We would be heading to the basement in a moment but I wanted to look for myself to see how well the front door was holding up. I crept to the door imagining that at any moment it would burst inwards. It was just getting dark outside and I could see nothing through the blacked out sidelights. A hand must have slapped the beveled glass. It was then that truly I appreciated how fragile the sidelights were. The looters had used a baseball bat on our neighbors’ houses. Continued knees and slaps would be just as effective here over time. What about a creature with just the right slap wearing just the right jewelry?
I checked the deadbolt and hasp on the floor. The upper hasp was locked from visual inspection as I couldn’t bring myself to stand up to check it. I could feel every bang against the door. The sound of their moaning just inches from my head made my skin crawl. What I checked looked good. The baby monitor webcam was in place so I got the hell away from there.
We headed through the door leading to the basement.
We turned on some hand cranked LED camp lights on their lowest settings and continued on into the basement. Ruth Ann was the last one down and dead bolted the door behind us. At least this door didn’t have any fucking sidelights.
The good news was that it was quiet. Virtually no sound reached us through the foundation. The bad news is that should any entry be made into the house we would be trapped. But who was I kidding? Millions of cold dead eating machines were walking through our yard. If they got in the house whether we were here or upstairs we’d soon be one of them.
Cranking up a few more camp lights we started making ourselves comfortable. We had no cooking equipment set up down here yet but we could set up an electric hot plate if we needed one (and electricity held out). There were plenty of non-perishables and dry goods. This is also where we kept our canned goods. If we were trapped down here, as long as we could replenish water we could last a long time. Deep down I knew the basement door would give out long before the food did.
For the next few hours it might have passed for a sleepover except that the zombie movie we watched was a live video feed.
While I was down here I figured I might as well do some tidying up while Ruth Ann and Ryan talked. I could hear Ruth Ann edging around the question we were wanting an answer to since we first discovered Ryan. Again, he steered the conversation away from the subject. I resolved that in the morning, if morning came, I would ask the question directly and insist upon an answer.
It didn’t take me long to check in on our batteries and power status, all good. I nosed through our long term supplies, all good there too. I scored a bonus when I ran across a small sample box of cups for the coffee machine upstairs. The box had long ago expired and many of the flavors were crap but there were a couple of good ones in there. I would just need access to a machine two floors up.
Finally, I looked in longingly on my technological pride and joys sitting idle since the shit hit the fan. The work I did in Silicon Valley required lots of processing power and tons of storage. When I “retired” to Wisconsin I saw no reason to be without the toys to which I had become accustomed. I had a few ideas I was working on. I could have rented “cloud” services for processing power but this was not just my work. Fiddling with wires and buttons was my hobby as well. Ruth Ann had her greenhouse; I had my own farm of sorts.
As such farms went it wasn’t large but for things one might find in a residential basement, it was huge. Two 12U racks each sported a dozen servers. Each server was capable of running tens of web sites each fairly well. Hundreds each, badly. The servers were fed by two 18 terabyte networked attached storage (NAS) arrays. Next to those was my own small supercomputer. The box held four Tesla K10s that together were many thousands of very fast computer cores perfect for image processing and parallel computing.
While I could occasionally fire up one the NAS devices for fetching this or that such as a ripped movie or book, the servers were a power impossibility. There was enough horsepower and storage sitting idle here to run hundreds of web servers. Even if I had the power to run them I would still be missing the web itself. Still, they looked pretty and I patted the boxes lovingly.
I came back to the big room and stretched out on the couch with a few layers on blankets on top. I flipped on my tablet. When it connected to the house, the status indicator for email showed up. I had been with Ruth Ann and Ryan all day. They hadn’t sent me anything. I opened up the email app and found the message was from our modem / router. A modem, or modulator / demodulator, is the thing that physically connects the network inside the house (the LAN) to the outside world (the WAN). The modem was on whether we had Internet service or not as it was also the device that told packets inside the house how to get from one device to another (routing). The modem had sent me an email saying that for about a minute early this morning, it had a connection to the outside world! For a minute, we had Internet service!
While this was very exciting, I didn’t share the news as I had no idea what it meant.
We watched the steady crush of dead lessen slowly to a consistent but lighter flow past our house. The percentage of badly burned creatures had dropped to almost zero.
I suppose we can all take pride in the diversity of the dead. A butcher, a baker and probably a candlestick maker had undoubtedly passed our cameras amidst the slowly advancing horde. Every race, color and from what we could tell by jewelry and apparel most creeds were represented. We are all clearly equal in the end.
Just watch the time-lapse stills from our cameras that DHS put up at the War Memorial website. It turns out our house’s camera feed was the first ground level “live and in-the-round” look at the inside of a horde of undead.
We had been watching a long time now. The density of the dead had come down to the point where we could once again concentrate on individuals. Ruth Ann stopped watching completely after a woman passed right under camera five wearing a wrap style baby carrier. That’s the type where the infant faces mom or dad, arms and legs poking out like a starfish. The woman and child were truly heartbreaking as the infant’s arms and legs were where they were supposed to be but there was no head on the child. Instead, the remains of a spine poked up from the bloody baby sling. The woman’s face, hands and arms were stained with the dried blood of her own baby. You can see the mother and child about two hours and twenty-one minutes into the time-lapse video. You can see it if you want to. We’ve tried desperately to forget it.
I asked Ryan what he meant about staying overnight in our garage being better than what they do at the camps.
“If you come in by car, soldiers guide you inside a big garage. You drive up to really tight lanes made from those temporary concrete guardrails from when they do road work, you know? There isn’t enough room to open your doors. They tell you to put your car in neutral, roll up all your windows except for the driver’s. That one stays open enough to pass water bottles and food in. They give you enough water and protein bars to last 24 hours. From there on in, if you start your car they’ll shoot you right through the window.”
Wow. Martial law really means martial law.
“They push you down the lane until you bump the car ahead of you. You stay like that for 24 hours. If anyone turns inside your car, you’ll all be dead. If the zombie doesn’t kill you they don’t take any chances. They shoot everyone in the car anyway.”
This made perfect sense and must be very effective.
“What if you don’t come with a car?” Ruth Ann asked.
“They zip cord your feet together and stuff you in a sleeping bag. Then they zip cord your hands and close up the bag. They put a straw next to your face for water. No protein bars. Then you wait 24 hours. If you have to pee, you pee. If you have to crap, you crap. It is way less comfortable than being in a car. At least you can move around in a car. But then again, you won’t get eaten by a family member if they turn. That happened a lot,” Ryan was looking downwards as he talked.
“So after 24 hours they look you over. If you look sick it�
��s a .45 to the head. If a family member looks sick, it’s a .45 to the head. If you’ve turned, it’s a .45 to the head. Simple. And no chance to spread the infection.” Ryan made the motion of shooting a pistol into the side of his head.
“If you make it through, you spray down and wash you up. They give you new clothes. That’s pretty much it. Once in a camp there’s hardly ever an infection. They do this to every person coming in. Even soldiers coming in from patrol. If you refuse, it’s a .45 to the head. Sort of like “Is that your final answer?” Bang!” he finished.
Later with Ryan out of earshot, Ruth Ann and I discussed his story of camp life.
“Do you think he’s exaggerating at all?” I said.
“Definitely, he’s got it wrong.”
“Really? What part?”
“The .45 hasn’t been standard issue for years.”
When the cameras switched from daylight color to infrared black and white I realized how long we had been transfixed by the scene outside. I did not want leave the quiet of the basement but I wanted to let Lambeau Field know we were doing OK. The radio, however, remained on the second floor.
I typed up a message and saved it to a file called ‘readme.txt”. In it, I gave Frank an update saying we were safe in the basement for reasons of maintaining sanity. We would check in by voice when the horde had passed. I copied the readme file to the radio and sure enough within seconds, it disappeared, deleted by the radio itself after transmission.
I was dozing off and Ruth Ann was sewing when Ryan shouted for us to come to the laptop. The all-camera view was up. Ryan pointed at camera six, which showed a view along the front of the house looking northeast. Where the front door would be I could see a spastically waving arm connected to an immobile shoulder. Part of an upper torso seemed to stick out of the wall. I instantly knew what had happened. Murphy, you mother fucker.
I hit a key to fill the screen with camera six. A monster was wedged partially through one of the sidelights at the front door. Its head was through the opening along with its left arm. It was wedged at its chest. Perhaps it hung up on its clothes or maybe by the size of his body. I could not tell.
I pulled the laptop to me and opened the baby monitor’s built-in web server. In pristine infrared HD we looked directly at a shoulder and wildly waving downward pointed arm. There were jagged glass pieces on the floor. It fingers and jaw snapped open and closed. It could almost rake jagged fingernails across the smooth tile floor. What we could see of its head was covered with matted blood-caked hair as it continuously flailed about. After a moment, we could clearly see the thing had sliced or torn its own ears off possibly when getting through the opening. It snarled and snapped at the air around it.
For a moment I enabled the monitor’s audio, our end muted. The sound of a horde is terrible. The sound of just one monster only a few feet away is even more terrifying. I muted the audio immediately.
Its head was clearly through the opening. It was bashing its left arm against the inside of the door itself and against the wood trim below the broken sidelight. We still could not tell if it was hung up on clothes that could suddenly tear loose. Or, was it unable to get its torso through? One alternative meant some security while the other meant none. We had to act.
“I am loading the crossbow!” Ruth Ann said.
“Are you going up there?” I said.
“We have to kill that thing before it gets in. Where it is we can use its body to plug up the break. We have to do it now!”
“And by “we” you mean you again, right?”
She looked at me. “How many crossbows have you fired, Doug?” Ruth Ann got the crossbow, cocked it and made sure the safety was on. Then she snapped a stubby evil looking bolt in place. She picked up the revolver and put it in her pocket. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Easier than shooting fish in a barrel.”
I grabbed the carbine. With Ryan carrying the laptop so we could watch the baby monitor, all three of us made our way up the stairs to the bolted door. We clicked the one camp light we brought off and waited in total darkness for our pupils to dilate. We checked the baby monitor. The beast was still wedged in the sidelight. Ruth Ann unbolted the door leading out of the basement. There was no mute button now.
I moved out first so I could ready myself behind Ruth Ann as backup. Ruth Ann settled into a crouch with the cross bow at the ready. Ryan watched the laptop. His face glowed faintly. There was minimally enough light for us to see. Ryan nodded at Ruth Ann and whispered, “He’s still stuck - no change.”
“OK. You ready hon?” she said softly. I love it when my wife uses endearments before we shoot a snarling ghoul. Actually, this was the first time this situation had come up.
“Yeah.”
“OK, on three.” She stood up just behind the wall turning into our entryway. The crossbow was up and ready. She counted to three. Ruth Ann pivoted around the corner. The beast looked up and roared. The crossbow answered.
The beast fell silent instantly.
Ruth Ann pivoted back towards the open basement door. Ryan scurried down using the laptop screen for light, followed by Ruth Ann. I bolted the door behind us.
At the base of the stairs, Ruth Ann and Ryan stared at the laptop. When I could see the screen too, I saw the creature’s arm drooped and motionless, its head folded over its shoulder. Only a tiny nub of the missile’s tail protruded from its skull. I flipped to outside camera six. We could see the now really dead undead thing poking out from the doorway just as limp on the outside (of the house) as it was on the inside.
“Doug?” said Ryan. “What’s up with those windows? They’re easy to get into.”
“I’d rather not talk about it right now.”
To calm myself I went about making a copy of the H.264 video file containing the whole movie of the home invader. I transferred the copy over to the radio for transmission to Lambeau Field. They saw the set up; they might as well get to see the big finish.
For the next hour, we watched the cameras intently. We saw the ghouls bounce around the creature stuffing the hole in our house without processing the opportunity they had. We saw the remaining structure of the deck we had torn down completely disappear under a pile of human shaped spastic worker ants. Finally, we saw their density thin down to a relative trickle. On the all-camera view, we could see only a few dozen stragglers wandering around.
We felt safe enough to take turns sleeping two at a time.
Ruth Ann nudged me awake on Tuesday (Day 34), what would have been Election Day. Down in the basement there was no way to judge time. A tablet said it was a little after seven in the morning. The all-camera view showed clouds mixed with sprinkles of undead. The land looked like it was trampled by a horde of zombies. Oh wait, it was.
There was no change on the baby monitor except the pristine HD infrared picture was now a pristine HD color picture. What a miserable mess. The webcam in the garage showed nothing had changed in there. No breaches of any kind.
We gathered much of our things and walked up the flight of steps to the first floor. We stopped to scan the cameras again and listened to the stillness on the other side of the door. Opening up, nothing looked different as long as we did not look to the front door. We quietly made our way to the second floor where comforts including the kitchen awaited. I had a date with some coffee.
Actually, coffee presented the first of what would prove to be a day of changing directions. While still only thinking about firing up the brewing machine I glanced at the tactical radio sitting on the kitchen table. I remembered we had new demands on our power and wondered if I could use the ready-made cups with an electric kettle instead. I tried. It does not work. I tossed the box of stale samples in the back of the pantry and settled for some of the instant coffee we found at the Flynn’s now off-limits house.
Breakfast consisted of cold cereal with powdered milk. Homemade strawberry jam mixed in made it palatable. Objectively we were still living like kings compared to most of the planet but it did n
ot feel that way.
None of us wanted to talk. For my part, I did not know enough about the coming day to have anything worth saying and I did not want to talk about the past. We did and saw things in the last 24 hours that took the desire for conversation right out of us. What I wanted desperately was to get out on the roof and see things with my own eyes.
We bundled up. It was in the high 20’s. On opening the door, there were moans and screams here and there from the assorted detritus roaming around below. We were grateful not to hear the sound of a whole horde.
We heard jets and explosions. Looking east, we could see smoke rising from the direction of Eau Claire only about seven miles away. Through our binoculars, I could clearly see shapes over the city. We had slept through the heaviest of the bombardment. What we saw and heard now was the tail end. The horde would have moved beyond the Chippewa River by now.
Ruth Ann and I want to take a moment to digress. We want to acknowledge the Carson Park survivors. Both you and we lived through the experience of praying that a horde would pass through without tearing our limbs apart and eating our beating hearts. We however endured nothing compared to you folks who, in addition to the horde, hunkered down amidst bombs, missiles and the carnage that comes with them. We will see you at the reunions and for as long as we live, the first round will always be on Ruth Ann and me.
It was a good thing that the sanctuary at Chippewa Valley Regional was evacuated two weeks ago. There was no possibility anyone there would have survived.
The clouds said snow. They get a somber gray pregnant look before the flakes begin to fall. I imagined the land would look almost normal when covered in white. Sound would be deadened a bit, especially during the snow itself. That could be a good thing, as the deadening would deaden the sound of the dead.
Get Off My L@wn - A Zombie Novel Page 11