From Oblivion's Ashes

by Nyman, Michael E. A.

  Shortly after that, the roof was torn away, allowing beams of sunlight and fresh air to spill into the interior.

  Valerie sat at her computer going over reports, inventories, and projections. The clock on the wall was an enemy, telling her that it was well past time that she should have gone to sleep. But there was still so much work to do.

  Food. Twenty-one of the slaughterhouse victims had been stuffed into Dr. Burke’s hospital, barely alive but still needing food and water. The sixteen remaining victims were healthy enough that they didn’t need constant medical supervision, and had been sent to First Canadian Place, where makeshift accommodations had been hastily set up to receive them.

  Steve and Brad had returned from the Loblaws at Jarvis and Lakeshore with a number of five-gallon water jugs for the water coolers they’d acquired on Monday, plus a large cache of concentrated soups, bouillon cubes, and enough pasta to last for several weeks. Valerie immediately emailed them congratulations on the wisdom of their selection, asked for an inventory report, and gave instructions to take Crapmobile to First Canadian Place, where it was to recharge over night and handed off to Krissy and Elizabeth for an early morning shift.

  She sighed, hoping that the two women would be just as fortunate in their own hunt.

  Brian’s hydroponics project had been shelved. Instead, he and his crew were taking advantage of safe zones inside First Canadian and playing the role of a roving, scavenger gang. They tore apart fixtures, removed paneling, and dismantled partitions on lower floors so scrounge materials to keep Torstein’s crew in business. With only one Crapmobile and so many new mouths to feed, there were just too many other things they needed more.

  Which reminded her…

  Valerie jotted down a quick shopping list for Krissy’s morning shift. Blankets. Mattresses. Clothing. Concrete. Plaster. Screws. Indoor paint, light colors. Hinges. More water. Always more water, and likely to remain so until it rained. Plus a full three shipments of plywood, insulation, and flat, black exterior paint...

  Even as she typed, Valerie felt herself beginning to drift off in her chair. Reluctantly, she surrendered, turned off her monitor and got ready for bed.

  Her bed. By default, the fourth bedroom at the apartment had become hers, and Marshal had made it official, telling her she needed her own office. A far too-small closet housed her limited wardrobe, but it would have to do for now. Valerie accepted the sacrifice. It was, after all, a zombie apocalypse.

  She stripped down to her underwear, threw on a sleeping blouse and crawled eagerly into bed. With the flicker of a smile, she secretly played with the mental image of a nearly naked Marshal. Just like counting sheep. Not that anything intimate was likely to happen between them, of course. Not yet, at any rate. There were still far too many hoops for him to jump through before anything like that could happen. And besides, they were both far, far too busy.

  She hadn’t yet decided whether or not she wanted matters between her and Marshal to escalate. They were a good team, but that didn’t mean they’d make a good couple. Still, he was rather scrumptious… and dangerous, in a pirate slash highlander slash gunfighter motif. It was fun to think about, in those moments just before sleep took her. And if she ever did decide that they’d make a good couple, well...

  Baby seals wouldn’t be as helpless.

  A knock at the door broke the quiet just as she was drifting off.

  “Hold on,” she called blurrily, reaching for a robe and throwing it on. Of course, there had to be something! Sleep? Who needs sleep? Sleep is for pussies.

  She flung open the door and saw an exhausted Kumar.

  “Kumar,” she said. “You’re back.”

  “Oh!” His eyes swept up and down her form-fitting bathrobe and he flushed. “S-s-sorry! I… uh… You’re normally still awake at… uh..”

  “Stop,” she said testily. “Stop that right now. It’s a bathrobe, Kumar. Not a bikini. Start over. Conversation, take two: Kumar! You’re back!”

  “Guh?” the programmer blinked at her. “Uh… yeah. I, uh, I caught a ride back with Krissy when she dropped Steve and Brad off at the hospital. I finished helping set up Eric’s network of prison-cams-”

  “Let’s get a drink,” Valerie sighed.

  Kumar rubbed his face tiredly. “Yeah, sure. Let’s go.”

  Seconds later, they were seated at Marshal’s bar. Valerie had a gin and tonic. Kumar had a beer and pulled out a joint.

  “So, yeah,” he said, lighting up. “How’s it feel being left in charge?”

  “Peachy,” Valerie answered. “I measured myself. I’m two inches taller today, bullets bounce off me, and I think I can now move objects with the power of my mind.”

  Kumar laughed.

  “So. What did you want to talk about? Prison-cams turn out okay?”

  “Prison-cams are up and working. The prisoners get no privacy, but they each get access to toilets. The fifty-eighth floor had about a dozen professional offices on it, each with their own washroom, so we’ve got ‘em locked up there. Eric says we may change things down the line, but for the time being, they all sleep in handcuffs.”

  “Lovely,” Valerie said, taking a sip. “Bedtime wrist ornaments. Stylish.”

  Kumar shrugged. “They’d be dead if Marshal hadn’t spoken for them. Anyway, that wasn’t what I wanted to talk to you about. Do you remember the report about the Swarm going on down on the U of T Campus?”

  Valerie frowned. “Vaguely. Everything that happened before the attack on the slaughterhouse feels like ancient history now.”

  Kumar snickered halfway through a deep drag.

  “I know what you mean,” he said, offering her the joint.

  “Just one puff,” she said, “to help me sleep.”

  Kumar rummaged through his bag and pulled out a laptop.

  “This is the footage from about a week ago,” he said, tapping a few keys and turning it so that she could see the screen. “Notice how far away we are? That’s the ISU we set up on College looking up St. George street.”

  “Okay,” Valerie said, passing the joint back and exhaling.

  “So I checked on it, when I got back tonight,” Kumar said. Tap, tap. “Split screen. The one on the right is taken from today. Do you see? It’s still going.”

  “Really? That’s odd. Marshal said that they hardly ever last more than a few days. Five at the most.”

  “Yeah. That’s what I thought too. But then I thought, “So what?” Marshal hasn’t seen everything, right? So I decided that maybe this was something new, and that I should try to take a closer look and document it. After all, if there are such things as long-term Swarms, then it’s something we should know about, right?”

  He tapped more keys, and the picture zoomed in close and froze.

  “First thing I noticed was the degree of damage. Main concentration seems to be a courtyard next to the McLennan building. Look at the grounds and the stonework.”

  “Wow,” Valerie said, her eyes widening. “It’s all torn up. The ground looks like an artillery range. And the walls all around are… my goodness!”

  “Exactly. They’re really looking hard for something, so hard that they’re ripping up pavement and shredding the walls. Now, look at the first picture.”

  Valerie peered at the screen. “Not much difference.”

  “Yeah,” Kumar said, zooming out again. “Which means they’d already been there for at least a couple of days, maybe a whole week before we first discovered them. Add that up, and it’s possibly two weeks of non-stop Swarm, right in the heart of Downtown Toronto.”

  “Good god,” Valerie murmured. “A perma-Swarm? That’s a threat we can’t afford to ignore. And… that’s not how Swarms are supposed to work. According to Marshal, they get bigger and bigger until they solve the source of their problems.”

  “We can’t see the whole of the Swarm from this angle,” Kumar pointed out. “Most of it could be taking place out of view. Remember. We’re looking at this thing from quite a di
stance, and we haven’t risked getting any closer out of fear of endangering our methods. Marshal might still be right, and if he’s right, then there could be thousands.”

  “We need to let Marshal know about this right away,” Valerie said, putting down her drink.

  “Can’t be done,” Kumar said grimly. “That’s the second thing I wanted to talk to you about. We lost contact with Shitbox some time this afternoon.”

  A flash of panic fluttered in Valerie’s chest, but she pushed it away.

  “Not a big deal,” she said. “He said that might happen as they got further and further from our signal network. That’s why he brought the boosters, so that he could create a linked chain all the way up to the Tesla dealership. Once installed, we’d be able to salvage that whole strip and never lose contact with the network.”

  “Yeah,” Kumar said hopefully. “It has to be something like that, right?”

  “Right?” Valerie flashed him a smile. “Why are you asking me? Isn’t that what he said he was going to do?”

  “Yes, but…” Kumar rubbed the back of his neck. “Setting up one of those towers shouldn’t take more than thirty minutes, an hour at most. The computer said he’s been out of contact since two this afternoon.”

  The panic in Valerie’s chest returned, but she did not let it reach her face.

  “We are not having this conversation,” Valerie said. “There could be any number of reasons why he’s not in contact with us. It could be a malfunction in the gear, or he encountered a Swarm and felt it was too dangerous to set up, or maybe he just decided to make up some time so he could get back quicker.’

  She threw back the rest of her drink and stood up.

  “We need to get sleep first,” she said. “Tomorrow morning-”

  “That’s not everything,” Kumar said.

  Valerie rolled her eyes. “You mean there’s more? Good Heavens, Kumar. You’ve already said enough to give me nightmares. What else could there be?”

  Kumar exhaled a big cloud of smoke like a sigh.

  “A lot more. Sorry. When I couldn’t reach Marshal, I took a few minutes to try and decide how I was going to tell you all this. So I went back to examining the Swarm footage again. I almost didn’t see it. You haven’t seen it yet. The reason is that because we were so far away, we zoomed in and missed the forest for the trees. At least, that’s the only explanation I can come-”

  “Kumar. What are you rambling on about?”

  He pointed at a particular spot on the screen.

  “Do you see it now?”

  “What am I supposed to see? We’re so far away… from everything…”

  She leaned forward, staring at the laptop in disbelief.

  “Oh my god,” she said. “Can… can you bring that part closer?”

  Without changing his expression, Kumar punched a key.

  “Oh my god,” Valerie said again.

  “Yeah,” Kumar said, shaking his head. “And that’s what couldn’t wait until morning. The top floors of the McLennan building still have all their windows. Whatever is happening on the ground, in that courtyard, it’s so engrossing, it’s like a flytrap for the undead. Any of them that enter the area get caught and pulled in before they ever get a chance to investigate the upper floors of the building. Those top floors are like the eye of a particularly nasty and apocalyptic hurricane, and the undead aren’t the only ones who are trapped.”

  Valerie stared.

  A very human silhouette, barely visible against the window glare, stared back.

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Day 48: Gods and Monsters

  A small group crowded around the television in the apartment.

  “Okay, look here,” Kumar said, pointing at the screen with a laser pointer that Angie had given to him as a gift about a week ago. “See that? It’s some sort of hi-def, video projection coming from the building. Originally, it would have been pointed at the flat parts of the wall here… here… and here. What’s interesting is that, even with most of the walls destroyed, the images kept on appearing in all the dust that got kicked up in the air. See? That made it vaguely holographic to the zombies’ rudimentary sense of sight.”

  The group just gazed, open-mouthed, at the devastation before them. Eric’s eyes were wide and thoughtful, while Torstein, Krissy, Brian, and Elizabeth just stared in disbelief. Paul looked amazed, shaking his head in wonderment from time to time. Valerie, who’d already watched the incredible footage, nibbled at one of her thumbs, her eyes flickering back and forth between the screen and the astounded audience.

  “Now,” Kumar continued, freezing the screen and pointing the laser at a particular image, “here we can see one of the surviving speakers. The whole courtyard used to have a total of twenty for making announcements to students and faculty on their lunch breaks – there’s a university food service cafeteria one floor down – and what with all the windows smashed out, there have to be at least a half a dozen more in range. Currently, all the surviving speakers are pumping out eighties music with a five minute pause between each song. The acoustics in that courtyard are fantastic, by the way, or at least they used to be. Sound bounces everywhere, making it really difficult to locate the source. Music students have been known to take advantage, and security was always chasing away buskers. Anyway, that would explain why the speakers, most of which are hidden in the masonry, haven’t all been destroyed yet.”

  Silence greeted this observation, and Valerie sighed. It was to be expected. She’d had a hard time focusing on the details herself. If she allowed them, they’d probably be willing to simply sit and stare at the sight all day.

  “Show them the chute,” she told Kumar.

  “Right,” Kumar said, letting the footage play forward. “The chute. We hovered over the chute for a few moments, wondering what the hell it was all about. It was obvious that somebody had expended a great deal of effort and no small amount of risk setting it up. Notice the incline? A steep fifty to sixty degrees, projecting ten feet from an open window on the top floor. You’ll never believe what it’s for.”

  He played the video forward, and the drone advanced to within three or four feet of the chute, which appeared to be home-made with several bent pieces of metal panels fastened together with nuts and bolts. An unpleasant brown and yellowish streaking marred the surface, and it took only a few seconds for the audience to realize what it was.

  “They’re dumping their… their shit and piss on the zombies?” Torstein asked incredulously.

  “That’s sick,” Paul murmured.

  “Talk about gall,” Krissy marveled, shaking her head “Bad enough they seem to be out of sight to the undead, but to dump your poop on them...”

  “Yeah, it’s got style,” Kumar said appreciatively, grinning at the screen. “But that’s not why they do it. Sight isn’t the most important tool the undead use to hunt us.”

  “Scent!” Brian exclaimed out loud, even as several other faces lit up.

  “Exactly,” Kumar said, pointing at his friend. “And whoever set up this zombie fly-trap seems to have figured that out. The human waste spills out the end of the chute, gets caught up by wind resistance, and literally splatters all over the courtyard. Result? Fresh smell of human permeates the place. Added to the projectors and the human voices belting out eighties songs, and it’s got to be driving the zombies crazy. They probably don’t even know the crap is falling from above because the dust from their own destruction has gotten so thick, they can barely see the sky.”

  “So,” Krissy said, looking amazed. “They make this big dust cloud… the images from three projectors give them the sight of humans to hunt, the speakers project the sound of humans, together with the rain of… of waste gives the absolute conviction that the humans are all around them. It’s… it’s astounding, really.”

  “It’s also the reason that the Swarm is so large,” Steve pointed out. “There’s got to be thousands of those things, trying to figure this out. Until they do, the top floors of the McLenn
an building may as well not exist.”

  “We estimate around four thousand,” Valerie interjected, “give or take a few stragglers. Obviously, it’s hard to be sure. Marshal and Angie are the only ones of us who’ve ever seen a Swarm up close before, or had the time to study it. Marshal’s seen three. None of them ever exceeded a couple of thousand bodies.”

  “They want to solve this riddle bad,” Kumar said, twirling his pointer.

  “Why haven’t they, yet?” Eric wondered out loud. “I mean, it’s not that hard to figure out. And if what Marshal thinks is true, and their intelligence does increase collectively, then what’s the problem?”

  “Maybe it’s a matter of how they think,” Elizabeth suggested, frowning. “A river dam seems obvious to humans and beavers, but only one of the two builds one using mathematics. And for that matter, when you stop to think about it, this… this mousetrap isn’t as obvious as you think. You’ve got three, complicated, completely unrelated ingredients all combining to give the appearance of a rather straightforward conclusion, at least from the undead point of view. In order to dismantle the riddle of why humans aren’t there, they’d have to be able to explain away all the evidence telling them that they are.”

  There was a silence as the group considered this.

  “Not a bad theory,” Eric said, nodding absently. “Still. It’s bad for us.”

  “Why?” Elizabeth asked. She waved at the screen. “We can’t afford to get involved in anything like this.”

  “Not sure I agree with you, Liz,” Valerie said.

  “Why not?”

  “For a whole bunch of reasons, actually,” Valerie said, gazing at the screen. “Kumar. Show them the part where we fly the drone right up to the window.”

  “Right,” Kumar said with a grim expression, advancing the video further.

  The image rolled ahead in high speed, skimming past a number of architectural shots, and a long period of hovering over a boiling sea of angry undead in Attack mode, tearing up the already shredded pavement and absently crushing chunks of stone.