Surviving the Day (11 page)

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Interlude: Boreling Empire

After Hours Schedule Guide

 1 : Headliners : Scary Mayhem Planet Reality Apocalypse Show Highlights

 2 : Headliners : Apocalypse on the Water

 3 : Headliners : Funniest Armed Forces Moments

 4 : Headliners : Worst Bunkers Ever

 5 : Headliners : Afraid of the Dark

 6 : Headliners : Best Bio-Creature Attacks

 7 : Headliners : Alien Faces of Death

 8 : Headliners : Games Highlights

 9 : Games : Die or Not Die

10 : Games : Voter's Choice

11 : Games : Live Like an Alien

12 : Pay and Play : Drone Controller

13 : Pay and Play : Baffle an Alien

14 : Pay and Play : Find the Bunker!

15 : Entertainment Talk : Jezeen the Irresistible with Team Zeke

16 : Entertainment Talk : Dradge Borgwah 

17 : Alien Interest : “The Prepared Alien”

18 : Alien Interest : “My Mom is a Zombie!”

19 : Alien Interest : Following Your Favorite Aliens

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The Professor

The Professor sipped his wine as he sat on the balcony, high above the darkened street. The Geiger counter on the table clicked. He turned his head to look at it, and then checked the radiation badge he wore.

Nothing.

“How can you have an EMP without radiation?” he wondered aloud. He knew how they worked, having experimented with creating small EMP generators out of camera capacitors and coils. He'd fried a nice Radio Shack solar-powered calculator with one. An EMP strong enough to effect, say, his refrigerator, should have put out enough radiation to turn his badge dosimeter all kinds of nice colors. He looked at it again.

Nothing.

He finished his wine and went back inside, out of the darkening night of screams and cries, far-off gunshots and scattered fires. He set the glass in his kitchen and went downstairs to his electronics stores. He opened the bunker door, cognizant of the distant scraping and thumping noises of the creatures three and a half floors below. He turned on the lights, closed the door and locked it, then took down a box from a shelf as he thought about the unfolding disaster.

Apocalypse.

The Professor removed the 12 volt HAM radio from its box and broke the seal on its static bag, plugged it in and connected the external antenna. He switched it on and set it to scan for signals, pausing on anything it found for one minute before saving the frequency and continuing the scan. He sat with his head in his hands, thinking.

Apocalypse.

The One Word that matches the question. “What do impossible zombies and an EMP that doesn’t add up have in common?”

He looked up from his notebook as the radio stopped on a frequency, but the only sound was static. He put on a set of headphones so that he could hear the signal better, but it still just sounded like static. He took off the headphones and stood up, walked over to a box and pulled out a MacBook, also sealed in a static bag. He plugged it in with a car adapter, then connected a cable from the HAM radio to the computer. He booted the system and ran Audacity and started it recording. He should be able to record all night—but maybe he should rig up some kind of sound level-activated recording system. He had a stack of Raspberry Pi's he could use. Back when he was a student, he had plugged in USB sound cards and written sound-activation stuff in Python code. He'd hoped to sell them as radio silence detection systems, but he never finished it. The code was lost on Github, gone now, but maybe he could recreate it—no more Google or Stack Overflow to help him, though.

The Professor removed his reading glasses and rubbed his nose. He took a last look at the setup, dutifully searching for frequencies, then headed for the door, picking up his ever-present AK and slinging it over his shoulder. As he reached up to remove the heavy door chain, the radio stopped.

“Q. C.Q. Calling C.Q. This is KA2YBI. Kilo Alpha Two Yankee Bravo India. I'm in Peru, Massachusetts. Is anyone there? C.Q. C.Q.”

The Professor took off the rifle and hung it next to the door, walked back to his set and picked up his microphone, paused, looked down at the microphone, then set it back down.

What if they're listening? What if they're targeting communications systems?

“I know I would be,” he said aloud. He stopped the scan for the moment and listened to see if anyone responded. The Professor grabbed a book and leafed through it to find the section on signal codes. The signal was clear and strong, a “59”. He considered responding with that. Short enough?

As he picked up the microphone, the operator’s voice changed. “What the…” came over the air, then a hiss, a clanking sound, like a hammer striking an anvil, then finally dead air—no static, no sound. Dead air meant the transmitter was still broadcasting. The professor heard a series of clicks and brief squeals, then the transmission stopped and became static—nothing transmitting. He put down the microphone, glad he hadn't responded.

It sure sounded like something abnormal took him off the air.

“And when are they going to find me despite my Faraday cages and positive air pressure bunkers?”

The Professor wheeled his chair to the computer and zoomed out the recorded waveform, looking at the odd noises. He stopped the recording, saved the file, then started another recording. He reached for his headphones next to the HAM set, but stopped, hearing a faint banging noise.

The Professor stood and went to the door and put his ear on it. The banging noise was continuing, and it was somewhere in the stairwell. He strapped on the AK and added a Kel-Tec racked on the wall next to it. He opened the door slowly, leaving on the heavy chain, and looked out. Nothing, but the banging and rattling was still going on somewhere downstairs. He disconnected the chain and closed the door, taking the time to lock the deadbolt, then crept down the stairs, checking carefully around corners the entire time. He passed the armory and reached the door to the medical floor, and the banging intensified.

The stairwell was utterly packed with zombies, they were climbing over each other and pulling on the barricade. As he watched, a table leg was broken and the mass shifted, allowing a creature to move upward a tiny bit.

Not good.

He slung the shotgun and brought up the AK, single fire, and looked for a shot. He was as likely to strike his barricade as he was to hit a zombie in the head. He lowered the gun.

Think man, or you're zombie food.

The Professor slung the AK-47 and ran up the stairs to the top floor, pulled out his keychain and unbolted the door. He ran to his food storage and grabbed a five-gallon jug of peanut oil, then carried it back out the door, leaving it unlocked. He trudged down the stairs, lugging the heavy container as well as the guns on his back, reaching the barricade with its mob of zombies only about two minutes after he’d run back up the stairs. He quickly opened the container and pulled out a Mora knife and sliced out the seal.

“Dammit,” he muttered. He put the container down, opened the medical facility and grabbed a plastic container that held about a quart, then shut and locked the door. He went back to the oil and poured it into the cup, then threw it on the zombies and the barricade.

He continued until the five gallon container was emptied, then tossed the container down the stairwell for good measure. Finally, he leaned against the wall to watch and see if it worked.

Sure enough, a zombie would grab onto the barricade and its hand would slip off. Other zombies tried to pull and scramble up the stairs but were defeated by the slick oil that covered the stairs, the barricade and all the other zombies.

And now they all smelled a bit like peanuts instead of unwashed and slightly ammoniated flesh.

A bit.

He picked up the quart container and took it upstairs to be washed, then locked the first floor. On his way to the electronics room, he stopped in his armory and grabbed two cans of ammo for his AK—just in case he got stuck for real. He sat the cans down away from the door and look at the workbench. The HAM radio was scanning and the computer was recording. It looked like the radio had stopped on some static again, as the recording program had captured a few sections of low-level audio. Nobody talking though – no sounds except the static.

The Professor opened the recording of the operator from Pittsfield. He played it back, over and over, sometimes looping the odd noises – the hissing, the clicks and the squeals.

First, he looped the hissing sounds, listening to that for more than five minutes. Not like a snake or an animal, more like air escaping. Almost like the last bit of fire extinguisher gas. He wrote that down in his notebook.

Next, he looped the clicking sounds. He'd always been fascinated with the language of insects, and he could have sworn this was something like that.

Finally, he looped the squealing sounds. Artificial, possibly feedback, but it wasn't just one frequency – he heard several together. Highlighting one section of sound, he profiled it and then filtered that part out of the squealing and played the result.

His hair stood on end. It sounded almost exactly like a 1200 baud modem signal. Certainly artificial and most likely computer generated. It was a sound from his youth. Logging onto CompuServe and hanging out in a CB room. FidoNet downloading forum messages. A Wildcat BBS with Star Wars fan fiction stories.

He wrote it all down in his notebook, then re-read his notes from the beginning.

If I can actually read that signal, or just duplicate it somehow…

He opened a terminal window on his Mac and started typing a script:

]$ nano processSignal.php

It's going to be a long night.

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Interlude: Boreling Empire: Aliens are People Too

By Dradge Borgwah

Do you remember the Ruiarkians? I do. We pulled a male from the planet and even brought it here for an interview, shackled inside a bubble of its planet’s atmosphere. We asked it about its life on Ruiarkia, the name they gave their world. It told us of their history, how their machines became smart, how they nearly took over. Thousands of years had passed, and their ban on computers had remained.

Of course we already knew that—it's why we unleashed the smart machines. Their societal fear was off the charts, created an audience larger than any program in history, and made the network we know today, made the
society
we have today! A society built on our ability to exploit the pathetic sufferings of “lesser creatures.” Just an extension of the doglard fights that have been part of our culture as long as we can remember, along with putting fighting spurs on bridlings, and betting on which one will survive the fight.

I recollect how the Ruiarkian squealed as it told of his mate’s death at the claws of a killer-shredder. The audience laughed as the scene was replayed on the monitor. They laughed even harder when the male tore at the prison of his interview bubble, and the footage of his death as he suffocated in our atmosphere was replayed endlessly on the re-runs of the Apocalypse Show.

But I ask you – are we better for the kind of “entertainment” we have now? Shows about horrific crimes that we deplore, and
at the same time
, shows where we torture and kill thinking creatures? There's even the “Alien Appreciation Society”, intent on tasting every alien they can find. Sometimes it must be carefully prepared, as it would poison anyone who consumed it incorrectly. And other times, well, we have the Marcshgots, said to be one of the most delicious creatures ever found, best eaten alive so that their “terror juices” are at their height of flavor. Of course you know of Marcsh, the only planet to avoid complete destruction, but only because the Mellow Marcsh Treats Corporation lobbied against it in order to protect their food empire.

An entire planet of sentient creatures, reared like cattle for our pleasure.

We are the Borelings, the greatest empire in the known galaxy.

We are better than this.

The End

Continued in Book 3 (preview at the end of this book)

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ApocalypseMakers.com
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