Dave looked at the caravan sized box. "There's a chance that it could be power transformer, but I'd expect more coils of wire."
Eric walked around to the side of the box. "What about these?"
Dave looked a half dozen gas barrels and a hand pump. "Damn. This is a really manual setup. I'm guessing that they didn't expect to use this very much. The air in this room must be terrible."
"There are a lot of bars up there," said Eric pointing to the top of the wall. The entire top part of the wall was open to the outside. There were no windows, just some iron bars like you would see in a cliche prison. The metallic box itself had what appeared to be numerous vents connecting it and the wall outside. At least there was little chance of a dangerous build up of gases.
"So is it a generator?" asked Eric.
Dave scratched his head. "Honestly I'm convinced that it is, but remember, I was an office worker before this. Office types are pretty damn useless in the real world."
Eric pointed past Dave, causing Dave to turn around. "Maybe that will help?"
On the wall, near the door where they walked in, was a massive schematic showing the wiring of the room.
Dave pointed to the schematic on the wall and some instructions on the side of the generator. "Looks like they provided enough instructions to make this place idiot proof."
"I hope it is for our sake," said Eric.
"Well, let's look at this schematic," said Dave reading. "Look, you can control which areas get power. This is convenient. You can see that there are switches for the main doors of the shopping part and there's a switch for the rear docking doors. If we turn off all the switches, other than what we need, then it should be good."
"Do you know what switches needed to be turned on?"
"They are numbered on the schematic," noted Dave.
Eric pointed to the console below the schematic. "And here are a lot switches with numbers."
Dave grinned. "You can't seriously think that it's that damn easy?"
Eric shrugged.
"There's really only one way to figure it out," said Dave looking back and forth between the console and the schematic. The switches on the console were large paddles, just the sort that you'd expect to carry a lot of current. Dave pushed the various switches back and forth until he was happy.
"That should be good," said Dave. "Now comes the generator."
"Do you think that it's fuelled up?" ask Eric.
"I hope so, but if it isn't then I'm sure we'll figure something out."
Dave took a moment to read the instructions on the side of the generator.
"Does it make any sense?" asked Eric.
"It's mostly a bunch of warnings. If I understand it correctly, then pushing this green button starts it, and the red button stops it."
"That's it? Shouldn't we have to manually crank something?"
"I've never done something like this before so I'm not going to pretend to really know how this works. We might as well try to fire it up."
"What if something goes wrong?"
"Then it goes wrong and we'll have to find another solution. Maybe we can block the entrances with the trucks?"
"So what should we do when we start it?"
"I really want to make sure Sid is okay, but we just have to trust him to successfully close off his area. What we need to do is go back to the store doors, open one, go outside, hit the door button, jump back inside and lock the door again. We need to do that for all the main entrance doors. Once those roller doors are down then we can run around to Sid and check how he's doing. Once we get all the docking area doors closed then we'll get back here and power off the generator."
"Got it."
"Okay."
For a moment, Dave felt some sense of doubt, but he then reached out and pressed the green button on the side of the generator. It was a really idiot proof system. The generator, whined and coughed for a moment before starting up. Dave could hear the generator steadily settling into a smooth rhythm.
Dave was a little alarmed at how loud the generator was. "Let's go," shouted Dave.
Together the ran out of the room and out into the hallway. They ran into a nearby stairwell and up to the ground floor. They ran a short way along the hall and emerged in the shopping centre.
"I'll go this way," said Dave pointing to the right.
Eric nodded and ran to the left.
Dave ran, his breath catching in his chest. As an office worker who spent his days sitting on his bum he wasn't the fittest. And all the walking and bicycle riding that he did over the last few days seemed to not have done anything for him. He felt that he had the stamina of a brick.
Dave reached the entrance doors, unlatched one and jogged outside. He flipped up the cover for the door switch and pressed the down arrow. Dave looked up as he heard the door slowly moving above him. Dave ducked inside, closing the door behind him and locking it firmly. The outer roller door made a crashing noise as it reached the walkway and stopped. Dave spent a moment listening but it seemed like the door had automatically turned its motors off after slamming into the ground.
Dave immediately dashed back towards the middle of the shopping centre. Dave had not even gotten half when when he saw Eric returning to the intersection and turn into the branch that they had both not picked. Dave heard Eric running towards the final entrance way. Dave got to the intersection and watched Eric in the distance operating the outer roller door that he had just run to.
As he waited Sid arrived. Dave was rather surprised but then again, after starting the generator Dave and Eric had to run from the generator in order to reach their respective doors, while Sid was already near the doors that he was responsible for. It only made sense that Sid would finish before Dave and Eric. It's easy to get caught out by how the imagination will fail to predict the future.
"How was it?" asked Dave.
Sid gave a thumbs up. "Easy as hell. I was worried that I wouldn't be able to tell when you turned the generator on, but that thing is loud as bloody hell."
Dave frowned. "That isn't good. We need to turn the generator off as soon as possible."
Sid pointed towards Eric. "Eric's done."
"Good, let's not wait for him and get going."
With Sid following, Dave backtracked to the generator, running the whole way. A little out of breath, Dave pressed the red button on the generator. In a few moments there was silence.
Sid was looking about the room, obviously this was his first time here.
"You really notice how loud that thing is once it's off," said Sid.
"The people who designed this room really put a lot of effort in it when they designed and built it," said Dave. "It was surprising easier to operate than I had feared it would be."
"Makes sense," said Sid. "This generator is something that you'd only use in case of emergency. When the shit hits the fan you want everything to be as easy as possible or else you'll waste time trying to figure things out and that could cost lives."
Eric walked into the room. He must have sprinted like a cheetah to catch up to the other two by this time. "So that's it?"
Dave nodded. "There's probably a lot more that we can do to secure this place even more."
"This centre is surrounded by roads and parking zones," said Sid, "but beyond that is a tall, wire-mesh fence. Closing that off would create a buffer zone."
Dave looked at Sid with surprise. "That's an absolutely amazing idea. I had only thought as far as securing the building itself. But having extra layers of defence is definitely not a bad thing."
Sid grinned. "Fuck. You'll make an optimist out of me yet."
All three smiled at each other - proud of their efforts.
"Okay," said Dave, "We're not done yet. Let's walk about and double check that this place is locked up."
"We also need to double check that the building is really empty," said Sid. "There's probably a million hiding places."
Dave looked at the generator. "One good thing about the noi
se this thing made is that if there was something asleep in the building before then it will be awake now and will hopefully be having a walk around so that we can notice it."
Sid groaned. "So there's still a chance that we'll get some nasty surprises."
Dave nodded. "With that in mind we should be extra careful and stay together at all times. I've never fought one of the walkers before. I have no idea if one man could deal with it or even if us three is enough."
There was no heroic posturing among the group. Just the harsh awareness of reality.
"We're never going to get a break," said Sid.
"So we might as well get this over," said Dave.
Together they left the generator room.
"Checking the entire building is too much work for one day," said Dave. "We'll just have to sweep through it many times over. Even then it wouldn't help to keep paranoid."
"Yeah," said Sid. "It's too easy to hide a body in this place and it only takes one of them."
They walked up out of the basement and into the shopping centre. Obviously nervous, all three looked about the shopping centre trying to spot any sign of activity.
"You think we closed all the doors?" asked Sid. "I know that we closed the main doors, but what if there were some sneaky small doors that were left open."
"I'm hoping so, but Eric should know."
Eric nodded. "This place is pretty simple. There were the three big doorways that people used to get into the shopping part, and there were the big doors out the back for the loading docks. Oh wait, I just remembered that there was a door near the loading docks. It might be a staff entrance."
"I saw that while I was waiting for you guys," said Sid. "There's some stairs to get to it, but it's a solid door. I'd have problems getting through that with an axe. It's got some serious locks on it too. I double checked and it's good."
"That's a relief," said Dave who suddenly froze mid-statement.
From one of the store entrances came a rattle. It was tricky to see through the dual doors but there was a few human shapes visible on the other side. Some were noisily bumping their bodies against the roller door. It wasn't a serious attack on the door, but the rattling was unsettling. With so many opportunities for things to go wrong the three had been unbelievably lucky.
"There's more," said Eric pointing to another gate.
"Looks like there's a crowd at each door," said Eric pointing to the third entrance. "Now what?"
Dave spent a moment in observation. "They don't look like they are trying to break in. If they don't notice us I suspect that they'll just go away in a bit of time."
"Should we call off doing any more today?" asked Sid.
"It's annoying," said Dave, "but we should do everything to avoid making this worse. At the moment it looks like they are just standing out there. If they see us they might try breaking down the doors. We should avoid that if possible."
"Back to the roof then?"
All three nodded to each other in agreement and began to quietly sneak up the to roof. During their journey they didn't notice anything other than themselves moving around inside the shopping centre. They would have to leave a more serious inspection of the building for a latter date. Now it was important to just lay low and lose the interested of the dead.
* * *
As Dave, Sid and Eric came out onto the roof of the shopping centre they were greeted by Justin. "You certainly got everyone's attention."
"Was it that loud?" ask Dave.
"Come and take a look for yourself," said Justin as he walked to the edge of the roof.
They all followed Justin, walked to the roof's edge and peered over the wall.
"Got to be about a hundred of them," said Sid.
"Weird," said Dave. "They aren't the usual greys we see at night. These have yellow patches."
"Maybe the sunlight damages them," suggested Sid.
"That's a good observation," sad Dave. "I first thought the patchiness of the skin colour was because they were newly converted from a living human and hadn't fully completed the infection process. But you're saying that they can be damaged in some way by daylight. This is the first time I've ever really contemplated something like that."
"Will they notice us up here?" asked Eric nervously.
"It doesn't look like they do," said Sid. "They just seem to be staggering about. They get more excited when they see people and right now they just look dopey."
Dave didn't want to hear how Sid knew how the walkers got excited. "I doubt that they will see us, but we should probably stay more in the middle of the roof. That way they don't see us and hopefully they won't hear us."
"Do you think it worked?" asked Sid and Justin gave Dave a serious look.
"They don't seem to be trying to break open any doors," said Dave. "They're just there. I'm pretty confident that if left alone that they'll disappear as quickly as they arrived. The good thing is that we can now be confident that when they do disappear that they aren't coming inside this shopping centre to do so."
Justin sounded a bit nervous. "Let's move and find a place to sit. We should probably plan out what comes next."
All of them said nothing as they left the roof's edge. Together they walked to where Justin slept.
"The weather is very mild at the moment," said Justin, "but it's still nice not being in the direct sun for too long."
Justin spread out a blanket and sat down. The others followed.
"Well," said Dave. "I have to admit to being surprised. The first part of my plan worked out really well."
Justin nodded. "That's good to hear. Although we do seem to have gotten a bit more attention then I expected."
"Was the generator that loud?" asked Sid.
"It was rather shocking. I wouldn't say that it was loud but more of a rumble."
"The generator was in the basement," said Sid, "it's surprising that you could hear it through the shopping centre."
"I'm no engineer," said Dave, "but I'll guess that the generator wasn't attached to the floor correctly. It didn't need to be very loose, but even a little bit might cause it to rattle a lot. It certainly seemed a lot more noisy than I expected, but I can't say that I'm familiar with such things. And then there are the air vents all around us - I guess they helped to conduct sound up here."
"Strange that they didn't secure the generator fully," said Justin.
"This shopping centre looks new," noted Dave. "Ten years at the most. Maybe they never had an emergency or the time to do the testing needed to reveal that there were issues. Keep in mind that I'm guessing. If we actually had a member of staff who was responsible for the generator then they might very well have a completely different response. I might even be completely wrong."
"But I'm guessing that this doesn't matter anymore," said Justin, "with the main entrance doors closed we don't really need to start up the generator again."
"I don't have any plans for it," said Dave. "One thing that you should remember is that it is petrol driven and there's probably tightly limited supplies of that. I don't think that you could run the generator for very long if you wanted to. It's best to just plan as if there is no generator."
"And that leads to my next question, what are your plans?"
Dave looked at the assembled people for a moment. "I got no plans."
Sid laughed. "You always seem to know what you're doing."
"Well," said Dave, "I sort of have the plan on living through this. It's just that I've not figured out the details. Obviously, trying to survive on my own is difficult. It would be great to get a community set up so that we can share the workload - whatever that might be. So here I am trying to make sure how to keep this community safe, but I don't know what that community can do to help me survive. My thinking is a bit vague and I'm sort of improvising."
"Sounds a bit selfish," pointed out Justin.
"It's the paradox of being selfish," said Dave, "helping others is an act of selfishness. By helping others they are in a better
position to help you back. Cooperation is the easiest way to satisfy one's needs, which sort of sounds upside down."
"I think we're getting a bit deep here. Anyone got any ideas what we should be doing next?"
Sid nodded. "I think Dave said this while we were downstairs. We'll need to spend a bit of time searching this whole building. We need to know that it's completely safe."
"We made a lot of noise," pointed out Dave, "so I feel certain that if there was anything in this place then they would have come out where we could easily see them. And yet we saw nothing. That's not to say that we're clear, but it's a good sign."
"So, we need to search this place fully," said Justin. "Anything else?"
"Even if we secure the door leading into this place," said Dave, "there's nothing wrong with having extra security. I think we should take a few vehicles like the trucks and park them in front of the big entrances."
"Won't they just climb under the trucks?" ask Justin.
"Maybe. It's just that I've never seen the walkers do that. And even if they do then they'll have to attack the doors while laying down or in some other awkward pose. I doubt that they could attack the doors with the same strength as if they were standing and a part of a large crowd."
Justin nodded. "It's not like using trucks as a wall is our only defensive line. Any little bit that eases the strain is a victory."
"Also," said Sid, "we can block off the space under any trucks we use as barriers. Maybe we could use tables from the furniture store to cover the big gaps. Maybe we could make sandbag out of the more useless clothing."
"Those are good ideas," said Justin.
"Sid has a lot of good ideas," said Dave. "One idea that he told me that I really like is the idea of blocking off the road accesses that lead to this shopping centre."
"What?" said Justin surprised.
"I was rather taken back by the idea of it as well," said Dave, "but then I noted that there's a high mesh fence surrounding the entire shopping centre complex, except at the roads that are used to access this place. Blocking a few roads with a truck or two should be easy. With the roads blocked and the fence then a decent boundary can be setup so that it should keep all the dead a fair distance away."
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