not necessarily kill. It was unlikely that the weapons
would destroy many brainstems but it would make several tightly packed zombies
immobile per mine detonated. A zombie with no legs is still dangerous. However,
it is a danger confined to a fixed and known area. The accountants of
destruction could calculate then to take them out or just let them rot where
they lay.

It was just as well that the CB horde was many
hours away from the field. There were so many mines that the planning system
needed new baseline images to account for the change in color of the land.

On the radio, our troops were said to be on the
move again in Door County and Puerto Rico. Sealing underground tunnels brought
a dramatic decrease in recurrences of outbreak.

The day’s bad news was that it was now
demonstrated fact that the ghouls continued functioning underwater. No horde
had wandered en mass into a large body of water like the Atlantic or even the
Great Lakes. Attacks being recorded now in disinfected areas of Door County and
Puerto Rico were sporadic and easily put down if they were spotted quickly. The
key was spotting them quickly as they came up out of the water. Coastlines are
too long to station troops that were needed elsewhere. Civilian “Coastal
Defense Forces” were being organized. Their effectiveness was uneven,
especially at night.

I could help with that.

I fished out some old articles on using the
Raspberry Pi for stereo vision off my NAS. I grabbed two webcams and attached
them to one Pi. I pointed them roughly in the same direction toed in a little
bit. After confirming I had pictures from both and I started writing code.

The first part of the code was essentially the
same as I had written the day before. Some swath of coastline such as a beach,
for example, should have no one on it, that’s key. Baseline images told the
code where to filter out any windblown grasses and continuous motion like
waves. If something is spotted moving, the two eyes are compared and with some
judicious use of trigonometry the angle and distance to the object could be
accurately determined (once distances had been calibrated during setup). I
demonstrated this to Bill Mancheski and Sgt. Orderly by having the system place
a crosshair over a third soldier automatically as he wandered around outside.

Both Bill and I had a conference with Frank and
others at Lambeau to explain what I built and how it could be used. I reminded Frank
he had access to process control engineers that could easily write code to take
the crosshair data I generated and control servos to aim and fire a weapon.
Even if it didn’t fire a weapon it could send a warning message that something
was moving where it shouldn’t be (if some type of ad hoc wireless network were
available).

Prior to the war, this type of contraption would
set the government back a hundred grand from a defense contractor. Now, apart
from the weapon, we could build them for under three hundred bucks in parts:
computer, cameras, servos, stands, recharger and batteries all for a price less
than an afternoon’s bar bill from the defense industry.

The system had no failsafe in it though. Once it
was set, there was no way to walk in front of one without being shot. This was
an acceptable flaw for the time being and could be corrected over time.

A Blackhawk came later that day to drop supplies
and take most of my Pi’s back to Lambeau while they figured out where to find
more. Pi’s had been created in England to help children around the world learn
about technology. I had purchased them to give to middle school children here in
town. They would be used to help children after all. Help them avoid being
eaten.

I ended the radio conference with Lambeau by
adding that it would be a trivial change to connect the output of the Pi’s to M18
Claymore directional antipersonnel mines. These mines can blast ball bearings
over two hundred feet without hurting what is behind them. I suggested they
mount the mines at head height on telephone poles or similarly sized trees. I
told them to set the Pi up on the “far” side with cameras out on stalks. My
guys up in Door County could modify the code to fire the Claymore when a
certain sized movement was spotted so groups of zombies could be killed instead
of the first one that wandered by.

My thinking was that this sort of device could
be parachuted into small camps to help in their defense or used by troops for
delaying actions.

Lambeau was excited by my development. I told
them it was all included as part of my service.

The work I supposed to do for the day was
interrupted when I saw unusual behavior on my servers running the optimization
code.

What was it a couple of days at most these
things were running? I found the anomaly in the form of a massive Minecraft server
that appeared to have several hundred users when I shut it down.

I had a second conference with just Frank and
told him which of my people left behind his digital fingerprints. Fortunately,
it was a junior engineer. He assured me the person would be disciplined. I
don’t know what Frank did but I never had a problem with my servers again.

We also had enough zombies approach the back of
the house to know where they were going, or wanted to go. Every single one
approached the back and stopped near the natural gas end of the fuel cell
system. When they got up against the protective fence some banged on it, others
entered statue mode. Sometimes the statues would stop behind the fuel cell
container where the soldiers could not get a clear shot. They had to yell and
make a commotion to get the statues to wake up, walk a few feet over so they
could be shot.

I reported this to Frank in our last
conversation of the day.

“Have any of these fuel systems been deployed in
the field, Frank? Like we have here with just a fence, no protected perimeter?”
I said.

“Negative Christmas Tree. You’re the first.”

“Well, there might be a problem with keeping
them out where walkers can congregate. Lieutenant can you fill Frank in on what
we’ve seen today?”

“Sir, we have observed walkers arrive from all
directions and congregate at the natural gas end of the fuel cell system. From
the roof, my men can’t smell any gas leaks. I sent a man down to ground level,
he reported no smell of gas there either. There is the constant hissing from
the gas moving from its tank into the system. Zeke seems to be drawn to it,
sir.”

“Understood Christmas Tree. I will have somebody
look into that. Anything else?”

Bill and I exchanged looks.

“Nothing else Lambeau, Christmas Tree out.”

A
round 10:30 PM, I reconfigured the satellite
feed covering Wisconsin to download a new IR image once per minute. I wanted to
see the yield from the mining of Mauston. I hooked the HDMI output of my laptop
up to our big screen TV, which thankfully still worked. With the lights down to
a minimum, Ruth Ann and I along with all the soldiers off duty gathered around
the TV for the show.

First I showed the crowd the glowing dots from
Camp Christmas Tree for perspective, then traced southeast about 120 miles to
where the Dells / Mauston area is.

We did not have to wait very long.

At the first new glowing dot, the soldiers
cheered. Then, with each new image, the glowing dots moved in a slow wave
extending further and further northwest. The horde was marching right through the
densely laid minefield. As their front ranks detonated mines, the following
ranks just kept walking. We saw a widening line of dots that ultimately
stretched west from the Wisconsin River all the way to the hills of the
Driftless Area almost ten miles away.

The ripple of dots began showing a bulge that
slowly formed into a wedge shape pointing along Interstate 90/94. As the horde
marched deeper into the minefield the width of the glowing dots shrunk. The
dead, without any kind of cognition, were forming up behind a spearhead of
their leading edge. While some dots winked in and out to the east and west of
the horde’s advance, the brightest glows continued to be along the Interstate.

Unbeknownst to us, helicopters on Lambeau Field’s
orders were orbiting the area from high above. With night vision gear they shot
video zoomed in close enough to see individual ghouls get thrown like bowling
pins and pinballs combined. One of my guys sent me an email with a clip from
the helicopters cameras. I put it up on the TV and my guests howled with
approval.

After putting the live feed back on I wandered
over to the kitchen. I found Ruth Ann there nursing some tea. I joined her.

“The carnage is horrible,” she said. “But those
aren’t people. We’re doing them a favor.”

“Yes, we are.”

“Is it cutting down the size of CB?”

“Definitely, but I don’t think it’s doing as
good a job as our friends here think. The dead are lining up to follow a path
of least resistance. Further from the highway that place will be dangerous for
years.”

“How many do you think we’re getting?”

“I don’t know yet. My code is thrown off by the constantly
moving wave of detonations and heat differences caused by the explosions. I
won’t be able to give an accurate number until daylight.”

“We should leave Doug. Leave now before the
hordes come back.”

“We talked about this hon. We made it through
once, we’ll make it through again.”

“I don’t think so babe. I hope I turn first so I
can bite the shit out of you.”

“Hon, if you turn first you will have no problem
at all getting shit out of me. I’ll do it all by myself.”

We went to bed.

O
n Sunday (Day 39), the thinning optimizer placed
the size of TC at 1.1 million and CB at 2.5 million. About 800,000 zombies had
been immobilized in the minefield last night. I zoomed into the satellite
images south of Mauston and saw a veritable moonscape of small densely packed craters.
I subtracted some consecutive images from each other and saw pixels changing
everywhere. As expected, many zombies weren’t completely de-animated but
neither could they move around much.

In my mind’s eye, I could picture a scene from
Soylent Green someday taking place north of the Waterpark Capital of the World.
I could imagine front loaders moving slowly across the moonscape scooping up
wriggling zombies and dumping them into waiting dump trucks. What would be done
with all that organic matter? I don’t know but I bet if we put enough of them
together in one place and wait sixty million years, we’ll strike oil.

I was talking the numbers over with Bill.

“We started at over six million in two hordes. When
they combine, we’ll be down to 3,600,000 in one horde after eleven days of
non-stop attacks,” I said.

“And to get down that far we left fifty square
miles uninhabitable due to land mines. We’re wearing out our people and equipment.
Brandt is telling me he is hearing of more and more downed helos and planes.
This kind of sustained action requires repair and replenishment. Seems to me
the spare parts department at Sikorsky factory is closed.”

“You know it’s going to shift back onto your
shoulders don’t you? I don’t mean you personally, but ground troops. It’s going
to shift back onto you guys.”

“It always does, but why do you say that?”

“The whole concept of the TOs are to thin,
right? Well, once the hordes are thinned to the point that low density means
dropping bombs is ineffective, we’ll be back to door-to-door and hand to hand.
By “we” I mean you, no offense.”

“None taken. I actually wouldn’t mind being out
in the field again. There’s only so many times I can strip and clean my weapon.
My men are restless. You’ve got a nice house and all, but we’d rather be on the
move. No offense.”

“None taken. Ruth Ann is convinced we’re screwed
by staying here.”

“She might be right. Your fortress has a second
floor with holes that are way too big. I would be more comfortable in a
medieval castle with arrow slits. These glass windows up here, they will go in
a heartbeat if the dead press against them.”

“How is that going to happen? We’re on a second
floor.”

“It can happen. If they’re motivated, they’ll
climb on top of each other. It can happen.”

I parted from Bill almost too disturbed to work
on what I needed to do for the day.

Fortunately, what I needed to do was easy.
Lambeau field needed web hosts and database systems to be able to share data
more effectively. I took two physical servers out of the rotation of those
working on the thinning optimizer without losing any functionality. Each had
twin CPUs with four cores each. This is almost like having sixteen computers on
just the two boards.

It goes up even from there. I fired up a
“virtual computing” environment allowing multiple make believe computers to run
on one physical computer. This works because only some of the make believe
computers will be busy at the same time. The benefit of having all the make believe
computers is that each can be handed over to its own web master or
administrator who would then be free to screw it up without breaking all the
other make believe computers.

In all, I instanced one hundred sixty make
believe computers and sent the access details up to Lambeau.

This task, though important, only took a few
hours of my time. Once I had the first make believe computer set up I could
walk away while the others built were automatically.

Ruth Ann was out hunting with some of Bill’s
men. We finally figured out what happened to all the animals.

They’re still out there.

They had evolved to avoid all sorts of predators
more intelligent and faster than the undead. Wherever the undead were, animals
weren’t. Why didn’t we humans think of that?

In her absence, I watched the merging of TC and
CB. It was exactly like watching simulations of galaxies merge. As I expected,
the axis of march shifted in the direction of the bigger horde. In a little
over three hours it was done. The combined horde was christened Chicago B2, or
CB2. It was headed right back at us.

From the time TC passed us to the time it merged
with CB to make CB2, the Twin Cities horde had gone from 1.6 million to 1.1
million or a decrease of about a third. CB2 had to march back up along the same
path route to get back here. It stands to reason, I thought, that we could
expect about a third to be killed off before CB2 got here, right?

So, running the numbers to make myself feel
better I estimated that CB2 would number about 2.4 million by the time it
walked onto my lawn.

I didn’t feel better.

A half an hour later the thinning optimizer spit
out an opportunity. CB2 had forked a smaller group that stayed to the west of
Decorah Lake. They were now bunched up especially tight against the bluffs and
were being left behind by CB2. Barely twenty minutes later planes began bombing
this splinter. Helicopter gunships that arrived after the planes had left
engaged the remaining dead with Gatling guns and missiles. It would be ground
troops next, exactly as Bill and I discussed earlier in the day.

“See?” I said to myself, “down to 3,400,000
already.”

Things were looking up.

Except they weren’t.

The center of mass of CB2 was heading northwest
at an average of more than two miles an hour, double the speed of the hordes
marching over fresh ground. Maybe they could tell there was nothing left alive
where they were so they could move faster. Maybe they were getting hungrier.
Nobody knew.

The reality was we would have a far shorter time
to prepare for CB2 than we expected. Bill and Ruth Ann seemed quite sure we
wouldn’t survive CB2. My own self-doubt grew by the hour.

It certainly didn’t help that walking dead were,
in dribs and drabs, appearing out of the tree lines and fields that surrounded
us. When the soldiers on the roof let them get close, they invariably headed
for the back of the house. Something about the fuel cell system was drawing
them in.