We Go On (THE DELL) (13 page)

I was always impressed with Dave’s knowledge of defensive
works and he hadn't disappointed. I asked about the road that ran right up to
the wall on the eastern side and he continued his explanation. "Once we
close up the gap, I'm going to have the ditch cut across the road. That will
solve the problem of anything other than a tank getting close. I'm also going
to use some of the abandoned semi-trailers to build an abbattis at the cut
through the hills where the road enters the valley. That will keep any vehicle
traffic from being able to get into the valley on the eastern side."

I felt like an idiot as I had to ask again for an
explanation of an abbattis. Dave explained that he would park the trailers in
such a way that they would be interconnected and pointed out at an angle toward
any incoming vehicles. This way nothing would be able to ram its way through.
They would have to take the time to move each trailer. It would take a
considerable amount of time and couldn't be done without alerting us. I felt
better about the fact that the only way anyone could get close would be on foot
and I was confident that we could handle any assault of that nature.

Not that I hadn't been sure before, but I was positive now
that the barrier construction was well in hand. So, I turned my attention to
the interior preparations. I found Jim and his wife Gwen at the old Post Office
which had now been turned into the village offices. It was large enough and
there were three small offices in back that made it the perfect choice to use
as a sort of government office. They would handle the day to day operations of
keeping The Dell running in an orderly manner from these offices. I had already
laid claim to what had been the community center and had Dave turning it into
the Emergency Operations Center. The security force would be managed out of
there as well as planning and classes for the security folks. There had been
some push back from some of the people when we announced the plan to move the
EOC in there. They had wanted to keep it a community center and use it for
meetings and festivals. It kind of surprised me that they were already thinking
that far ahead. I didn't think we should be concerned about festivals just yet.

After talking with Jim, I was relieved to find that the
interior work was progressing at an even faster pace than the outer works. He
informed me that Judy Aikens had already finished the corral for our animals
and that they were being moved to The Dell that day. Judy had a degree in
agriculture from Purdue University in Indiana and knew her business. I had
noticed as I walked around that she had been busy. In addition to the pasture
for our animals, she had organized the barn and led a foraging party to some of
the nearby old farms and recovered a farm tractor and some implements that
would be needed to prepare the fields for planting. She had also overseen the
digging of the pond for the livestock and busied herself with inventorying any
canned goods found in the cellars that were part of nearly every house in the
village. According to her, if properly prepared and sealed in glass jars the
fruit and vegetables that her and her crew pulled out of the cellars would be
good for quite some time. There was now a wide selection of preserved fruit,
jellies and jams as well as vegetables of every description in the old General
Store.

This added to the mystery surrounding this place. Why would
the residents move out and leave so much valuable material behind. After
spending the time preparing the food for canning and storing it in their
cellars, why would they just walk away and leave it? Everything about this
place caused me to have questions.

It's September now and fall is right around the corner.
September and October are usually beautiful months in this part of the country
with the really cold weather not hitting until January and February. I'm hoping
for a mild winter this year but we’re preparing for the worst. Jim assures me
that we have a large enough food stock to last us until spring but we aren't
going to use it until it’s absolutely necessary. That means we still have to
send out foraging parties each day to find food. To the best of my knowledge we
have stripped Lebanon clean. There's not a scrap of edible food left in the
place. We’re ranging further and further out each trip and have now resorted to
checking individual homes for anything left that might still be edible. So far,
were making it but that feeling of being on the edge continues to haunt me.
It's been a lean year and the leanness will continue until we are able to
sustain ourselves.

It appears our good luck has returned, although I'm cautious
about saying it out loud for fear of jinxing it. We haven't had any more
accidents or incidents that resulted in casualties. Of course, there have been
minor accidents. With the amount of work completed in the last three months it
would be hard not to have a few scraps. There have been a few broken bones and
one of the guy's working on the wall lost a finger while guiding two T-walls
together. We haven't seen any more Stinkies in or around the valley and there
has been nothing from any of the Road Gangs in the area. Maybe the battle we
had back in May did pay off. As long as they think we are too strong for them
to attack easily, they'll look for easier pickings elsewhere.

The last of the T-walls went in a few days ago and the outer
defense work is complete. The Dell is now secure. With the village finally cut
off from the surrounding area, I told Dave to organize a clearing party and go
through the entire village with a fine tooth comb. I didn't want there to be
any possibility that a Stinky might be trapped or hidden in any of the out
buildings and been over looked during the construction phase. The clearing
operation went off without a hitch and nothing was found. I can finally relax a
trifle now that I'm sure that we are safe inside the wall. Outside is still
another story.

There are still a few smaller projects being worked on but
the majority of the inner perpetrations are complete. More people have come out
to The Dell on a fulltime basis to help and the Lebanon compound is now down to
a skeleton crew. Jim has designated houses for families and houses that can be
used as dorms for single males and females. Dave and Jenny have finally
announced that they are together and decided to move in with each other once
the final move is made. He has picked out a charming place for them close to
what used to be the community center and is now the EOC. Kat has brought most
of our meager belongings out and has moved them into our little cottage in the
woods. I haven't had a lot of time for fixing the place up but have managed to
lay in an acceptable supply of wood for the winter and scavenged us a camp
stove to cook on and an old percolator type coffee pot so we can still enjoy a
cup in the mornings. During the big shopping trips, I had raided every
Starbucks I could find. Thankfully, there's one on every corner and I now had a
good stock of coffee.

The big shopping trips also brought in the other needed
household items that all of our people would need. Towels, bed linen, and the
lower-tech kitchen appliances. We were reverting back to a time when the most
hi tech gadget in the kitchen was a wood burning cook stove. I’m sure that some
of the women would be lost when it came to cooking and preparing meals in this
new (old) way but I bet they'll get the hang of it. As far as the guys having
to cook, I didn't see much problem. They were burning meals before and now
they'd actually have an excuse for burning them. So that was good.

We are about as ready to move into The Dell as we can be.
It's becoming more of a problem trying to maintain the two different locations.
Now that the wall is finished, I can't think of any reason to delay the move any
longer. The few remaining projects that need completion shouldn’t keep us from
moving. We will still have to send out foraging parties and there will be
little things pop up that will need to be handled but that's no different than
things were when we all lived at the Lebanon compound. I know everyone’s
waiting for me to make the final decision and it appears that we are at that
point. Yeah, I think it's time to move.

The KH-12 “Improved Crystal” satellite silently sped through
the cold vacuum of space. The satellite, code named “Key Hole” was in a polar
to polar orbit at an altitude of six-hundred-and- ninety kilometers above the
Earth and was capable, because of the great speed at which it traveled, of
completing fourteen orbits each day. The space vehicle was about the size of a
city bus and weighed eighteen tons. Its two solar arrays provided power for its
internal electronics and a large rocket engine provided the maneuverability.
It’s capable of stealthily watching everything over a swath hundreds of
kilometers wide with each pass.

On this day "Key Hole” began its first orbit in almost
six months over what had been the central United States. Five months and four
days had passed since a silent command had been sent to the satellites
electronic brain telling it to shift its orbit a few degrees east each twenty-four
hour period. It had followed its orders and over the intervening period had
looked at every inch of planet Earth's surface. Weeks before the journey
started, a new computer program had been uploaded asking "Key Hole' to
compare the images it saw as it made its fourteen passes each day over the
planet to images it had taken before events rendered such things unnecessary.
Parameters had been built into the program to account for changes in the
Earth's surface due to weather and natural disasters and it was only to sound
an alert if it saw a change its brain determined to be man's intervention. The
journey had consumed a considerable amount of fuel and 'Key Hole' had only a
few days’ supply left.

As the space vehicle made its first pass of the day over
North America and the old United States, the two and a half meter wide 'eye'
stared unblinking down on the Ohio River Valley, across Kentucky, and on to
Tennessee before continuing south and over the pole. During its pass over
central Tennessee, the electronic brain identified an anomaly and immediately
compared its current image to those stored in its memory. Yes, ”Key Hole” was
sure there had been a change and that change fit the parameters set in its new
program. Instantaneously, an alert was sent to a console on a desk deep
underground. Along with the alert went two date and time stamped images to a
high speed high resolution photo printer. One image was the old stored image;
the other was the new fresh image with the anomaly outlined in a highlighted
box.

On the console a red light, that until this moment had been
dark, started to blink. A soft chime accompanied the blinking red light and a
message box appeared on the computer screen. The message was simple:

“
Anomaly detected. 36 degrees, 16
minutes, 5 seconds North Latitude

86 degrees, 1 minute, 26 seconds
West Longitude”

The text box stayed on the computer screen and the blinking
red light and accompanying chime continued to signal the alert as “Key Hole”
sped south and minutes later was on the backside of the planet.

A technician wearing a pair of tan board shorts, flip flops,
and a blue Cal Tech t-shirt sat leaned back reading a paperback and listening
to an IPod. Even with the ear buds in Bob Marley's “Jamming” could be heard
from five-feet away. Beside him in another chair a second technician, a virtual
clone except the t-shirt was yellow and had a silk screened photo of Bozo the
Clown on it, sat dozing. The first technician closed his eyes and leaned his
head back and after taking a deep breath released it in a long, slow exhale.
Turning his head to the side and opening his eye's, he looked at his sleeping
partner and considered taking a nap himself.

He lowered the book to his lap and closed his eyes in
preparation for his nap. A blinking image was flash frozen to the inside of his
eye lids. A nagging sensation started somewhere in his brain and tried to force
its way to the front. The technician tried to shake the feeling and was winning
as he slipped into a deep sleep.

Blinking light! The tech's eye's popped open and he sat up
and stared at the console. The little red light continued to blink. In his ears,
Bob Marley had gone on to singing about shooting a sheriff so the tech couldn't
hear the soft note of the alert chime. He jerked the ear buds out of his ears
and instantly heard the alert tone that accompanied the blinking light.

"Shit! Hey... hey dude, wake up!" A snort was the
only reply from his sleeping partner. "Dude! Wake up!" louder this
time and accompanied by a thrown paperback as emphasis did the trick.

The second technician sat up, startled. "Hey, what the
fuck?" The first tech pointed at the console and the second tech turned to
recognize the red blinking light and alert tone that had now been sounding for
approximately ten minutes. "Oh fuck! When did that start?"

"I don't know. I just noticed it."

"What's it say?" asked number two.

"I don't know, dude. Why don't you look at the
screen." replied number one. Number two rolled his chair closer to the
console and read the text box.

Number two turned to the other. "It says it’s detected
an anomaly and gives the coordinates." After a moment’s thought he added,
"Check the printer. It should have sent photo's to the printer."
Number one jumped up and went to the printer. He stood staring at the two pages
setting in the tray, afraid to touch them. Finally, he lifted the two pages and
looked at them. After checking the date and time stamp he let out a sigh of relief.
It had only been a few minutes. He'd been afraid that they had zoned out for
hours and if that had happened they would have really gotten their asses
chewed. Feeling better, he brought the photos back and handed them to his
partner.

Number two immediately compared the photos. A bowl shaped
valley with a small village and a road running east to west through the center
was the main focus on both photos. The first was taken six months ago just
before “Key Hole” began its journey. The second was now about fifteen minutes
old. In the second photo a partially constructed square could be seen around
the small village at the heart of the valley. The square was missing in the
first photo.

The straight lines could only mean interference by the
intelligent hand of man. Definitely not the work of the infected creatures that
now inhabited the majority of the surface. Number two continued to compare the
photos. He couldn't tell what the lines were or what they meant but they
definitely weren't there six months ago. He looked up at number one. "When's
the next pass?" he asked.

Number one checked a counter on a second monitor. "One
hour twenty six minutes. Do we wait for a second pass to confirm?"

Number two thought and after only a couple of seconds made a
decision. "No. We have to tell her now. If we wait she'll blow a fucking
gasket. I don't need that shit."

Number one nodded his head in agreement. "You taking it
to her or you want me to do it?" Again, two thought a moment before
answering. As the senior technician he should be the one to deliver the news
but he hated going to talk to her. He wanted to give the job to his assistant
but then thought if he did that and she had questions he'd still get his ass
chewed for not being there to answer them.

Decision made, he said, "Nah, I'll do it. She might
have questions." With that, he stood and started for the heavy, thick
steel vault door that led out of the small control room. As he left, he said
over his shoulder, "keep a close eye on the monitor. If I'm not back by the
time of the next pass, make sure you get more photos." Number two stepped
over the raised threshold and was gone.

Number one continued to stare at the monitor a couple of
seconds then sat back down. He had an hour and nineteen minutes now before the
next pass. He could read a couple more chapters. He rolled his chair over to
where the book lay splayed on the floor. After retrieving the book, he popped
his ear buds back in and smiled as the sweet Jamaican reggae sound filled his
head again. He leaned back and propped his feet up on the console and opened
his book. Four minutes later, he was fast asleep.