And just like that, she was in. She tried to make sense of what programs they had on their desktop, then noticed something that made her yelp with joy.
This computer has Internet access.
Holy crap. She didn’t even know where to start.
* * *
She nervously checked both of the locked doors—still no sounds from the other side—and settled in at the workstation. The first task, she decided, would be to get a sense of the layout of the system, and what exactly she had available to her. She found what they were using for e-mail, and saw tons and tons of messages in the in-box with attachments—status reports and equipment requests and lots of other standardized forms. Bureaucratic spam. There were also long e-mail exchanges about sound—reports and experiment results about frequencies and modulation and terms she had never heard before, like “infrasound.” The staff were sending audio clips back and forth, and huge walls of analytical text referring to them full of technical gibberish. She’d have to set all that aside for now, she could spend weeks trying to get through it all.
She next found a program that, when she clicked on it, took over all three screens, filling them with banks of various camera feeds. Absolutely nothing was going on in most of them—you wouldn’t know they were live if not for the occasional bit of trash that would blow into view—but they were clearly of the exterior of the hospital quarantine.
She got out of that, and found a separate application that gave her a full aerial view of the hospital grounds, rotating slowly just like the gun-camera video Josh had shown her earlier. She was going to hit “Esc” to back out of it, but suddenly had the irrational fear that if she hit the wrong key, she’d see a missile come flying out of the bottom of the screen and blow everybody up. After a little more snooping she found out that the aerial drone thing was controlled elsewhere, which made sense. You wouldn’t control something like that from a keyboard, you’d want a control stick and all that. She was just watching the feed as a spectator—
David.
She saw him, because the camera view swung around and focused on him. She had no control over that, whoever was operating the drone, wherever they were, had done it. The view blinked and zoomed in, then blinked and zoomed in again.
It was David, plain as day, in a standoff with a big guy who looked really mad. They were surrounded by a crowd, next to the huge bonfire Josh had said was some ceremonial thing (and no matter how she looked at it, it really did look like skulls and bones in there). There was radio chatter going back and forth in the video feed, but it was faint and Amy couldn’t make it out word for word. What she was able to gather was that the guy flying the drone was asking for permission to fire from a superior, and then Amy realized that she wasn’t just watching this through a camera, but a gun camera, and that the gun was pointing right at David.
“No! Don’t shoot!” she said, stupidly, at the computer monitor. She had to have some ability to contact them, right? There were landline phones here. And she would say, what? That she was a random girl who sneaked into the REPER command center and that she didn’t want them to shoot her zombie boyfriend? All that would do would alert them to the fact that they had an unauthorized person on their network and that they needed to remotely shut down everything.
On the video feed, the big guy raised a gun, pointing it right at David. The camera view shifted slightly, putting the big guy in the crosshairs.
“Yes! Shoot that guy!”
They didn’t. She picked up enough of the radio chatter to get that the drone pilot (who she gathered went by the code name “Guardian”) had been told to stand by and await further orders. Several excruciating minutes later, David was hauled away and taken inside the hospital building, and the camera view zoomed back out so that it could see the whole yard and, presumably, any zombies who tried to make a run for the fence. The next most likely one to make a run for the fence, however, was David, if she knew him at all. And David was not a zombie. This was not wishful thinking on her part—when David was talking to the big gun guy, he was gesturing and conversing exactly the way David had the last time she had talked to him. David was no more a zombie than he had been two weeks ago, and Amy had faith that the drone operator in fact did not know that. He had been sold the same B.S. that Josh believed, about murderous infected non-humans. Those things did exist—Amy just watched them eat the crew she had ridden down here with. One could burst in that tunnel at any second. But the people inside that fence were people.
And the military was about to bomb them all.
* * *
In the end, it took Amy an hour to make the connection. As a hacker, she was a novice, but she knew that by far the most effective way into any system was what hackers called “social engineering.” The biggest weakness in any network is the human beings. It doesn’t matter how many firewalls or passwords you set up, in the end the system was manned by people. Lazy, busy, harried people who when all was said and done, would take the path of least resistance.
Figuring out where the drone pilot was operating from was easy—a Google search told her that Unmanned Aerial Vehicle or UAV pilots operated from only one location—Creech Air Force Base, just outside of Las Vegas, Nevada. Next she went sifting through the e-mail system to see if she could somehow get so lucky as to find e-mails from
[email protected] but there was no such luck. What she did find was a series of e-mails flying back and forth from the day before, with various people clarifying the “ROE” (which she figured out was Rules of Engagement) with the “Zulus” in the quarantine, as apparently the drone had shot a guy who was attempting to climb the fence and Amy gathered from reading fifty or so e-mails that they were supposed to wait until somebody actually got over the first fence before shooting. Somewhere buried in all of these forms she found an “Eyes Only” document that had been sent to the guy who manned this workstation, some kind of after action report on that incident that named the drone operator: a Captain Shane McInnis.
This was part of an e-mail thread that bounced back and forth between people with REPER e-mail addresses. The issue was the kid who had been shot, a twenty-two-year-old male they were referring to only as Patient 2027. She sifted through a bundle of scanned Eyes Only reports, until she found some kind of admission form they were using for the quarantine. Everything was expressed in jargon and acronyms but Amy was able to piece together that the kid had been held only because he was found in proximity to somebody else who was infected—the kid had killed that person with a baseball bat. But the relevant part of the report on the kid himself were these five words that ended the admission form:
“No signs of infection detected.”
Patient 2027 was not a zombie. He was just a kid. And now he was dead.
One thing became clear when following the chain of e-mails on this subject: that particular fact had not been shared outside of a very small group of people in REPER.
Amy looked down at the clock. It was now 4 A.M., which would be two in the morning Nevada time. The shooting happened at 3 P.M. yesterday. Obviously it wasn’t the same guy manning the drone all the time. Did they work some kind of regular shifts? If so, that meant Captain McInnis would be back behind the stick in the morning. It really didn’t matter either way, that name was all she had.
All right. Start simple. Did Captain Shane McInnis have a Facebook page? She searched. Yes, he did. Set to private, which made sense for a guy in that line of work. She could break into that—Facebook’s password reset request form was easy to fool—but she wasn’t sure that’d get her what she wanted. Back to Google. She looked up the schools around where the air force base was located, and searched for anything on Google with the names of the schools and “McInnis” in the same article.
Boom. Nevaeh McInnis, point guard on the middle-school basketball team. Want to bet that’s Captain McInnis’s daughter? Thirteen years old—Amy knew she’d have a Facebook page. Ten seconds later, it was up on her screen. She had left everything public, her pi
cs—including shots of her posing with Dad in a dress uniform—her friends list (there was Dad, listed under “family”). Nevaeh had 132 Facebook friends. Amy sent her a friend request, wondering what time Nevaeh would wake up in the morning to check it. But Nevaeh was apparently a night owl, because even at two in the morning her time, she was up to immediately accept a friend request from a total stranger ten years older than her.
Teenagers.
Five minutes later Amy was chatting with Nevaeh McInnis, and realizing that this was going to have to be handled with some delicacy.
* * *
Nevaeh McInnis: who is this?
Amy Sullivan: Hi navaeh, this is going to sound really weird but this is kind of an emergency and we don’t have much time.
Nevaeh McInnis: Nevaeh
Nevaeh McInnis: Not navaeh
Amy Sullivan: Oh sorry
Nevaeh McInnis: its heaven spelled backward
Amy Sullivan: Right its very pretty
Nevaeh McInnis: I cant sleep
Nevaeh McInnis: Chatting with my friend in Taiwan
Amy Sullivan: Anyway this isn’t a scam or anything, I’m not going to ask you for any money or account numbers ok
Nevaeh McInnis: k
Amy Sullivan: And no naked pictures or anything like that
Nevaeh McInnis: I have a friend named Taylor, she’s only a year older than me, and this guy emailed her and offered her a modeling contract and then her mom drove her all the way to LA to have pictures taken, and do you know what happened then?
Amy Sullivan: Nevaeh, this is really important. I’m in [Undisclosed] right now. Do you know what that means?
Nevaeh McInnis: omg are you a zombie
Amy Sullivan: No! That’s kind of the point.
Nevaeh McInnis: oh wow dont tell anybody but my dad is in the air force and he flies a robot plane shooting zombies
Amy Sullivan: I know
Amy Sullivan: That’s why I contacted you
Amy Sullivan: I’m here on the ground and so is my boyfriend
Amy Sullivan: And we’re not zombies
Amy Sullivan: But your dad doesn’t know that
Nevaeh McInnis: hes in bed
Amy Sullivan: OK is he going to fly the robot tomorrow
Nevaeh McInnis: hes tired all the time
Nevaeh McInnis: i think so
Amy Sullivan: Nevaeh, I’m really scared
Amy Sullivan: We’re all scared down here
Amy Sullivan: Because I think they’re going to shoot all of us
Nevaeh McInnis: They won’t do that
Amy Sullivan: I need you to make sure they don’t
Amy Sullivan: I need you to talk to your dad
Nevaeh McInnis: I cant talk to him about his work
Nevaeh McInnis: hes not allowed to talk about it
Nevaeh McInnis: and he gets mad
Nevaeh McInnis: and he gets quiet
Nevaeh McInnis: hes tired all the time
Amy Sullivan: Then you have to let me talk to him
Nevaeh McInnis: hes in bed
Amy Sullivan: I just need his e-mail address.
* * *
There was a long, long pause without a response. This was the point where any caution young Nevaeh had developed about strangers on the Internet should have triggered her alarm bells. Amy tried to picture the girl on the other end, almost two thousand miles away. She imagined her simply closing her laptop and curling up in bed. Then she imagined her going into her father’s room and trying to wake him up. Then she imagined her calling the police.
Finally, the chat window blinked to life again, and an e-mail address appeared.
* * *
It was as simple as pulling up the e-mail that had the attached form with the analysis of Patient 2027, and forwarding it to the personal e-mail account of UAV pilot Captain Shane McInnis. “No signs of infection detected.” The body of Amy’s e-mail was concise and to the point:
Read this. The boy you shot was not a zombie. The people inside the quarantine are not infected. They are people. They are American citizens. You have been lied to.
There were a million things that could go wrong with this—it could wind up in his spam folder, he might not even check his e-mail in the morning before going on duty, he might dismiss it as a hoax. But she couldn’t think of where else to go with it.
All right. What next? After the drones, the other layer of security around the fence was the unmanned gun things. Amy brought up the bank of video screens, which she had figured out were feeds from those guns. Still a whole lot of nothing going on outside the fence, a series of static scenes tinged night-vision green. She spent the next half hour poking around, trying to figure out how the guns worked. They were called Gladiators (long name: Gladiator Tactical Unmanned Ground Vehicles, or TUGVs). They had diesel engines that both turned the wheels when they needed to move and charged onboard generators to keep themselves powered up. Just as with the aerial drone, she hit a brick wall when she tried to find an application that would let her actually control one of them. That was too bad because she had this fantasy about taking one over and just rolling it around the fence, going on a robot shooting spree and taking out all of the others. But, again, she wasn’t thinking—those machines were military, the room she was in was REPER. And no matter how hard she tried, she could not figure out who was operating them.
She was getting frustrated at this point, but she knew that wouldn’t help. This was a system, one set up by people, and it had flaws. What was the flaw here?
Diesel.
The Gladiators (or TUGVs or whatever) needed fuel and that meant they needed people to fuel them. Even if the human operators were on a base in Japan, the refueling job had to be done by people here, on the ground, operating out of this very building. Which meant that there had to be some mechanism by which they could disarm the guns so they wouldn’t get shot when they approached them with gas cans. She just needed to find it. And she would.
From the room behind her came the sound of metal scraping against floor.
Something was pushing the vending machine out of the way.
Amy sprang to her feet. She couldn’t panic. She had a door on the opposite side of the room she could unlock and run through. Where it led, she didn’t know, but she would get there as fast as her feet could carry her.
Molly ran over and faced the door standing between them and the intruder. She let out a low growl. The scraping continued. When it stopped, what replaced it was the sound of something stepping over the vending machine. Then, there was the crunching of glass, something stepping across the shards that had crashed out of the machine when Amy tipped it over.
Amy ran for the opposite door and cranked open the dead bolt. Molly did not move from her spot. Amy was about to call to her when she heard—
“Who’s there?”
A tiny voice, from the room the intruder had entered. It sounded like a little girl, and Amy had the crazy thought that Nevaeh McInnis had somehow teleported in from Nevada.
The little voice said, “Can you unlock the door? Hello?”
Amy cautiously made her way over and said, “Who’s there?”
The voice answered, but Amy couldn’t hear. Then, louder, it said, “What’s your name?”
“My name is Amy. Are you lost, little girl?”
“I’m not little, I’m eight.”
“Who’s with you?”
“It’s just me. Can you let me in? I’m scared.”
Amy glanced back at Molly, who looked as skeptical as a dog can look.
Amy unlocked the door, and opened it just a crack. “Uh, hello. Who are you?”
The little voice said, “Anna.”
2 Hours Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed
I ducked down and banged my head on the window crank on the Caddie’s door. I anticipated the thunder of gunfire and the sound of lead punching holes in the Cadillac’s door panels. Then I realized I may very well hear nothing at all, because John had gr
ossly underestimated the caliber of the sentry guns. The twin barrels on that turret looked big enough to put my thumb into, ready to fire bullets that would effortlessly pierce the thin metal of the Cadillac’s door panels, a microsecond later taking a nice leisurely path through my squishy internal organs.
But the guns did not fire.
John screamed, “Let’s go! Let’s go!”
“What? No!”
“We got ’em confused, we have to get out before they get their shit together and turn us into Swiss meat!”
He opened his door and dragged me out. He reached into the backseat and grabbed something—the green mystery box from my toolshed.
We ducked down, putting the Cadillac between us and the gun—not that there wasn’t another, identical gun on the other side—and ran. We hurdled the concrete barrier and there, in front of us, were the woods. Beyond it, a convenience store bathroom that would hopefully take us away from here.
Déjà vu.
Only there were no soldiers chasing us now. No, now there was a crowd of armed townspeople, carrying shotguns and hunting rifles and machetes, half of them running, half of them aiming their guns and drawing down on us. And, unlike the National Guardsmen in those disorganized early hours of the crisis, here were people who knew what a breach in that fence meant. I risked a look back and saw the gaping hole we’d torn in the fence. Red jumpsuits were gathered on the other side, everyone gawking out at the outside world, as if a hole had suddenly been ripped open in the sky.
And then I saw the gathering crowd, onlookers on the other side of the fence—every one of them armed—with the exact same expression on their face. Two sides of a mirror, the same ideas dawning on both sides.