by Nick Cole
He listened to the swamp.
There was a heavy, dull and constant buzz of unseen insects.
No strangers, though.
Just the low burble of the swamp beneath the buzzing sound.
Then Cory remembered something. Something important. He said it aloud. “Cory, always follow the water. It will lead you someplace safe.”
Right now, Cory wanted to go to someplace safe. He wanted that badly.
Cory remembered the day he’d spent hiking in the mountains with Daddy. Cory hadn’t liked the drive up. They’d come too close to the cliff’s edge on the highway that climbed higher and higher into the mountains. Cory had needed to shut his eyes because they were so high up, and when he’d opened them again, they were in the middle of a real forest and the air had smelled clean and good to Cory. And it was quiet up there, which was something Cory liked very much.
Daddy had taught him many things that day, most of which Cory couldn’t remember now when he needed to. Things about the woods. An important thing about water.
... and an important thing about being lost.
Yes, Cory said aloud. “If you ever get lost, Cory, just follow the water.” Daddy called it a “stream”. Follow the stream and that will lead you someplace safe.
Cory stood up and walked toward the water’s edge. He bent to drink some of the water, but didn’t like the smell that came from it. He got up once more and brushed the wet sand from his chest. He put his mask back on and began to follow the twisting stream as it dove deeper and deeper into the swamp. At times he even waded through it, his pant legs and tennis shoes getting wet and sandy as it grew deeper.
It was very quiet now.
Even the invisible gnats had stopped buzzing.
A dense fog had closed in on Cory, coming out from the trees along the bank of the stream, snaking up and onto the water, lying along the bottom of the swamp like a waiting thing. Closing in on everything and blotting out the world with its heavy thick blanket of quiet. It was cool and silent in the fog. Cory liked that.
He thought he’d like to find someplace where there weren’t any strangers and maybe there was a dog that would be nice to Cory. A dog he could pet. Dogs were never mean to Cory unless someone had made them that way. Dogs were always good friends.
That would be nice, thought Cory, and wished as hard as he could that he would find a dog right now.
Chapter Nineteen
Bertram had been watching the ancient grainy black and white CCTV all that day. He’d heated the last of the leftover possum stew they’d made a few days back and then gone across to the main room, enjoying as he always did, the smell of the butterscotch colored carpet and the ancient books along the shelves. As always there was the distant hum of the servers whining, whirring and sometimes ticking with the last of humanity’s knowledge sleeping inside.
He sat down again to watch the battery of black and white CCTV monitors.
The view of the shadowy alley.
The washed out view of the bridge.
The camera underneath the bridge pointed north toward Los Angeles, watching the train tracks disappear into the desolate north. Other cameras surrounded the neighborhoods adjacent to the secret library.
He checked the temperature inside the building. Forty-eight degrees. He pulled his old coat close to his considerable bulk and sat blowing on the re-heated stew in the chipped bowl, waiting for the transient they’d spotted at various times over the past few days to reappear again.
They’d first seen him three days ago. There hadn’t been a soul down in this neck of the woods other than the two of them and the occasional visits from Captain Rose and his squad.
“Traffic request for Hotel Six.” It was Cade. Then, “That stew still good? Possum smelled off from the get go,” asked the tall, bearded, younger man as he sat down with a huff in an old patched office chair that squeaked a wide groan as he settled back into its natural inclination to lean impossibly backward. Then Cade handed the message to Bertram.
“They still coming in through the wire tonight, up there at the Reseda Outpost?” asked Bertram.
“That’s what the man said. Week in the downtown ruins and they can’t find that HK air traffic control server node.” Cade bent forward and snatched up the bent spoon from Bertram’s untended bowl. He tasted, made a face, and swallowed it anyway.
“He talk about the water condenser?” asked Bertram, studying the old paper with the new scribbling. Underneath Cade’s chicken scratch, a beautiful woman in a red dress looked back over her shoulder and smiled. It was an ad for perfume or some such from the Before.
“Yeah,” mumbled Cade.
“Well, that’s the code. Means they’re coming in tonight. I’ll get a message ready and we’ll open a router. Howse yer anti-virus working?”
“As good as it’s ever gonna get, just like I tell you every time.” Cade spooned up more stew.
Bertram glared at Cade from underneath his gray bushy eyebrows.
“There’s more in the kitchen if you want to go ahead and have yer own bowl, instead of this one. The one I made for myself.”
“Nah, it’s off.”
“Then why are you eating it?”
“Just makin’ sure.”
Bertram pulled out an old binder, its plastic spine peeling. He checked the front, the code cypher index, then turned to the appropriate page. Sticking his tongue out and bending to the scrap of paper, he set a stubby pencil to translating the message for Hotel Six.
An hour later, the message was ready and the servers locked down with encrypted double blind passwords and all of Cade’s antivirus army up and running on a battery of hodgepodge monitors representing every decade of computer development. Green screens where zeroes and the occasional one rained down across the monitor. 16-bit color monitors with clunky numeric figures representing the latest machine-lethal algorithms humanity had been able to develop after the Before. Even a barely functioning liquid crystal touchscreen that had been the latest thing the last year Apple made anything. The last year any corporation had made anything for that matter. Their best monitor showed the system batch and root files Cade would use for command and control as they opened up their router to the patchwork resistance internet. Key system entry points were locked down by blocky red bars on another 16-bit monitor that had the word Amiga written along the bottom.
“Cold in here,” mumbled Cade.
Bertram reached over and flicked the switch on an electric space heater. A few of the coils began to turn a slight orange. None of the others would. Ever again.
“Ah,” exhaled Cade. “Much better, dontcha think?”
Bertram grunted, rubbing his jowly chin stubble as he double-checked the message one last time.
“Alright, let’s check out the neighborhood for stalkers,” whispered Bertram to himself. His thick fingers began to dance across the old, dirty gray plastic buttons of the worn keyboard where the CTRL button was missing and had been replaced by a jury rigged enlisted soldier’s US Brass insignia.
A moment later Cade, watching his battery of monitors, whispered, “Rabbits are out of the hole and no one’s chasing.”
They’d broadcasted a bogus message across the internet to see if any HK algorithms gave chase. Nothing moved and the message sped off toward a useless fiber optic junction that could only contact a battered MWRAP Command and Control vehicle just outside the Tijuana blast zone.
“Be careful old man, Cans are getting smarter every day,” whispered Cade. “Scramble the back trail and bounce it off the old bunker array near LAX. They’ll never...”
“Cade, I was doing this ‘fore you ever laid eyes on a computer, so shut up and let me work!” whispered Bertram.
Cade thought about asking why they always whispered when they went live, but he knew the answer. They whispered because death could be just moments away.
Bertram nosed around the router’s neighborhood, looking for clues and sifting traffic that had cluttered the network on the
day the bombs fell. Looking for anything that might tell him the Cans had been there recently. Any lag other than the appreciable lag of equipment twenty years past its operational date, and that was reason enough to shut the whole system down and hide. They’d have to find another way to get the message through or just hope the best for Hotel Six and the recon squad coming in through the wire tonight.
There was lag, and then there was unacceptable lag.
Bertram watched the ping counts and mentally calculated their echo. A two second error was all he needed to know the Cans had been there.
“See here,” he motioned for Cade to watch monitor six. If their HK’s are hanging out, monitoring it, or if they’ve even high-jacked it, that number’s gonna be a lot more stable.”
“Why’s that?” asked Cade.
“They can’t stand it. Cans can’t stand bad machinery. They always fix it. Always try to improve it somehow if they’re going to use it.”
They watched the router pings jump around a bit.
“Looks good to me,” mumbled Cade. “And by good, I mean wonky.”
“Yeah,” replied Bertram. “Does look good.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes. Cade watched the clock on the wall.
“It’s after four, Bert. Hotel Six’ll need time to get the dogs ready.”
Bertram, mouth open, watched all the monitors. He was dimly aware of the smell of burnt wiring and the ancient yellowing books in the library beyond. He looked over his shoulder, out into the main room and across to the server room. He didn’t see any flames in the darkness there.
But that’s where the lights are really on, thought Bertram. That’s where the fire of civilization still burns.
“Alright,” he sighed and seemed to momentarily shudder. Let’s open the router and see what the old net looks like these days.”
Cade bent to his keyboards, sliding his chair along the monitor banks in what used to be the librarian’s break room, tapping in brief commands at each station. He glanced up to check the monitors, seeing what he needed to see, then moved along quickly.
“I’m hot. All defenses up and rolling.”
“Bandwidth,” mumbled Bertram.
“Check.”
Then, “I’m in,” said Bertram. There was a moment of silence that followed. The kind of quiet only those who violate graveyards after midnight know about.
“Moving through the portal. Cover me.”
Cade watched a monitor. Mouth open. Then he bent over a keyboard and slapped in a series of quick commands.
“Spam jam.” Then, “Covered.”
A million old forwarded emails began to download and re-download across a live cake decorating website from the Before. Millions of lost messages about everything from cat videos to government hatred began to flood Angie’s Unique Cakes.
“Uh....” moaned Bertram. “Oh.”
Cade felt his chain-smoking heart seize. He’d want to light one of his homemade specials if it were indeed their last moments, but Bertram would never let him smoke inside the library. Still, if the Cans were gonna drop a bomb on them, then who cared anyway. Cans would use a TAC nuke to kill a mouse. Cans didn’t care that way. They just wanted to make sure it got done.
The “it” being the eradication of humanity.
Cade stopped himself from going there and settled for a, “What’s wrong, Bert?”
“Seattle’s Best is gone. Can’t find it anywhere.”
“Can we use another website?”
Time. Tapping.
“Okay, got an old financial maintenance server running out of a bank in Whittier.”
“I don’t like it, Bert. That’s way too close to Can Central.”
Silence.
“I know, but it’s all we got right now if we’re going to help Hotel Six get through the wire.”
Tapping.
“Okay, I’m in. Setting up the message.”
Cade swiveled and sent himself off to another monitor. “Alright, scrambling your IP there. Bert, this place has got six open sockets. It’s Grand Central!”
“I know. Someone’s using it as a message board.”
“Who? Who could be living that close to It?”
“Gangs?”
“Not that close.”
“Resistance?”
“We’d know about ‘em.”
“Maybe Black Section?”
Cade waited a minute. To him that wouldn’t be the only explanation. Still, he didn’t like it.
An alarm went off on an old Mac monitor Cade had worked with for six months to get up and running.
“What is it?” said Bertram.
“Maybe nothing, but hold on a sec,” moaned Cade. “It’s that old Mac.” They both knew it was unreliable.
“I told you that thing was...”
“Nah, Bert, it’s true and straight. You got a hound.”
“How many seconds?” asked Bertram.
“Thirty ... forty-five at most. Either cut the whole line or send the message.”
Bertram weighed the cons for ten seconds. There weren’t any pros. There never were. The scout unit that was coming in through the wire had been on a long range patrol. They’d survived and maybe even found a Can factory. Something the resistance could take out. And then there was always, in the back of Bertram’s mind, the hope that whatever the patrols found out there in the ruins was something big. Something big enough to end the Cans once and for all.
But that’s just hope, Bertram always told himself. Just hope, and nothing more.
And then there was the reason why he had to do something.
If the patrol tried to in come through the wire at the Reseda Bunker without a heads up, they’d get shot to shreds. And, if they did and the dogs weren’t ready, there was a chance everyone down inside the pit, the bunker, would be dead. One infiltration unit, one “Terminator” in that patrol, and everyone inside the pit was dead by dawn.
There was always that in the back of Bertram’s mind.
And... there was also some little part that just wanted to finally give up and let go. He was tired of everything meaning life and death. His whole existence, every day of it since the bombs, had been a struggle for life, or death.
That and nothing more.
He hit SEND and shot the message off into the secure Reseda Comm Gathering Array. A clever warren of routers and receivers, dead ends and double blinds on ancient computers running complex crypto so the simple message of someone, the few of what remained of humanity, might know that another someone was coming in out of the darkness tonight. Through the wire.
Coming in from the never-ending nightmare created by machines.
“Blow the site, Bert?”
If they did, the Can Hound would know for sure. At that point it would have a choice. Either follow the message and see where it went, or back track and find the sender. In his heart, Bertram knew the Hound would chase the message. When it didn’t, his jaw literally dropped.
Suddenly he and Cade were scrambling to shut down routers. Outermost first, as they watched with wide-eyed fear, then the traffic on the best ones nearest the library. The last bastion of man’s entire knowledge database as far as the resistance, or what was left of humanity living beneath the rubble and the Cans, was concerned. The library.
Bertram exploded. “This is why we don’t do comm, Cade!”
To lose the entire library, all the beautiful old hardcopies and magazines and the even more valuable digital files hiding in the server room because of a lone patrol wasn’t worth it, roared Bertram inwardly.
But Bertram had had this conversation with everyone, including himself, many, many times.
“Shutting it all down,” Cade called out.
“Hurry... it’s inside Fullerton. Ahhh... it nailed the original IP out of that station Carver set up last year.”
“Working on it,” mumbled Cade.
“Well do something quick, otherwise we’ve got to nuke the whole system just to have enough time
to get the hell out of here with the entire library. That’s a lot to lose, Cade, because of traffic!”
Tapping. Burning ozone. Humming.
“Alright, see that server down in Tustin. I’m broadcasting help messages from an old Day One database. That Hound might think that’s all it is. Just us looking for our own after all these years.”
Bertram chewed his thick lower lip.
“Now,” said Cade quietly. “Let’s drop off the net and close her down. I’ve covered our routers in old received message traffic. They’ll think we’re just another dead station sending and receiving on automatic.”
Bertram reached down and physically disconnected the routers.
“Should we shut down the mainframe in the library?” asked Cade.
If they did, thought Bertram of the salvaged mainframe, it might not ever come back online again. One day, if the library didn’t get new equipment, that was going to happen.
One day.
“No.”
They watched their double-blind monitored routers. The pings danced all over the place. The lag was the lag. Nothing stabilized. Nothing was fixed. Nothing suddenly improved. If the Hound had gotten lost somewhere in Tustin, they’d never know. If it had gotten close, they might know. If it found them, well, they said “SkyNet” or whatever the dammed thing called itself could nuke from orbit if it was important enough.
If it knew, thought Bertram to himself, that we’re the last storehouse of all human knowledge, it wouldn’t even hesitate to drop a bomb on us, right now.
They watched everything for another hour, switching the cameras between all the feeds outside while monitoring the root systems crawl. Watching for changes. Cade continued, long after Bertram had gone back to the views on the CCTV. The empty road. The ruins of the silent gray high school near the bridge. The worn out frozen cars along the freeway heading south, forever not making their way to safety. Forever not escaping the last day of human civilization.
