by Jack Wallen
We walked a few paces in silence. I could tell Jamal was mulling over my plan. He’d have an opinion any moment. His opinion would probably be filled with Devil’s Advocacy. Was I breaking countless laws? Yes. Did I give two shits about breaking those laws? Hell no. All I cared about was locating my baby and I would do any God damn thing under the sun to do so.
“It’s perfect.” Jamal shocked me with his decidedly positive statement about a plan that had no testing, no theory, and no moral compass. “It’s clearly our best chance of locating your son.”
Jamal followed me back to the studio.
“I’d ask if you needed any help, but I already know the answer. It’s not like I had any insight to offer for the task at hand. You are the script master, if I recall.”
Jamal flashed me a bright, hopeful smile. He really was doing everything he could to make me feel better about losing my child. I wanted to tell him the gesture was, at the moment, pointless and for him to save it for when I had Jacob back in my arms. Instead, I smiled back at him and fired up my favorite text editor on my laptop.
“Actually, there is something you can do for me Jamal.”
“Anything.”
Jamal’s enthusiasm was a blessing.
“It won’t be easy.”
“Nothing ever is where you’re involved.” A wink followed the slam, lessening the blow.
“I need back doors into all the major phone carriers. Can you get them for me? Preferably in the form of ports twenty-one, twenty-two, or five hundred thirteen. One of those three is bound to be open just enough so that I can get through to sniff their data stream. I get the back doors pieced in with a little shell magic and we’ll have a continuous flow of information that can be sorted through. If the ZDC had any communication with our friend Gabe, we’ll know and can act accordingly.”
“Accordingly, meaning find the fucker and take him down?”
Jamal grinned his most evil of grins. I wish I had it in me to return the look.
“I’ve really missed working with you Bethany. I’ve never in my life known someone that could look so lovely hunched over a computer keyboard hacking out code like you. It’s the most pure and beautiful art I’ve ever seen.”
For a brief moment I thought about diving headfirst into that pool of reminiscing, but the code held a stronger sway. When I glanced Jamal’s way, he immediately saw the story in my eyes.
“I’m sorry B – I don’t mean to…”
“It’s okay Jamal. Really. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate what you’re doing. Just… let’s focus on getting this up and running and then we’ll talk about the past, present, and future. I promise.” My words mingled with the sounds of two keyboards ticking and tacking away. It was like old times. Memories of Jamal and I hacking away into the wee hours in graduate school, racing against the clock to finish a final coding project. Too much Mountain Dew and too little romance. That was all blown out of the water as soon as the code compiled. While the other über nerds were celebrating with video games and Battlestar Galactica marathons, Jamal and I were ripping one another’s clothes off.
“Done. I have your back doors and I’ve already worked them into an API for you. All you have to do is link and compile.” Jamal handed me a flash drive served up with the most adorable of smiles.
God, how can my heart feel anything but broken right now? I wanted to cry again. Rage out against every machine I could find until my inner Hulk had smashed all signs of civilization. Nothing was fair at the moment. Everything sucked. And even still – there was Jamal, that man I called mine for a brief period. He could wrap his arms around me and I’d forget everything… or so I wished.
“Done. Now, let’s hope this bitch works.”
I saved the script with the name save_my_baby.sh, copied it over to the server, gave it executable permission, and ran it. I had a second terminal window open, running the tail command on the output file of the script. At first the tail was empty, but after a moment, text began flying by. The script was working.
“We did it! It’s collecting data from every phone provider in the country. AT&T, Verizon, Sprint…they’re all there. Now I just have to sit back and wait for the regular expressions to work their magic and send me the alerts.”
Jamal came to me and gave me that hug he knew I needed. All I could do was breathe in the moment, take in the oh so brief peace his embrace brought.
“By the way, the Zombie Sensing Obliterator, aka ZSO, is now operational. It wasn’t working when you went up top because we failed to load the main application. Newbie mistake. I blame it on the apocalypse. That’ll never happen again. But this area is pretty much surrounded by the undead just out of ear shot. We’re safe, but we’re not going anywhere for the time being.”
As the embraced lingered, a rather odd thought bubbled to the top of my mind. “How big did you say this underground city is?”
When Jamal pulled away, the look on his face was curiosity making love to trepidation. “It’s roughly thirty-five or so square blocks. It’s not that huge, but there are plenty of tunnels that intersect and finger out. Why do you ask?”
“Just a hunch, but how do we know Gabe escaped? How do we know it was him getting into that car? Isn’t it possible he’s just down here somewhere, waiting to be picked up by the ZDC? My baby could still be here.”
Before I could continue on, Jamal had me by the shoulders and stared deep into my eyes.
“B. I’ve had every man and woman I trust scour this place. He’s not here. The possibility of…”
I stopped his logical train of thought before it could leave the station of his mind.
“No. I refuse. Knowing what’s out there and him having the encumbrance of an infant, it is possible he could still be down here. You could have missed him.”
Desperation had crept into my voice. I didn’t want to admit it, but it was there. Before I could swan dive into that black abyss, a stranger’s voice broke through the building fog.
“I was told you were looking for me.”
The voice belonged to a wisp of a man, easily in his sixties, skin like hot cocoa, wearing an adorable old-man cardigan, baggy pants, an odd sort of drivers cap, and a very misplaced twinkle in his eyes.
“Oh my God! I completely forgot. Bethany, this is Dr. Theo Amos Williams. He’s the chemist from Portland.
The impish man came to me, arms extended, with the biggest, brightest smile I’d seen in over a year.
“Dear God in heaven, I am so honored to be in your presence Miss Nitshimi. What you have done has been nothing short of miraculous.”
And he hugged me. Out of nowhere, the smiling chemist wrapped his arms around me and embraced me in that way only older people can pull off. It was charming, touching – but a bit misplaced.
“I’m sorry Dr. Williams, but the only thing I’ve managed to do is lose what might possibly be the human race’s only salvation.”
Theo looked at me with the cocked head of a curious spaniel. “I don’t follow.”
“Jacob was taken from me.”
I brought the doctor up to speed on the entire situation. When I finished my tale, he wasn’t nearly as convinced as I that all was lost.
“The miracle that coursed through that baby’s blood was made one with your own. Although no blood would have passed through the placenta, if that baby was born with the infection, you would have shared that infection. If the baby was born immune, more than likely, that immunity was passed on to you. Bethany, you are as your child. If there is a cure to be had, we can get it from within you.” Theo proclaimed with finality.
The idea that I shared Jacob’s miracle hadn’t been part of the equation. It was too easy to assume there was something genuinely unique about him, or there was something just shy of fictional to his very existence. I fully understood the biology; mother and fetus do not share blood, but there are certain gases and trace elements that migrate back and forth. It wouldn’t be entirely out of the realm of the possible that wha
tever it was that gave Jacob his immunity could have transferred into my system.
There was something gnawing away at me. Something angry that wanted to hurt someone.
“If you think, for a second, I have or will give up on finding my son, you are sorely mistaken. Anyone that gets in my way of finding him will witness a wrath unlike any they have experienced.”
Jamal came to me with his big eyes and bigger smile. “B. no one is going to try to stop you from finding Jacob. Dr. Williams only wants to work with you to find a cure as quickly as possible. If that means we use you as the prime catalyst for the work, then so be it. Whatever the cost, right?”
My dearest cohort in crime just had to pull our old motto out of his ass and drop it on the floor in front of me. Jamal knew I couldn’t resist the old tried and true. It was a phrase we came up with back in school, in the middle of the night while trying to complete one of the single most crucial assignments we’d been given to date. Over and over we tried to get the code to compile, but to no avail. It wasn’t until we decided we’d do whatever it took to succeed with the work and wound up bringing in a third party to get an outside perspective. It worked. Of the ninety-seven students in the class, we were the only two to get the code to work. We both graduated at the top of our classes. For all intent and purpose, we were Gods among men.
Jamal was right to drop that bomb on me. This had to succeed. The cure for the Mengele Virus was beyond me, beyond Jacob, beyond everyone.
Just as I was about to toss down another barrage of verbiage to ensure everyone involved knew the primary objective was the return of Jacob, my phone went off. It wasn’t a call – it was an email. The script was throwing out hits on the search strings.
“Shit Jamal.” Was all I got out of my mouth before I took off running toward the studio. From my laptop I could access the dump file and search it for anything that might give us a clue as to what the Hell had happened.
I could hear the slap of Jamal’s Chuck Taylor’s on the cement floor behind me. He was too gangly and awkward to be quick. Typical nerd. I, on the other hand, had the speed of survival on my side. The third-party sounds of Dr. Williams could not be heard. Good boy for staying behind. I’d have to make a note-to-self memo and chat with the man later – if we all survived this horror-fest.
As soon as I reached the studio, I threw myself down behind the desk, logged into the laptop and accessed the file. The file was huge. I had expected a few hits here and there. What I got was nearly ten megs of data on a flat-text file. Thousands of lines to search through would take any normal human hours to go through. I, on the other hand, had the power of regular expressions and bash scripting on my side. After a brief moment of cobbling, I had a script ready to sift through the information and leave behind only the bits and pieces that would aid in our search. The resultant file was short enough for both Jamal and I to sift through together.
“Here’s a communication from someone named Faddig to a Koenig, ordering him to send enough undead soldiers to San Antonio to…” Jamal’s voice trailed off into some black abyss of fear.
“What is it Jamal?”
Silence. The only other time Jamal was ever rendered silent was when he heard Firefly was being canceled. That was almost ten years ago.
“B… The Zero Day Collective only sent enough of the undead to Texas to make you think they were off track.”
Another rousing round of silence.
“What?”
“They knew all along where you were and where you were going. They… fuck. Fuck!”
“Please Jamal, what is it?”
Jamal turned and stared hard at me. The look in his eyes was clear – I wasn’t going to like what he had to say.
“Gabe. He was in constant contact with them. He was a fucking plant! And he led them…”
Before Jamal could finish his sentence, the roaring and banging began. It was a sound all too familiar to me. It was a symphony of chaos that forced its way into my psyche in Munich. That horrific noise once again appeared to claim its prize.
“Why is the Obliterator not going off? I thought you said you started the program. Jamal, you said…”
“I know. I did. I started it. I swear!”
The poor man was in hysterics. And why shouldn’t he be. His Fortress of Solitude had been found and the hand of evil was banging at the door.
Clang, clang, clang went the zombie.
“Bethany, what do we do? What if they get in? How will we defend ourselves?”
I had forgotten the average nerd’s experience with combat ended at the gaming console. Most nerds would be lost in real mortal combat. Add the undead to the mixture and the nerd herd were nothing more than pant-shitting, thumb-sucking, babies. Fortunately, they had me on their side. Since the apocalypse hit, I sort of became the anti-nerd hero.
“We need weapons. Well, you need a weapon. I need to get into a bag in my room and grab my pike. What do you have down here that can serve as your own personal wrecking ball?”
“Are you kidding? We have an armory down here. I managed to stockpile every sort of weapon of undead destruction you can imagine.”
Jamal took off with me close behind. The pounding grew ever more relentless. The monsters knew we were here and they wanted to say ‘hello’. My guide took a sharp right turn and then an almost immediate left. Jamal was showing a grace and athleticism I’d never seen from him before.
When we finally reached the armory, Jamal stood in the center of the room, arms wide open, spinning in circles to bask in the glory of what seemed like an infinite collection of security blankets.
“Grab yourself a silent but deadly and let’s go kick some zombie ass.”
Jamal gestured to the stockpile of various and sundry deadly weapons, most of which fell into the too-loud category for zombie combat.
“We need stealth on our side. Grab something sharp and pointy and let’s go. I need to get back to my room.”
And that’s exactly what we did. Jamal opted for a Klingon-like sword that had clearly been sharpened by a master. The song it sang as it sliced through the air was vicious. As soon as we made it back to my room, the first thing I laid eyes on was the blanket I had used to wrap up Jacob. Memory slammed me in the chest. Had it not been for the pressing matter of life and death at hand, I probably would have succumbed to the weight of sorrow. Instead, my fingers jabbed into my bag and pulled out the collapsed pike that had served me so well. In seconds I had the lethal pole extended to its fullest and ready to do my best Faster Zombie Cat, Kill, Kill!
“Please tell me your plan doesn’t involve tracking these things down and getting up close and personal.” Jamal’s tremulous voice reminded me he wasn’t a superhero.
“That’s my plan exactly. Now, you’re either with me…”
“Don’t say it B. Don’t even say it.”
I didn’t say it. In fact, all I did was take off into the halls, leading with my zombie skewer. As we slowly and quietly made our way through the halls, it dawned on me just how creepy this underground city was. Hollywood couldn’t have chosen a better location for a haunt-fest. Dust kicked up with every step, there were cobwebs hanging from every location a human hadn’t already passed through, doors creaked with a pained effort. This had to be some sort of sick twisted joke fate decided to play on me.
The screaming and odd roaring of the undead made it very clear this was not a joke.
“Holy shit Bethany, I think…”
Another roar confirmed what Jamal was about to cry out. The undead had come to play. The sounds of reckless abandon filled the halls. That sound was soon followed by the shrill cries of human lives being extinguished. I hadn’t managed to get around to visiting the entire underground city to introduce myself to its inhabitants. Looks like I’d never get that chance. Few humans could stand up to screamers and survive.
Another scream set the molecules around my head on fire. Accompanying the familiar screech of screamers was that same odd roaring I heard a se
cond ago. That sound actually made the hell-born noise from the screamer seem like music from a merry go round.
“I don’t want to recognize that other sound Jamal.” I had to voice my fear before it tore out my insides. “Can’t we just pretend evolution didn’t take the zombies on its Red Rover team?”
“Sorry B, those are boners.”
“And not the good kind right?” I tried to make light. I didn’t work. Not with the crusty call of the undead demon lords spilling out all around us.
For a split second we thought about taking off. But the sound-proofing Jamal did to the sound booth made the room an ideal hideaway for us. After Jamal closed the door, even the call of the Circus of the Damned was sealed out.
“Jamal, please tell me you have the means to monitor this underground city from inside this room.” I knew the answer to the question before I asked. I asked any way. Reassurance was a precious commodity these days.
Jamal huffed, as if I had just dropped the insult of insults at his feet, and sat down in front of one of the keyboards. After tapping a few simple commands, he had a window open that spanned two monitors. Inside the window rested eight smaller windows, each of which revealed the view of a strategically placed camera.
“There are actually thirty-two cameras. You can cycle through them with the Alt-Tab key combination.”
Jamal stood and presented the workstation to me. There was something I had to do. In my panic to locate Jacob, I managed to let Echo fall into the cracks. I sat down in front of the pair of monitors and started cycling through the cameras. It didn’t take long before I spotted Echo. She was in a room with Morgan, in what looked like a heated conversation. There was no sound with the image, so I could only assume what was happening.